The New Friend by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrated by Benjamin Chaud

The New Friend by Charlotte Zolotow illustrated by Benjamin Chaud Review Copy from Abrams Kid s Charlotte Zolotow (1915 - 2013) was a writer, poet, editor and publisher. She had her own imprint at HarperCollins and the Cooperative Children's Book Center created an award in her name in 1998 that honors the author of the best picture book published each year. As her obituary in The New York Times notes, Zolotow stood out for plumbing "children's interior lives, often ranging over loneliness, loss, longing and other painful topics that earlier generations of children's books had either sugar coated or ignored outright." While children's books have evolved to address myriad experiences and emotions from increasingly diverse perspectives over the last fifty years, Zolotow's work remains relevant, although diversity in the illustrations would be welcome. Originally published in 1968, I began reading, despite having read (and owning) other books by Zolotow