Asian characters

4 New Picture Books Full of BIPOC Family Love

| Tasha
Cover image for The Heart of Our Home by Janelle Washington, featuring a family gathered around a table seen from above.

The Heart of Our Home by Janelle Washington

  • Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
  • Publication Date: March 24, 2026
  • Reviewed from Edelweiss e-galley
  • ISBN: 9781250357366

Gather around the kitchen table in this tribute to the room that is at the center of a Black American family. Morning starts with breakfast at the table. After school it is card games and baking treats. Dinnertime comes with setting the table more formally. It’s a place to spend time and be creative. A place to clean fish for the weekly fish fry. It’s a place for serious talks if someone gets in trouble. Friends are welcome at the table and many family celebrations happen there. On wash day, the table holds hair clips and bands right at hand. It’s a place to listen to grandparents and celebrate ancestors. A place to grieve when needed. A kitchen table is so many things to a family.

Washington offers a poetic look at a specific family gathering around their kitchen table. I love how she incorporates elements that are specific to the Black experience, such as wash day and Kwanzaa while also offering many experiences that are universal: meals, celebrations, grief. Her poetic lines capture the dance of the days and the full lives of families. As a Caldecott honoree, her art is exceptional. Using cut paper, she creates art that feels almost like stained glass. Yet the lines also manage to beautifully capture the emotions on her character’s faces. 

Welcome to the kitchen table. Appropriate for ages 4-7.

Cover image for When We Were Snails by Nan Cao, featuring a mother and child with backpacks holding hands and looking off into the distance. Flowers surround them with a red train and an airplane.

When We Were Snails by Nan Cao

  • Publisher: Crown Books for Young Readers
  • Publication Date: March 31, 2026
  • Reviewed from Edelweiss e-galley
  • ISBN: 9798217028283

A little girl has grown up traveling with her mother from place to place. They were like snails, carrying their homes on their backs through their adventures. But then one day, her mother has to take a job in a bigger city and leaves the girl with her grandparents. The little girl missed her mother terribly, especially when she wasn’t able to come home as she had promised. When her mother finally came home again, it was wonderful. But then her mother had to go away for another job. This time though, the girl got to come too. They continued moving from place to place, new school to new school, together. 

Cao captures the emotions of a child having to be left behind by a beloved single parent. Though her grandparents are loving and kind, it’s not the same. The emotions that Cao shares so beautifully on the page will resonate with children who may not have cried even though their feelings were deep and tragic. Children who have grown up in families that move a lot will find themselves reflected here with warmth. The illustrations are filled with art and family, sharing the coldness of being left and the flexibility of moving often through lines and structure. 

A charming look at an adventurous life. Appropriate for ages 4-6.

Cover image for Where They Gather by Teresa Rodriguez, illustrated by Jamiel Law, featuring a Black family around a pecan tree with a man pruning the tree and a woman, a baby and a toddler nearby.

Where They Gather by Teresa Rodriguez, illustrated by Jamiel Law 

  • Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
  • Publication Date: February 24, 2026
  • Reviewed from copy provided by publisher
  • ISBN: 9781665957816

This is the poetic story of a family that built a home after Emancipation. On that land they planted roots themselves and also planted a pecan tree. That tree was the place they gathered in times of joy like playing together as children and at weddings. In autumn, the tree provided pecans to eat and sell. But times were not always happy. The tree was damaged, just like the family it sheltered. And just like that family, the tree regrew. The house was rebuilt and the family spoke up for change. They still gather under that tree, the symbol of them rising again. 

Rodriguez and Law use both poetry and illustrations to fully tell the story of the family and its tree. The poetry is kept spare and clear, sharing a focus on seasons and resilience against them. Meanwhile, as the seasons change in the illustrations so do the lives of the family. Winter in the illustrations comes with a fire set on purpose and the loss of the grandfather in the family as well as the house. Then comes political action, marching for civil rights and new hope for the land and its people. Very powerfully posed together.

A powerful look at resilience, civil rights and the Black American experience.

Cover image for While We’re Here by Anne Wynter, illustrated by Micha Archer, featuring a Black mother and daughter hugging one another with a red balloon tied to the little girl's wrist.

While We’re Here by Anne Wynter, illustrated by Micha Archer

  • Publisher: Clarion Books
  • Publication Date: March 24, 2026
  • Reviewed from Edelweiss e-galley
  • ISBN: 9780063238299

A mother and daughter hurry to get their jackets on and catch the train. Along the way a shoe is lost and found again. They reach a large park and head to where they need to be. But when they get there, the party was yesterday! Now they have lots of time, and while they are in the park why not roll down some hills, stroll past the pond, walk the trails, and sit under the trees together. They have nowhere else to be.

Written in brief and bouncy pairs of lines, this picture book is incredibly inviting for the youngest readers. I love the mistake at the center of the book and while it is disappointing to miss a party, the book emphasizes that this sudden treasure of time is not to be wasted but savored together. The illustrations by Archer are done in inks, layered paper and handstamped papers. She uses paper like paint, offering detailed textures that invite readers to slow down and look more closely.

A book worth spending extra time with. Appropriate for ages 2-4.

Himawari House by Harmony Becker

| Tasha
Cover image for Himawari House.

Himawari House by Harmony Becker (9781250235565)

Nao grew up not fitting in in the United States, hoping to find a place that felt more like home in Japan. She had visited as a child, but now was going to be attending Japanese cram school. She moved into Himawari House, a house shared with several other students, all attending the school but at different levels. Nao discovers that fitting in isn’t as simple as a shared language, especially when she doesn’t speak it as well as she thought. Two of the girls who also live in the house have left their own countries to study in Japan. They all learn to find a way to connect with both Japanese culture and their own. Whether it is through shared food, watching shows together around a laptop, or reconnecting with family they left behind.

This graphic novel is wonderful. There is so much tangled in the stories of the three girls. Each of the teens is a unique person with specific experiences that led them to come to Japan, whether it was well-planned or almost a whim. They all face difficulties and handle them in their own ways, which tell the reader even more about who they are. Add in a touch of romance and their search for a place to belong becomes painfully personal and amazingly universal at the same time.

The art is phenomenal. From silly nods to manga style to serious moments that shine with a play of light and shadow to character studies that reveal so much in a single image of one of the characters, the illustrations run a full gamut of styles and tones. The language in the book is also fascinating, sharing the English mixed with other languages, changes in linguistic formats and the blank moments that happen when learning a language. It’s all so cleverly done.

A great graphic novel that explores finding a place in the world to belong. Appropriate for ages 13-18.

Reviewed from e-galley provided by First Second.

From the Tops of the Trees by Kao Kalia Yang

| Tasha
Cover image for From the Tops of the Trees.

From the Tops of the Trees by Kao Kalia Yang, illustrated by Rachel Wada (9781541581302)

A true story from the Hmong author’s childhood, this picture book brings readers to the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand in 1985. Their days are filled with hunger and finding fruit that they can pretend are candy. The aunties in the camp talk about the war and their fears of returning to the old country or heading to a new country. Every week the families in the camp are given enough food for three days. It’s a practice meant to deter other Hmong refugees from entering the country. After Kao asks about the world beyond the camp, her father takes her to the tallest tree in camp, climbs with her to the highest branches, and gives her a view of the world beyond the camp.

Yang shows the view of the refugee camp from that of a small child living there. The day is filled with happy moments like riding one of the dogs and racing the chickens for rice balls. Yet there is no escaping that they are in a refugee camp. Yang shares this by having the adults talk about the war, showing the food disbursement, and having Kao explain that they can’t leave but others can enter. The climb into the branches is dramatic and inspiring, a look a freedom that could not be more moving and tangible.

Wada uses a mix of traditional media like graphite and watercolor with digital tools. She shows Yang’s small family, using more saturated colors to pull them out of the crowds and to keep the focus on the young Kao in the camps. The colors are sandy and subtle, becoming deeper as they reach the treetop to see the world around them.

Another gorgeous and skilled picture book from Yang that captures the experience of the Hmong refugee camps and Hmong Americans. Appropriate for ages 5-8.

Reviewed from e-galley provided by Carolrhoda Books.

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

| Tasha
Cover image for These Violent Delights

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong (9781534457690)

This whirlwind of a novel is a grand retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Juliette Cai is in line to inherit the Scarlet Gang, one of the two gangs who rule 1920’s Shanghai. Juliette has spent the last few years in New York City, making her both a native of Shanghai but also partly an outsider. Upon her return to Shanghai, strange things start happening. A contagion is sweeping the city, causing those who catch it to tear out their own throats. Juliette is determined to figure out what is actually happening, a desire that causes her to have to work with her former lover, Roma, who is the heir to the White Flowers, the rival gang. After being brutally dumped by him, Juliette is wary of whether Roma is telling the truth. But when his own sister succumbs to the contagion, the two begin working together in earnest, encountering murder, death, monsters and much more.

This book is full of so much depth and such brilliant world building that it is nearly impossible to believe it’s a debut novel. Gong writes with real skill here, managing the pacing of the book beautifully, slowing it at appropriate times and allowing it to dash madly at others. The result is a book that sweeps up readers, offering them a glimpse of a fictional Shanghai that dazzles. Gong also riffs on the original very cleverly, not tying herself too tightly to Shakespeare but close enough that there are glimpses of that tale throughout the book.

The two main characters are marvelously driven and willing to kill people along the way. Gong does not soften the ongoing blood feud or what it has cost both Juliette and Roma. She also makes Juliette the one more likely to resort to direct violence, which is dynamite. The puzzle at the heart of the book is complicated and strange, leading directly to the next book in the series.

A dynamite first book in a dazzling fantasy series. Appropriate for ages 14-18.

Reviewed from copy provided by Margaret K. McElderry Books.