By Kevin Henkes
One whole year of second grade, told in the small worries and small triumphs of a boy named Billy Miller.
Billy Miller starts second grade with a bump on his head from a summer fall and a private worry that it might have knocked something loose and left him not smart enough. The year unfolds in four parts, one for each person at its center. First his teacher, whom he has to win back after a rough first day. Then his stay-at-home artist father, who helps him build a diorama for a big school project. Then his little sister, Sal, whom he bickers with by day and cannot quite stay mad at. And last his mother, for whom he stays up almost the whole night trying to write a poem good enough to read aloud.
This one won a Newbery Honor for doing a very hard thing very quietly: taking a completely ordinary second-grade year seriously, from the inside, at exactly a seven-year-old's scale. The chapters are short and the worries are small and real, a fight with a friend, a school project, wanting to make your mom proud, so a newer reader stays right at home in it. Billy is gentle and funny and easy to be, and children who don't want big drama, who just want a book that feels like their own life, settle into this one and don't want it to end. It's the calmest, kindest kind of chapter book there is.