Ana and the Sea Star

R. LYNNE ROELFS lives in Kansas with her husband and teenaged daughter. Sometimes she likes to close her eyes and imagine she’s exploring tide pools on the beach. Ana and the Sea Star is her first picture book. JAMIE HOGAN has published illustrations in newspapers, periodicals, and numerous award winning children’s books including Rickshaw Girl, which was named one of the Best 100 Books by the New York Public Library and won the Jane Addams Peace Association Award and the Maine Library Association’s Lupine Award; and Island Birthday, which won the 2015 Lupine Award. Jamie lives on an island in Casco Bay with her husband and daughter.

"Hogan has in the view of this writer entered the sacred pantheon of books worthy of Caldecott attention with the quietly powerful and sensory Ana and the Sea Star. That Roelfs’s life-affirming story, told with poetic grace was the springboard makes the completed work all that more distinguished....There is an acute literary kinship between McCloskey’s unforgettable sensory immersion and Ana and the Sea Star, a work that similarly places youthful wishes front and center during the most formative years.Young readers are treated to an illustrated glossary featuring the sea creatures encountered in the text along with a four or five sentence engaging description of each. Making the connection of human to animal life is a similar showcasing of Ana, defined as a homo sapiens, a vertebrate like some of the others, but most notably the youngest species of them all and one with the unique power of imagination."