No kid should have to feel ashamed of his or her family. When the class in Sara O’Leary’s A Family Is a Family Is a Family is asked what makes their family special, our narrator hesitates to share about her family because it’s different. Families can be dysfunctional, but when you look at what makes them unique, it’s easy to find the good. In two-page spreads and a few sentences, each student in the class explains what makes their family special. Some descriptions are concrete, others dig deeper at the complicated feelings we have for the people we come from: “My mom says that before I was born I grew in her heart.” It begins traditionally enough with a student whose parents love each other very much (too much?). There’s a family with a ton of kids, another with two tone-deaf moms. Qin Leng’s illustrations create a visually appealing watercolour atmosphere, with sweet faces and details worth scanning the pages for. At the end, when we find out what is different about the narrator’s family, the reader will be satisfied to hear her mom’s smart retort to a nosy outsider. This book makes it a little more okay to be different. (VB)

On the first page of Lila and the Crow, readers meet both Lila, a pretty, dark-haired child with rosy cheeks, and a crow. Lila is enduring the common childhood experience of having moved to a new place. She starts school, anxious to make new friends. It’s only when a bully points out her dark hair and eyes that I realized she is Indigenous (it’s never made explicit). This fable is set among the secret lives of children, where adults can’t intervene. Day after day, Lila is taunted and grows more miserable, trying to find new ways to hide herself. From page one, the crow and Lila share something. She rejects the bird time and time again, but on the eve of an autumn festival in a magical encounter with a murder of crows, something changes. It takes a magnificent costume of her own making for Lila to stand proud of who she is. Written and illustrated by Gabrielle Grimard, Paula Ayer provides the poetic English version. (VB)

Lucy & Company, by Quebec children’s author Marianne Dubuc, follows Lucy and her four animal friends on three adventures. The first begins with Lucy looking for a nice spot to have her snack. One after another her four friends join her. The tale follows the ups (up a tree is a nice spot) and the downs (food goes down into bellies, but not if it’s dropped down on the ground) of snack time. In the second tale Lucy takes her friends on a treasure hunt that ends with a sweet surprise. The last is my favourite, with the most at stake, involving three parentless eggs. Recalling the charm of P. D. Eastman’s classic Are You My Mother?, the image of Adrian the snail trying to brood the eggs is a high point. Visually, Dubuc creates a bright, park-like world of adventure for its rosy-cheeked inhabitants. The stories can be read individually or as a whole, tracing a friendship that evolves from breaking bread to celebrating a birthday to caring for little ones. (VB)

It’s not surprising I’ve been washing my hands extra well since reading Inside Your Insides: A Guide to the Microbes that Call You Home, which introduces kids to the diverse and abundant mostly single- cell life all over their bodies. As microbe-ridden as a child’s hands are in the middle of the day, it’s also important for kids to learn that not all germs are bad. And what are germs anyway?