April’s Big Picture
The refugee experience is inevitably one of loss, an unmooring from a beloved place that has turned unsafe, a home that is no longer home. Even in the best circumstances, building a life in a new country is difficult, and a post-9/11 United States is hardly the best circumstances for families like the Muslim Shia protagonists of this month’s Big Picture. As an Iraqi Shia Muslim and refugee herself, author Al-Barkawi writes one of the first YA novels “for us and by us” in her debut, but in telling this specific story she offers a perspective that is anything but monolithic, instead giving readers a multi-layered, deeply vulnerable novel about three young protagonists reckoning with grief, family expectations, and their faith against a backdrop of bigotry and hate.
2025 Blue Ribbons
This year’s Blue Ribbon titles are united by the key theme of persistence, a refusal to accept dead ends, failures, or calls for the status quo. In the face of uncertainty, people both magical and ordinary work to define themselves outside of familial expectations, and artists seek tenacious healing by creating graphic novels and poetry. Elsewhere, a courageous young girl navigates the rocky seas of her own big feelings, and, less seriously but no less insistently, a young bear doggedly tracks a cheese-thieving dragons. Whatever the new year brings, we hope that you’ll join us in our persistent pursuit of literary joy.
The Center for Children’s Books
The Bulletin is partnered with the Center for Children’s Books, a research center whose mission is to facilitate the creation and dissemination of exemplary and progressive research and scholarship related to youth-focused resources, literature, and librarianship.
Cover image illustration copyright © 2026 by Nabi H. Ali, from IN THE COUNTRY I LOVE published by Peachtree Publishing Co. Inc.
