Let me start with a confession: some of the picture books I love most are ones I cannot easily explain at a dinner party. A girl who names her scab and grieves when it falls off. Two boys who dig straight past a diamond the size of a Buick and end up, possibly, in a parallel universe. A wordless book about a corner. These are not edge cases in the catalogue. They are, in my experience, the ones children return to.
There is a persistent idea that picture books for young children should be reassuring above all else: neat arcs, clear lessons, everybody home for supper. And many excellent books do exactly that. But some kids, quite early, want something weirder. They want the book that makes them say wait, what? out loud. This guide is for them, and for the grown-ups buying on their behalf.
A note on sourcing: the titles below are drawn from reviews in Horn Book, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly, from the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin, and from the long-running unconventional-picture-book tracking done by librarians and critics at School Library Journal and 100 Scope Notes. Age ranges are suggestions, not sentences.
What makes a picture book weird in a good way?
Weird in a useful sense is not the same as random or difficult. The best unconventional picture books are coherent on their own terms. They have internal logic, even if that logic is dreamlike or deadpan or unsettling. What they tend to share is a refusal to explain themselves too much, a trust that the child reader can sit with ambiguity, and an illustrator who is doing something visually that you have not quite seen before. Kids can handle the occasional bit of bizarreness; the problem is that standard picture book fare rarely offers it. This list tries to correct that.
Seven genuinely odd picks
1. Pepper and Me, by Beatrice Alemagna (2024)
Ages 4 to 8. Published by Astra/Hippo Park.
This is a story about a girl and her scab. A scab that talks. And it is also visually arresting and unexpectedly touching. The girl falls, names the wound Pepper after the dog she has always wanted, and then spends the entire book in a complicated, obsessive relationship with a crust of dried blood. By the time Pepper finally falls off, the girl has come to feel genuine affection for the scab and has a hard time letting go.
Horn Book called it "intimate and indelible," describing the book as an exploration of "pain, healing, change, wonder and time." Kirkus Reviews noted that "Alemagna deftly captures feelings of loss over something inconsequential to adults but of outsized importance to a child." The book was also named a New York Times Best Children's Book of 2024 and a Kirkus Best Picture Book of the Year.
Publishers and critics have compared the book to classics from Tomi Ungerer and William Steig, citing its exploration of "the weird, funny essence of childhood." That is not hype. Alemagna's colour work is genuinely unlike anyone else's, and the premise is so specific that it becomes universal almost immediately. Every child has had a Pepper.
2. Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen (2014)
Ages 4 to 8. Published by Candlewick Press.
Both Extra Yarn and Sam and Dave Dig a Hole are Caldecott Honor winners and E.B. White Read-Aloud Award winners, which is worth knowing because it means the establishment agrees these books are excellent, not merely strange. Barnett's comic voice is at its driest here, with prose that mimics the declarative sentences of early readers: "On Monday Sam and Dave dug a hole."
Klassen's cross-section illustrations give readers a mole's-eye view of the underground proceedings, and he shows an uncanny knack for conveying meaning with the subtlest of eye movements. The boys dig and dig, missing a series of increasingly enormous diamonds by inches, and then arrive somewhere that is almost home but not quite. Barnett and Klassen dangle the prospect of fantastic subterranean treasure and then leave readers with "a tantalizingly creepy and open-ended conclusion." Kids shout at the page. Adults reread the ending twice. Nobody fully agrees on what happened. It is a perfect book.
3. Extra Yarn, by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Jon Klassen (2012)
Ages 4 to 8. Published by Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins.
Worth including alongside Sam and Dave because it is the warmer, stranger twin. A Caldecott Honor Book and Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner, it follows a young girl and her box of magical yarn as she transforms a community, with a palette that moves from black-and-white to colour and a tone that feels like a new classic. Reviewers noted that "Klassen's deadpan, stylized illustrations impeccably complement Barnett's quirky droll writing." There is also a villain who covets the yarn with operatic intensity, which is the kind of detail that six-year-olds find deeply satisfying.
4. The Tree and the River, by Aaron Becker (2023)
Ages 5 to 9. Published by Candlewick Press.
A wordless time-lapse journey with a singular focus: a lone tree beside a river. As the pages turn, civilizations rise and fall, feuds begin and end, and yet the tree endures. It is one of the rare picture book stories that invites the reader to make the meaning. There is no narrator to tell you what to think, which means that a five-year-old and a fifty-year-old will have genuinely different conversations about the same spread. Buy it for the kid who stares at things longer than other kids do.
5. My Strange Shrinking Parents, by Zeno Sworder (2023)
Ages 4 to 8. Published by Enchanted Lion Books.
This is a picture book about parental sacrifice, a topic almost entirely absent from the genre. The conceit is precisely what the title says: a child's parents shrink, progressively, over the course of the book, because of the sacrifices they make for their child. It sounds like it could be heavy-handed. It is not. Sworder's illustration style is haunting and dry at the same time, and the emotional logic is exactly the kind of thing children sense without being able to articulate. It is the sort of book that adults cry at quietly while reading it aloud and then pretend they have something in their eye.
6. Corner, by Zo-O, translated by Ellen Jang (2023)
Ages 4 and up. Published by Owlkids Books, Toronto.
A local note: Owlkids, a Canadian publisher, did not hesitate to acquire this book when it appeared at the Bologna Children's Book Fair, and the instinct was right. Creator Zo-O's name incorporates the Chinese character for crow, making her full name "Crow Zoo" in English. The book itself is marvelous, almost entirely wordless, and highly unconventional. It is about a corner, in the architectural sense, and what a corner is and contains and means. Trying to describe its effect is a bit like describing a dream: the experience is the thing. Excellent for children who are already interested in how illustrated books actually work as objects.
7. The Paper Boat, by Thao Lam (2020)
Ages 6 to 9. Published by Owlkids Books, Toronto.
Another Owlkids title, and another Canadian one to be proud of. In The Paper Boat, Lam's signature collage art tells the wordless story of one family's escape from Vietnam, a journey intertwined with an ant colony's parallel narrative. Two stories, same spreads, no words, no signposting. The reader has to do real work to understand what is happening, and the doing of that work is where the book lives. It is recommended by the Canadian Children's Book Centre as one of the essential Canadian picture books, and it is the kind of book that gets passed from household to household with a sticky note that says just read it.
A few practical notes for buyers
- Age ranges on unconventional picture books are unreliable. A confident reader of seven may love Corner; a thoughtful adult will find it rewarding. Read the book yourself first if you can.
- Wordless books are sometimes mistaken for easier or simpler. They are not. They require more active reading, not less.
- Several of these titles are available through the Toronto Public Library system, which is a reasonable way to test a book before committing to a shelf copy.
- For more unconventional titles, the CCBC at the University of Wisconsin maintains annual best-of lists going back to 1980 that are reliably more adventurous than most retail recommendation engines.
One thing worth saying plainly
Children who are drawn to the strange in books are not a problem to be managed. They are readers with good instincts. The picture book tradition has always had a weird wing: Tomi Ungerer, William Steig, Edward Gorey adjacent territory, Maurice Sendak making adults nervous since 1963. The books above are part of that lineage. They trust children to be interested in things that are unresolved, odd, and occasionally about a scab. That trust is the whole point.
Sources
- Betsy Bird, "31 Days, 31 Lists: 2023 Unconventional Children's Books," A Fuse #8 Production, School Library Journal, December 2023. afuse8production.slj.com
- Travis Jonker, "The Most Astonishingly Unconventional Children's Books of 2023," 100 Scope Notes, November 2023. 100scopenotes.com
- Kirkus Reviews, starred review of Pepper and Me by Beatrice Alemagna, 2024. kirkusreviews.com
- Horn Book, review of Pepper and Me by Beatrice Alemagna, 2024. hbook.com
- Horn Book, starred review of Sam and Dave Dig a Hole by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, 2014. hbook.com
- Kirkus Reviews, starred review of Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, 2014. kirkusreviews.com
- Canadian Children's Book Centre (CCBC), "50 Must-Read Canadian Picture Books," bookcentre.ca. Accessed October 2026.
- Reading Rockets, author biography of Mac Barnett, readingrockets.org. Accessed October 2026.
- CBC Books, "40 Canadian picture books to watch for in fall 2022," cbc.ca, September 2022.