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Two horizontal pencil-and-watercolor illustrations, stacked vertically, show an adult bear and his cub at a lake, both wearing yellow raincoats. In the top illustration, Big Bear sits in a weathered, pale-red rowboat moored to a dock, where Little Bear stands frozen, nervous about stepping into the wobbly vessel despite Big Bear’s beckoning. In the bottom illustration, we see Little Bear in the boat, embracing Big Bear with his whole heart, having taken the leap into his waiting arms.
From “Big Bear and Little Bear Go Fishing.”Credit...Erin Stead
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Picture Books

A Luminary Children’s Author You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

Picture book writers whose works look different from one another because they’re illustrated by different artists are less apt to be on your radar.

By Emily Jenkins

Emily Jenkins is the author, most recently, of the picture book “A Big Day for Bike,” illustrated by G. Brian Karas.

Amy Hest is a quiet giant of picture book writing whose name you may not know.

The noisy giants, those with name recognition, tend to be author-illustrators: Sendak, Seuss, Steig, Carle, and more recently Blackall, Lin, Klassen, Morales. Less likely to be on your radar are authors who don’t illustrate, people whose books look different from one another because they’re illustrated by different artists.

Over the course of 38 picture books, plus many chapter books and middle grade novels, Hest has paid the utmost attention to the emotional lives of her young characters.

Her gentle sense of humor doesn’t always land her books on best-seller lists or the shelves of the biggest booksellers. But if you want to console your kids after a rotten day? Wind them down before a nap? Reassure them at bedtime? Hest is your writer.

What Hest offers is a feeling of connection and recognition. She will help you tell your kids that how they feel is valid, and that they are beloved.

ImageA softly textured color illustration with a fuzzy, nighttime-gray ambience shows a dark gray, blushing bunny, who has a white tummy and a white cottontail and wears white bunny slippers, walking on two feet down a shadowy hallway toward an open bedroom door. Inside the bedroom we glimpse an adult male rabbit sleeping on a bed under a blanket. The bunny pulls a little red wagon — filled with a water bottle, a blanket, a cookie and a book — behind him.
From “Bunny Should Be Sleeping.”Credit...Renata Liwska

BUNNY SHOULD BE SLEEPING (Neal Porter/Holiday House, 40 pp., $18.99, ages 4 to 8), illustrated with the softest, fluffiest, bedtimiest digital artwork by Renata Liwska, gives us a bitty bunny who should be sleeping but is waiting for his (seemingly single) dad to come check on him.

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