Ladybug Nominee Profile

The Bakery Dragon by Devin Elle Kurtz (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2024)

Ember has always been different from the other dragons. His fearsome roar sounds more like a polite sneeze, and when he breathes fire, the villagers just pat his head and say awwww.

Ember fears he’ll never collect a respectable hoard of gold until a chance encounter with a baker causes his fortunes to turn (and his stomach to grumble). As the little dragon soon discovers, the gold you make is way better than the gold you steal—and gold that is shared? That’s best of all.

Magic shimmers on every page of Devin Elle Kurtz's feel-good picture book that celebrates baked goods, dragons, and generosity in equal measure. Filled with adorable illustrations, this is a perfect read aloud for bedtime or brunchtime!

About Devin Elle Kurtz

Devin Elle Kurtz is a visual development artist, illustrator, and picture book author. She was born in Santa Cruz, California. Her debut picture book as an author-illustrator, The Bakery Dragon, was an Indie Next List pick and an Indie bestseller. Her website is at https://www.devinellekurtz.com/

Activities & Links

• Check out this read along at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPpBdoS7F-o
• Artsy Craftsy Mom has 15 Dramatic Dragon Crafts you can try at: https://artsycraftsymom.com/dragon-crafts-for-kids/
• Learn about real life dragons at: https://www.coolkidfacts.com/komodo-dragon-facts/ and https://easyscienceforkids.com/all-about-flying-dragons/ 
• Here are some great printable bakery items for a fun craft idea: https://www.notimeforflashcards.com/2023/01/bakery-pretend-play-printables.html
• Paper Crafts-Art has a tutorial on making paper bread slices you can try at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSHKqPTG4tM

Suggestions for Further Reading

• Check out the other 2025 Ladybug Longlist titles featuring flying creatures at: https://nhbookcenter.blogspot.com/2025/01/ladybug-longlist-flying-creatures.html
• For more books about dragon-like creatures consider Rory the Remarkable Dragon by Kathryn Rammell, or Dragon Was Terrible by Kelly DiPucchio and Greg Pizzoli. 
• For another book set in a bakery, check out 2020 Ladybug Winner, There are No Bears in this Bakery by Julia Sarcone-Roach.

 

This is one of nine titles nominated for the 2025 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.

Book of the Week (6/23/2025)

Thorn House by Thom Schramm (Yas Press, 2025)

In Thorn House, the domestic is treacherous and the dangerous is home. An unspoken understanding between reader and speaker exists-we are in the church of the wound or the scratch or the scrape-as clipped, careful moments tug against the chaos at the edge of each poem. Schramm's opening poem shows a speaker seeking to "hatch" and to "heal" from the past. By the book's final piece, the cumulative damage is a literal crack down the center of a poem that finally heals by its end. This is a book thick with New England graveyards, bloodied birch trees, forest pathways lined with the hung bodies of trapped rabbits. At the heart of each line and stanza sits the New Hampshire wilderness, a place of cold and remoteness and wonder, a place that offers refuge from family but also its own dangers. In "Wake: 1978," the arrival of an ice cream truck is juxtaposed with a dead child lying in a living room coffin. In "In Silence," snakes emerge from a concrete set of steps poured badly and in "Yesterday I Wrote a Poem Called 'Yesterday'," "Mother preaches 'her strictures-scriptures that were best obeyed." In several poems, including "Hide and Seek," children disappear into the woods and are unable to be found. The parents in the collection are shadowy figures who are sometimes avoided or escaped.

Poems of family and damage in Thorn House are balanced by a quieter series of eight 19-line poems centered around a correspondence with former New Hampshire Poet Laureate Jane Kenyon both before and during her illness. These poems capture moments of intimacy and fear and add to the foreboding sense of the collection, the feeling that we are in a darkness of the woods edged by the comfort of connection. As we read snippets of letters, caring inquiries and sentiments, and the news of her illness and decline, we see how the pain of two people can bond them together. Kenyon's cursive is "small, like nerve endings." Her pain is a "bone pain" suffered for too long. A reaching out across miles and silences becomes clear, as does the urgency of connection. Then finally the news of Kenyon's leukemia breaks, and a postscript to the exchange depicts a reflection at Kenyon's grave in Andover, New Hampshire, in a silence of snow. --Publisher's blurb

About the author:

Thom Schramm is the author of Thorn House (Yas Press, 2025), winner of the Granite State Poetry Prize, and The Leaf Blower (Blue Cubicle Press, 2016), as well as the editor of Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in AGNI, The American Scholar, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Smartish Pace, and have won an Academy of American Poets Prize.

Nationwide Read 25 Day!

As part of the Read 25 in 2025 challenge, Gretchen Rubin, author, host of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast, and founder of The Happiness Project is partnering with Bookshop.org to host a nationwide gathering on Wednesday, June 25th, for a special 25-minute silent reading experience, followed by lively discussions about the books that captivate us.

Imagine thousands of book lovers across the US, all sharing a moment of quiet immersion in their chosen stories. Gretchen is partnering with hundreds of independent bookstores to make this happen, bringing communities together through the joy of reading.

Here in the Granite State, The Country Bookseller in Wolfeboro, NH is hosting a silent reading & discussion event to coincide with this national celebration on Wednesday, June 25th at 1 pm!

Be a part of the biggest reading event of the year! Pledge to Read 25 on June 25th here!

Book of the Week (6/16/2025)

Outcasts of Essex by Jane Hulse (Open Books Publishing, 2025)

Essex, New Hampshire, April 1775

Fifteen-year-old Sarah Barrett hates the mess of childbirth, yet she's the unwilling apprentice to the town's only midwife-her mother. She longs to be a writer like her father, who publishes the weekly Essex Journal. 

As the American Revolution heats up, his pro-British views turn the town against the family. Troubles deepen when a smallpox epidemic hits the town, and her mother pushes a crude, controversial inoculation. 

Sarah finds herself questioning everything: the fight for independence, her father's judgment, her own failings, and more to the point, why it's considered unthinkable for a young woman to write for a newspaper. 

When she learns the redcoats and the patriots will soon clash over a stockpile of munitions in Essex, she comes up with a risky plan to thwart the bloodbath. --Publisher's blurb

About the author:

Growing up in Keene, New Hampshire, Jane Hulse was surrounded by history. From her family's 1795 home, she could see the former tavern where 29 Minutemen rallied before fighting the British at Lexington. With her father, she explored caves that served as hiding places for loyalists who had been hounded out of town during the American Revolution. After graduating from Syracuse University, Hulse worked for small newspapers in Colorado and then for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, where she covered major criminal trials. She did freelance writing for the Los Angeles Times and was city editor at the Santa Barbara News-Press. For her leadership there, she was one of six staffers who received the University of Oregon's Arcil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism, an annual honor for journalists who "report with integrity despite personal, political, or economic pressure." Most recently, she was editor of a Southern California agricultural magazine.

Book of the Week (6/9/2025)

The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling (PublicAffairs, 2025)

A surprising and compelling journey into the business of paranormal investigation, and the state of scientific literacy in America.

In 2010, in a small New Hampshire town, next door to a copy center and framing shop, a ghost lab opened. The Kitt Research Initiative’s mission was to use the scientific method to document the existence of spirits. Founder Andy Kitt was known as a straight-shooter; and was unafraid — perhaps eager — to offend other paranormal investigators by exposing the fraudulence of their less advanced techniques. But when KRI started to lose money, Kitt began to seek funding from the paranormal community, attracting flocks of psychics, alien abductees, witches, mediums, ghost hunters, UFOlogists, cryptozoologists and warlocks from all over New England, and the world. And there were plenty of them around.

The Ghost Lab tells the astonishing story of the wild ecosystem of paranormal profiteers and consumers, through the astonishing story of what happened in this one small town. But it also maps the trends of declining scientific literacy, trust in institutions, and the diffusion of a culture that has created space for armies of pseudoscientists to step into the minds of an increasingly credulous public.

With his distinct voice, eye for a story and ability to show how one community's experience reflects that of a society, Matt Hongoltz-Hetling crafts a powerful narrative about just how fragmented our understanding of what is real and what is not has become. --Publisher's blurb

About the author:

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a freelance journalist specializing in narrative features and investigative reporting. He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press Association, among numerous other honors. He is the author of two prior books, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear and If It Sounds Like a Quack. Matthew is currently a reporter for the Valley News, a daily newspaper in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Join Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling at Gibson's Bookstore on Thu., July 17, 2025 at 6:30 pm where he will be discussing his newest book!

Dublin Literary Award Winner 2025

The Adversary by Michael Crummey has been selected as the winner of the 2025 Dublin Literary Award.

About the Book:

In an isolated outport on Newfoundland’s northern coastline, a ruthless act of sabotage is the opening salvo in a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar’s largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world. As their unshakeable animosity spirals further each year, the community is increasingly divided and even the innocents in Mockbeggar find themselves forced to take sides, with devastating consequences. The Adversary is a dark, enthralling novel about love and its limitations, the corruption of power and the power of corruption. --Publisher's blurb

2025 Ladybug Voting Materials

The 2025 Ladybug Picture Book Award Voting Materials are now available!

Voting materials, including picture ballots, paper tally sheets, as well as an online tally sheet, are available on the Ladybug web page, here.

We will be posting information about a different Ladybug nominee each Friday throughout the Summer and will issue a pdf voters guide featuring all the titles by Labor Day. A post about the first Ladybug nominee will go out on Friday, June 27, 2025 here on the Book Notes Blog.

New Hampshire children, from preschool to third grade, will select the winning picture book when they vote in November 2025. The deadline for sending in votes is Sunday, December 21, 2025 at 4:30 pm.