Download I Love Libraries Web badges for your site.

September is Library Card Sign-Up Month, and NBA superstar and author Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the honorary chair for the annual event. Learn more on the I Love Libraries Library Card Sign-Up Month page.

What is Library 2.0? Learn the answer to that and more on I Love Libraries' Ask the Librarian page.

Award Winning Books

Award Winning Books  

Introducing this year's winner of the prestigious Caldecott Medal: Flotsam, by David Wiesner

As in his Caldecott Medal Book Tuesday (1991), Wiesner offers another exceptional, wordless picture book that finds wild magic in quiet, everyday settings. At the seaside, a boy holds a magnifying glass up to a flailing hermit crab; binoculars and a microscope lay nearby. The array of lenses signals the shifting viewpoints to come, and in the following panels, the boy discovers an old-fashioned camera, film intact. A trip to the photo store produces astonishing pictures: an octopus in an armchair holding story hour in a deep-sea parlor; tiny green alien tourists peering at sea horses. There are portraits of children around the world and through the ages, each child holding another child's photo. After snapping his own image, the boy returns the camera to the sea, where it's carried on a journey to another child. Children may initially puzzle, along with the boy, over the mechanics of the camera and the connections between the photographed portraits. When closely observed, however, the masterful watercolors and ingeniously layered perspectives create a clear narrative, and viewers will eagerly fill in the story's wordless spaces with their own imagined story lines. Like Chris Van Allsburg's books and Wiesner's previous works, this visual wonder invites us to rethink how and what we see, out in the world and in our mind's eye.
Gillian Engberg. Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved