Blog: #kidlit Book of the Day - Page 6 of 1472

Mari and the Great Market Swap
by Janelle Springer-Willms (Author), Juliana Eigner (Illustrator)
@ Amazon | Bookshop

Booktalk: Mari loves to help Granny sell their ripe guavas at the weekly market. Every week, she hears the cheerful chorus of Miss Hyacinth singing “Come fa yuh mangoes, sweet and juicy,” Fitzroy shouting, “Fish, fish flying fish, one ah dollar,” and Mamee calling “Sugar cakes? Tamarind balls? Guava cheese?” On Saturdays, they are one big family.

But today, Mari’s friend brings news that a sugarcane truck toppled over on the main road, so customers can’t reach the market. Without customers, the vendors won’t make enough money to buy what they need for their families and businesses. But Mari is a problem solver, and she has an idea. What about… a great market swap!

Snippet:

The author, Janelle Springer-Willms, is one of my former students.
Copyright © 2026 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved. (*bookstore affiliate)

Subway
by Anastasia Suen (Author) and Karen Katz (Illustrator)
@ Amazon | Bookshop

Booktalk: We didn’t have any subways nearby when I was growing up, so riding a subway was something I did years later when we went on family vacations with our children. On one of those vacations, I thought about writing a small poem about the ride, but that was hard to do when I was back home.

After two post-vacation writing attempts, I realized that I needed to write the poem while I was riding the subway. So that’s what I did! Each time we rode the subway during our next vacation, I jotted down a few lines about what we did and how it felt. (I always keep a small pad of paper in my purse to capture ideas.)

Snippet:

When we got back home I used those small notepad lines to write this 169-word picture book poem. As you can see from the book announcement postcard below, Subway was published in 2004.

A few years later, the publisher asked me to tighten the poem so it could be reprinted as a board book. After the 2008 board book appeared in Amazon’s Top 100 for Children’s City Life Books, Amazon made a preview video for it!