July/August’s Big Picture
A good middle grade graphic novel is a hot commodity, let alone one as gently self-aware as this month’s Big Picture, Jazzy the Witch in Friend Fiasco. The Bulletin first fell under Jazzy’s spell last year, and this follow-up volume returns readers to Jazzy’s cozy magical community. With the arrival of a new girl threatening Jazzy’s hard-won comfort in who she is and how her non-magic interests fit into her witch community, author/illustrator Jessixa Bagley tackles familiar middle grade anxieties: What if you want to make friends but are bad at it? How do you find your place if someone else is better at everything you love to do? And how do you admit you’ve misjudged someone? With emotional honesty and sympathetic humor, joyously diverse characters navigate this whimsically realized witchy world, and new and returning readers alike should be prepared to be enchanted.
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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.
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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 illustration from Jazzy the Witch in Friend Fiasco ©2026 Jessixa Bagley. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.