Ladybug Nominee Profile

The Day the Books Disappeared by Joanna Ho,  Caroline Kusin Pritchard and Dan Santat (Disney Hyperions, 2025)

Arnold didn't mean for the books to disappear—not exactly. It all started because he liked his book about airplanes best. Why would anyone want to read about tomatoes or ostriches or submarines (ew, the worst!) when they could read about planes, instead?

When Arnold realizes—POOF!—he can make the other books vanish, he goes a little too far. Before he knows it, all the books are gone…including his. Can Arnold figure out how to bring them back before it’s too late?

This book about books celebrates themes of empathy, interconnectedness, and the value of diverse and differing perspectives.

About Joanna Ho

Joanna Ho is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of many children's books, including Eyes that Kiss in the Corners, We Who Produce Pearls, and The Silence that Binds Us, her debut young adult novel, which received the Young Adult Honor for the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. She lives in the Bay Area, where she survives on homemade chocolate chip cookies, outdoor adventures, and dance parties with her kids. Her website is: https://www.joannahowrites.com/

About Caroline Kusin Pritchard

Caroline Kusin Pritchard is the author of Gitty and Kvetch and Where is Poppy, which School Library Journal called “a perfect story for all ages.” She has an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Virginia with her family. Her website is: https://carolinekusinpritchard.com/

About Dan Santat

Dan Santat is the National Book Award-winning, Caldecott Medal–winning, and New York Times–bestselling author and illustrator of The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend and the road trip/time travel adventure Are We There Yet? His artwork is also featured in numerous picture books, chapter books, and middle-grade novels, including Dav Pilkey's Ricky Ricotta series. Dan lives in Southern California with his wife, two kids, and many, many pets. His website is: https://sites.google.com/g.risd.org/dansantat/home

Activities & Links

• Check out this Read Aloud at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad3sUwCxxIw
• Here's an interview with Joanna Ho, one of the authors of "The Day the Books Disappeared": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e_87sHSkII
• Reflection exercise: Have students draw or write about how the main character Arnold felt when other people's books vanished versus how he felt when his own favorite book disappeared. 
• Design a Book Cover exercise: Provide a blank book cover template for children to illustrate their own favorite topic or story, celebrating what makes their personal reading choice unique.

Suggestions for Further Reading

• Check out the other 2026 Ladybug Longlist titles featuring Books & Reading at: https://nhbookcenter.blogspot.com/2026/01/ladybug-longlist-books-reading.html
• For more books by Joanna Ho, check out Eyes That Kiss in the Corners or A Room with a View. For another book by Caroline Kusin Pritchard, check out The Keeper of Stories. 
• For more stories about books, consider All the Books by Hayley Rocco and 
  The Dictionary Story by Oliver Jeffers & Sam Winston, both 2025 Ladybug Longlist titles. 

This is one of nine titles nominated for the 2026 Ladybug Picture Book Award.
We will be posting information about a different nominee each Friday throughout the summer and will issue a pdf voters guide featuring all the titles by Labor Day.

NHBF Author: Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-nine novels, including most recently the #1 bestseller BY ANY OTHER NAME. Her landmark novel 19 MINUTES was recently deemed the most banned book in the Unites States in a recent report conducted by PEN America. It is estimated that there are 63.7 million books by Jodi Picoult in print. Jodi's books have been translated into forty languages. 
Picoult is the recipient of many awards, including the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction, the Alex Awards from the YALSA, a lifetime achievement award for mainstream fiction from the Romance Writers of America, the NH Literary Award for Outstanding Literary Merit and esteemed Sarah Josepha Hale Award. She was the recipient of the 2024 Free Speech Defender Robie Harris Author Award from the National Coalition Against Censorship. She holds honorary doctor of letters degrees from Dartmouth College and the University of New Haven. She is a patron of the Carole Shields Prize for Fiction which is awarded to female fiction writers. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for PEN America. Picoult lives in New Hampshire with her husband. They have three children and two grandchildren.

Jodi Picoult will deliver the NHBF Keynote on Friday night. Tickets are on sale now.

 

This author is scheduled to appear at the NH Book Festival which will be held at the Capitol Center for the Arts & NHBF Festival Village on South Main Street in Concord, NH on October 2-3, 2026.

Mark Your Calendar!

Over the next couple months, Book Notes NH will be featuring the MANY authors who will be part of the 3rd annual NH Book Festival. which will be held at the Capitol Center for the Arts & NHBF Festival Village on South Main Street in Concord, NH on October 2-3, 2026. 

Most of the festival programs are scheduled for Saturday, October 3 and will be free for everyone to attend. 

The following events require paid tickets to attend. These events help to fund the free Saturday programming at the festival.

On Friday morning, the festival kicks off with Jeff Kinney (New York Times bestselling author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series) giving the Children's Keynote (which is sold out!).

Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of twenty-nine novels (and a New Hampshire resident!), will give the Festival Keynote at 7pm, Friday, October 2, 2026. Tickets for this event are on sale now. 

On Saturday night, at 6:30 pm, Jeff Kinney will be giving the Family Keynote. Tickets for this event are on sale now.

All keynote speaker events will be held at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, NH.

Book of the Week (8/10/2026)

Don't Go There: A Tour of the World's Most Sinister Spots by J. W. Ocker (Quirk Books, 2026)

Embark on a guided tour of 30 of the most dangerous and mysterious locations that we simply cannot stay away from.

Have you ever visited a forest or an abandoned building and gotten a bad vibe? There are places that are rife with rumors of hauntings, monsters, and sinister phenomena that can’t be explained. And there are just as many sites that are the confirmed home of disasters, murders, and man-made mistakes. Everyone’s heard about the Bermuda Triangle, but do you know these chilling sites?

Roopkund: There's a lake tucked high in the frozen Himalayan Mountains . . . and it's full of skeletons.

Mount Shasta: This mysterious mountain in California inspired the I AM cult and is said to host UFOs, bigfoots, and lizard people.

Nahanni National Park: Called the "Valley of the Headless Men", this national park in northern Canada is famous for legends of a hidden gold mine . . . and a series of decapitated miners.

Pine Barrens: Best known as the home of the Jersey Devil, this desolate pine forest has also hosted pirates, the mafia, and moonshiners.

Ciudad Blanca: This fabled pre-Columbian "Lost City of the Monkey God" in Honduras doesn't want to be found, and explorers seeking it have met violent ends. --Publisher's blurb

About the author:

J.W. Ocker is a nationally bestselling, Edgar-winning author of macabre travelogues, spooky kids books, and horror novels. His books include A Season with the Witch, Twelve Nights at Rotter House, The Black Slide, and The United States of Cryptids. He is originally from Maryland but has lived in New Hampshire for almost two decades.

Join J.W. at Toadstool Bookshop in Keene, NH on Sat., August 22, 2026 at 2:00 pm where he will be presenting and signing his newest book!

Ladybug Nominee Profile

Don't Trust Fish by Neil Sharpson and Dan Santat (Dial Books, 2025)

Why, dear reader, must you NEVER EVER trust fish?

1) They spend all their time in the water where we can’t see them.
2) Some are as big as a bus—that is not okay.
3) We don't know what they're teaching in their "schools."
4) They are likely plotting our doom.

This nature-guide-gone-wrong is a hilarious, off-the-rails exploration of the seemingly innocent animals that live in the water.

About Neil Sharpson

Neil Sharpson lives in Dublin with his wife and their two children. Having written for theater since his teens, Neil transitioned to writing novels in 2017, adapting his play The Caspian Sea into When The Sparrow Falls. A huge fan of animation, Neil writes Unshaved Mouse, a comedic review blog mostly focusing on animated film and comic book movies. His website is: https://unshavedmouse.com/

About Dan Santat

Dan Santat is the National Book Award-winning, Caldecott Medal–winning, and New York Times–bestselling author and illustrator of The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend and the road trip/time travel adventure Are We There Yet? His artwork is also featured in numerous picture books, chapter books, and middle-grade novels, including Dav Pilkey's Ricky Ricotta series. Dan lives in Southern California with his wife, two kids, and many, many pets. His website is: https://sites.google.com/g.risd.org/dansantat/home

Activities & Links

• Check out this Read Aloud with the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq5p9R1FVWI
• Here's an interview with Dan Santat, illustrator of "Don't Trust Fish": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZS6SmqNRsg
• Check out these activity sheets with facts about fish: https://kidsactivitiesblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Fish-Facts-Coloring-Pages.pdf 
• Writing exercise: Have students write a funny paragraph convincing others why fish cannot be trusted based on the book's silly premise.
• Here's a link to free fish coloring pages: https://mondaymandala.com/fish-coloring-pages/

Suggestions for Further Reading

• Check out the other 2026 Ladybug Longlist titles featuring Swimming Creatures at: https://nhbookcenter.blogspot.com/2026/02/ladybug-longlist-swimming-creatures.html 
• Parrotfish Has a Superpower by Jill Esbaum, a 2025 Ladybug Longlist title and Memoirs of a Goldfish by Devin Scillian and Tim Bowers, a 2011 Ladybug winning title are both fun books about fish that you can count on. 
• For more books written or illustrated by Dan Santat, consider Built to Last by Minh Lê and Dan Santat, a 2025 Ladybug Longlist title, A New Day by Brad Meltzer and Dan Santat, a 2024 Ladybug Longlist title and After the Fall (How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again) by Dan Santat, a 2018 Ladybug Nominee Finalist. 

This is one of nine titles nominated for the 2026 Ladybug Picture Book Award.
We will be posting information about a different nominee each Friday throughout the summer and will issue a pdf voters guide featuring all the titles by Labor Day.

2026 National Book Festival & Great Reads Selections!

 The 2026 National Book Festival is Saturday, August 22, 2026!

Discover Great Reads from Great Places with the Roadmap to Reading at the 2026 Library of Congress National Book Festival! The 56 Affiliate Centers for the Book each selected one book for Young Readers and one for Adult Readers to celebrate the people and places around our nation. Visit each stop on the Roadmap to Reading in Hall D of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. from 9 a.m-8 p.m.

For a link to the author lineup of more than 80 authors at the festival, click here.

The Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library has selected the book, Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor by Emily Arnold McCully as our 2026 selection for Young Readers. 

Mattie could make almost anything – toys, sleds, kites, and a foot warmer. When she was just twelve years old, Mattie designed a metal guard to prevent shuttles from shooting off textile looms and injuring workers at the mills in Manchester, New Hampshire. Later, as an adult at the Columbia Paper Bag Company in Springfield, Massachusetts, Mattie invented the machine that makes the square-bottom paper bags we still use today. Over the course of her life, Marvelous Mattie earned the title of "the Lady Edison." This is the incredible story of the first woman to receive a U.S. patent.

The Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library has selected the book, Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving as our 2026 selection for Adult Readers.

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County—to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto—pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.” --Publisher’s blurb

Book of the Week (8/3/2026)

The Old Scarecrow by Tabatha Jean D'Agata (Hb Publishing House, 2025)

Farmer Fred faces a tough choice. His old scarecrow, Tom, has stood guard over the cornfield for years. But now, a relentless flock of crows threatens to devour his crops.

As the crows invade, Fred's bond with Tom is tested. It's not just about the corn; it's about tradition, loyalty, and what it means to protect.

Farmer Fred scratched his head as the crows swarmed the cornfield. Tom the scarecrow had been a loyal guardian for years. But with the corn disappearing faster than ever, Fred began to think it might be time for a change.

Will Goose, Cow, and a particularly shaggy Sheep (who desperately needs a shave) rally together to save their cherished scarecrow, Tom, from possible replacement?

However, help can often come in mysterious shapes and sizes.

Join Fred on this heartfelt journey. Will he choose practicality or sentiment? Dive into The Old Scarecrow and find out. --Publisher's blurb

About the author:

Tabatha Jean D’Agata is a writer who has authored several books for children. As a dedicated literacy columnist for the Parent Express Newspaper, she advocates for the importance of reading and writing in children's lives. D’Agata shares her love for writing by conducting workshops for children in schools and libraries, inspiring the next generation of storytellers. D’Agata resides in Hooksett, NH where she enjoys making memories with her family, tucking a penny in her shoe for good luck, sending wishes with dandelion fluff, and indulging in chocolate—because she believes chocolate fixes everything!