The Best Picture Books of 2025
Welcome dear reader to the 8th annual Dad Suggests Picture Book Awards! Can you believe it’s been 8 years already? After just a couple more years of this we can do a battle of the champions from the last 10 years!
This is the first year of the award ceremony after moving into our new bookstore home in Fayetteville, Arkansas. And this year I promise we are making embossed stickers to put on all of the Dad Suggests Picture Book Awards winners through the years. And in no time all the top publishers will be clamoring to get those coveted stickers on every new copy they print. If you’re curious, here are the past winners:
2024 Bog Myrtle
2023 The Skull
2022 The Queen in the Cave
2021 Milo Imagines the World
2020 The Barnabus Project
2019 All the Ways to Be Smart
2018 Ocean Meets Sky
As you can see, this year’s champion will be joining a very prestigious group of past winners! We take the Dad Suggests Picture Book Awards very seriously around here, and, as demonstrated by the long list of very beautiful runners-up this year, making the final decisions is not easy!
All of the books below made the short list of books that we deeply considered for the 2025 top 10. And you can consider all of the books in the top 10 to be official runners-up. But it’s only the number one book of the year that will get that shiny golden medal.
Unlike the Caldecott medal, this is not just an award for the illustrator. These are the picture books that we think are the best and most beautiful and most entertaining all at once - just the best works of art overall. It’s equally an award for both the author and the illustrator.
I sincerely hope you enjoy reading through our list of books this year! If you’re reading this you must be a pretty cool supporter of picture books in general - so thanks for being cool and giving this art medium the love it deserves.
2025 Picture Book Short List
The Boy Who Became a Parrot
Outside In and the Inside Out
The Newest Gnome
The Language of Birds
The Wanting Monster
Sundust
Island Storm
Your Forest
Tonight is Krampus Night
Fireworks
Spoops
Take a Walk with the Wind
Secrets from the North Pole
The Little Ghost Quilt’s Winter Surprise
This Book is Dangerous
The Wild Robot on the Island
The Bear Out There
Stalactite and Stalagmite
The Other Side of the Rocks
Don’t Eat Eustace
Every Monday Mabel
Don’t Eat Me!
The Arguers
More or Less
Fox and the Mystery Letter
The Lighthouse Keeper
The Three-Year Tumble
The Wound
Late Today
The Slightly Spooky Tale of Fox and Mole
Let’s Be Bees
Dad Suggests Picture Book Awards 2025 Top 10
10. Don’t Trust Fish
Written by Neil Sharpson and Illustrated by Dan Santat
Okay we are starting off with a really funny one this year. I stand by the opinion that good quality humor is not easy to pull off in a picture book. Plenty of books out there appeal to a child’s propensity to laugh at the cheapest of jokes - but good humor is not easy to come by. Don’t Trust Fish is hilarious. It’s also an introduction to classifying animals - which makes it a great book for a 4th grade science class.
The book starts off simply enough - talking about how we know something is a mammal, a reptile, or a bird. But it goes off the rails when fish come up. It starts by bringing up some very good points about why fish are weird, but believe me when I tell you you are not prepared for how silly it gets. Top notch comedy here.
9. Dragon Flower
Written by Chen Jiang Hong and Illustrated by Alyson Waters
I love Dragon Flower because it appeals to my inner child and my desire for a simple fairy tale adventure story. Quite simply, at the end of the day, this is the type of story I think we should have more of for kids these days. It’s beautifully illustrated and it’s an engaging and original adventure story - like something that you might find tucked into a collection of Brothers Grimm stories.
Mae and her family are looking for a magic flower to cure her sick mother, but it grows in a secret place, and it is guarded by dragons. I think it’s wonderful to be able to summarize a story so quickly - but you can really tell it’s going to be wonderful just because of that short description, can’t you?
8. The Snow Theater
Written and Illustrated by Ryoji Arai
This one really caught me by surprise. The art is so abstract at times, and the first time I read it through, I didn’t quite grasp onto the substance of the story. But the funny thing is that really good picture books do that to me at times. I have to sit with it for a while to appreciate the quietness and subtleties of the experience. And the last time that happened to me was with another Japanese picture book called Little Shrew. It’s almost like a snapshot of life, and it’s just so beautiful.
Two boys are looking at a book about butterflies, and it accidentally gets torn. Then one of the boys goes off skiing by himself, perhaps feeling bad that the book was his father’s favorite. But he crashes in the snow, and underneath the snow he watches the most unexpected and delightful performance of the snow people - like a strange little magical ballet. Quite frankly it’s hard to describe, but this is art and I love it.
7. Hansel and Gretel
Written by Stephen King and Illustrated by Maurice Sendak
This one was on my radar for a long time - one of my most anticipated books of 2025. They took the art that Maurice Sendak had already done for the art design of the ballet of Hansel and Gretel, and let the one and only Stephen King do his version of the story. Of course he is a master, and indeed it did need to be a little different than any other version because of the very unique images Sendak drew, and it may very well be the best version of Hansel and Gretel now.
It is quite long though if you need that warning, so you’re gonna need an attention span from your little ones. You know I love scary things - and I love King and Sendak - so this was a no-brainer for the top 10. And that image of the witch’s house with a face on it? Absolutely iconic.
6. A Lost Cause
Written and Illustrated by Felicita Sala
I’m a big fan of Felicita Sala - and so it’s high praise when I say this is my favorite book of hers yet. Her style is very special and unique and it always really appeals to me in a big way. Just the perfect amount of quirky and just the right amount of whimsical. And my goodness this story mirrors that whimsy absolutely spectacularly. Quite simply this is the type of picture book I love. How original.
A little pig named Pablo just can’t ever remember where his things are. He is always asking his parents where he placed his favorite toys - until the day they say he’ll just have to remember and be more responsible. It’s just delightful in every way - but especially when he finds out where the things have been going. The detail in the art is so much fun and the whole thing just makes me happy.
5. My Brother
Written by Laura Djupvik and Oyvind Torseter
I always have my eye out for what Oyvind Torseter will illustrate next. I love his art and how the stories he works on tend to be so philosophical and sad and beautiful all at the same time - whether he is the author or not. This one is written by Laura Djupvik and it’s a story about a brother who has likely died recently - and how the family he left behind is dealing with it. Although I suppose there are other ways to interpret it.
The dad and the surviving sibling go fishing one day and catch their lost brother like he was a fish, and then he comes back to live with them for a bit. It’s an absolutely wildly imaginative and poignant concept - and it’s such a heartbreak and so incredibly original. I don’t know what it is about picture books that deal with grief and death, but it’s just such a powerful medium for it. And this is definitely one of my favorites now.
4. The Witch in the Tower
Written and Illustrated by Julia Sarda
It’s Julia Sarda folks and it’s a sequel to the sublime picture book The Queen in the Cave. What more must I say? This book is solid gold. We are so lucky to be living in a world with Sarda’s picture book art. Last time around the story focused on Franca coming of age and outgrowing things that her younger sisters were interested in - but this time around the story focuses on middle sister Carmela finding her people.
Thematically it can be about navigating loneliness and growing up and finding your tribe - but it does it so expertly and with the most beautiful art you’ve ever seen. I can’t begin to describe the details in this art - the witches, the frogs, the skeletons. The level of detail is insane and the aesthetic is right up my alley. This one is a little more Halloweeny than last time too which I’m not going to complain about one bit. It’s just one of the very best picture book makers out there doing her thing.
3. Aggie and the Ghost
Written and Illustrated by Matthew Forsythe
When I hear that Matthew Forsythe has a new picture book coming up, I just open up my article for next year and put the title on the list right then and there. It’s going to be beautiful, it’s going to be funny, and it’s going to be everything I want in a picture book to read to kids. Aggie and the Ghost is no exception, and it was definitely in consideration throughout the year to win the medal.
Of course I have to mention Forsythe’s art, which is perhaps exactly my favorite type of aesthetic for picture books. It’s extremely unique and it makes me happy. The other thing I very much appreciate about Forsythe’s books is his ability to really nail 2 or 3 absolutely fantastic and hilarious lines. Like Pokko saying “No more eating band members or you’re out of the band.” And this time around I think it’s “Humans are very bad at tic-tac-toe.” And I haven’t even told you yet that this story is about a girl who lives in a home that is haunted - and the ghost is not very good at following the rules. But don’t worry about all that - just read it and be happy.
2. Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend
Written and Illustrated by Bob Shea
I think I have a tendency to be drawn towards stories with a splash of serious emotions in them (I am after all quite fond of picture books about death), so it’s a tad unusual to have as pure a comedy as you’ll ever find so high on this list. But Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend makes us all laugh out loud, and the expertly-crafted humor on display here cannot be ignored.
The concept is simple - a turtle is wearing a bear suit and trying to convince another turtle that he is a bear. Are you sold yet? This book makes for a very good read aloud as well, which is a very important piece of criteria for a picture book list. Kids will laugh and you will laugh too. Take this delightful little exchange as an example:
Let’s see you hibernate like a for-real bear!
Pfft…. so easy. I hibernate like five times a day.
The silliness on display is top notch, and if someone comes into the shop asking for something funny for their kiddos it’s now one of the top 5 picture books I would think of period.
1. People Are Weird
Written by Victor D. O. Santos and Illustrated by Catarina Sobral
People are Weird is the very well-deserving winner of the Dad Suggests Picture Book Awards for 2025. Not only is this my very favorite book from Santos yet, but I could not possibly imagine better illustrations for this story than the ones created by Catarina Sobral. This is 100% and in every way the perfect pairing of words and pictures for a picture book.
I love this book. It’s funny. It’s quirky. It’s sweet. It’s sincere. It has meaning. It’s a slice of life story with a variety of characters and examples of “weirdness” that could not have been more perfectly chosen. I’m particularly fond of the boy at school who thinks he’s a real magician. And Uncle Jeff who doesn’t care what people think about the way he dresses.
People Are Weird holds up a magnifying glass to our eccentricities, and makes the very good point that we’re all so weird it might actually be more weird to be normal. Folks this is just a perfectly crafted picture book. It looks so good and it has a very thoughtful and worthwhile depth below the surface of its (perfect) quirkiness.
