It’s always a good day when we can applaud award-winning St. Paul author Kao Kalia Yang’s two new children’s picture books, as well as spring books for young readers from local publisher Lerner Publications, and a heartfelt adult debut novel by a part-time St. Paulite.

(Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press)

“The Blue House I Loved”: by Kao Kalia Yang, illustrated by Jen Shin (University of Minnesota Press, $24.95)

(Courtesy of Lerner Publishing Group)

“A Home on the Page”: by Kao Kalia Yang, illustrated by Seo Kim (CarolRhoda Books, $18.99)

Kao Kalia Yang (Shee Yang / University of Minnesota Press)

Yang, winner of seven Minnesota Book Awards for children and adults, forms “The Blue House I Loved” as memories of a Hmong woman recalling the time her family lived with her aunt and uncle in St. Paul when they were newly arrived from a refugee camp in Thailand.

“On the plot of grass off Maryland Avenue, behind a bar on Payne Avenue, on the east side of St. Paul, there was once a blue house that I loved,” the story begins.

Room by room, the author takes us through the house, now long gone. Although it was “a two-story, built in the late 1800s, a farmhouse with a damp basement,” it was filled with happy kids in an extended family. The author’s two boy cousins slept in a porch so cold their hair was frozen in the morning. The kids ate in the dark living room, and in a bedroom her older girl cousins played cassette tapes of Thai and Chinese singers. In the kitchen, her aunt and mother prepared pickled mustard greens. Outside, the family stood on a slab of concrete to welcome home an uncle who had surgery.

“We children didn’t know then that our lives would take us far from each other, and that love spread far too thin across time and space grows faint like dreams,” she writes. “Yet each time I pass by this plot of grass, behind Payne and off Maryland, I feel ghosts in that house, inviting us toward the past, to ourselves and each other, again.”

Yang writes for all ages, drawing inspiration from her experiences as a refugee. Among her Minnesota Book Award-winning picture books are “The Rock in My Throat” and “The Diamond Explorer.” American Library Association awards went to “A Map Into the World,” “The Most Beautiful Thing” and “From the Tops of the Trees.”

“The Blue House I Loved” received a starred review from Boolklist as well as praise from Kirkus Reviews. Critics give props to Jen Shin’s detailed, meticulous three-dimensional architectural renditions of the house.

Yang will launch her book with a free reading at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Arlington Hills Library, 1200 Payne Ave., in the neighborhood that inspired her story.

Yang’s other new book, “A Home on the Page,” confronts racism in a story about a young Hmong American girl who finds a racist slur painted on her family’s mailbox. She tells her parents she wants to leave, but they explain about the ways they find comfort and belonging. She discovers her father’s home is in the songs he performs and her mother’s home is in her garden. The girl begins writing stories and soon she has found her home — on the page.

And from Lerner

“Bird! In Spring”/”Bird! in Summer”: by Raymond McGrath ($12.99) — Bird is out on his own and and has to find a tree to make his nest, which he does season by season and friend by friend. Second in a four-book series of early reader graphic novels about independence, kindness and the beauty of our differences.

“Let’s Camp!”: by Shelley Rotner ($10.99) — This slim paperback gives advice on setting up camp and sleeping in a tent, camping etiquette and the fun of hiking, fishing and biking.

“Who Will Rule the Trees?”: by Eric A. Kimmel, illustrated by Alette Straathof ($19.99)

Every kind of tree asks God to be trees’ ruler. Oak, pine, maple, fig, date palm make their case by touting their strengths. But one tree reveals something none of the others can offer.

Middle-grade fiction

“Choir GRRRL”: by Ashley Granillo ($19.99) — A 13-year-old girl’s father wants her to follow in his footsteps with band music but she wants to sing in a choir without making her dad angry. Will she have to choose between two kinds of music?

“Wild Mountain Ivy”: by Shannon Hitchcock ($18.99) — A girl recovering from a virus spends the summer in an old house in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she dreams of a girl who lived there a century earlier when it was a tuberculosis facility. Delving into the history of the place, she finds changes in her own life.

(Courtesy of Lerner Publishing Group)

“Rules for Liars”: by Debra Garfinkle and April Patten ($18.99) — Rebecca and Nikki are facing life’s challenges, Rebecca is overwhelmed with preparing for her bat mitzvah while grieving for her mother. Nikki’s family has lost their home and she lies to her friends about their circumstances. Together, the girls face their grief, guilt and personal struggles.

“The Wolf in Underpants Moves On”: by Wilfrid Lupano, illustrated by Maryana Itoiz ($8.99) — In the seventh in this graphic novel series, the wolf’s fearsome reputation has other forest animal running, until the wolf shows up in a pair of comfy striped pair of underpants. Then he goes off to Elsewhere, wherever that may be.

(Lake Union Publishing)

“Loon Point”: by Carrie Classon (Lake Union Publishing, $16.99).

If everything around you seems bleak in these days of grayness and turmoil, read this uplifting, soul-satisfying debut novel by a St. Paul native and nationally syndicated columnist with Andres McMeel Universal about what it means to gather a family.

Norry Last has been running her family’s business, the Last Resort, since her father died 10 years earlier. After her husband left her, she’s happy at the northern Minnesota resort that is popular with summer visitors. Then, in the middle of a fierce snowstorm, a skinny little girl and her dog show up at the resort. Lizzie has walked in the storm from a crummy trailer she lives in with her drug-addicted mother. Norry knows nothing about children but she takes in Lizzie and the dog, Mr. Benson, and learns to care for the smart, polite third-grader who loves books, especially “Little House in the Big Woods.”

The cast includes Bud, a snowplow driver, a volunteer fireman and a big man who just can’t help giving a hand to everyone who needs one. Bud and Norry have known one another since high school and Bud can’t stop making jokes about the “Last” resort and Norry’s name. And there is Wendell, a 70-something man whose life Bud saves when Wendell’s hoard-filled old house literally falls in and nearly kills him. Wendell is a man who never reached out to do much and blames the world for it. He believes most people are idiots and only a few realize, as he does, that the world is dark, lonely and rigged against them. His life is “one long hesitation” and he’s thinking of ways to kill himself, except busybodies like Bud and the woman next door keep getting in the way. Could a little notebook with a glittery unicorn on the cover save him?

What’s so sweet about this story is the way this disparate group comes together to create family. Norry grows to love Lizzy, who’s often scared for her mother but loves living at the resort. Wendell, sitting by a shoreside fire roasting marshmallows, is surprised anyone pays attention to him. Bud doesn’t change, because he doesn’t need to; he’s just fine the way he is and Norry begins to realize that.

There is a sort of glow over this story, maybe because all the characters are doing the best they can, even Lizzie’s addicted mother. There are no villains here.

Classon is also a performer who had a 14-year career in theater performing in dozens of shows across the country. After founding and running a professional theater, she worked in international business. She holds an MFA from the University of New Mexico and has written a memoir, several plays and more than 600 columns. With her husband, Peter, she divides her time between St. Paul and Mexico. (Norry’s best friend in the novel lives during the winter in Mexico, from which she gives Norry advice.)

Teaser quote: “It was true, what she’d said to Virgie. Showing Lizzie things she had taken for granted has forced Norry to see them in a new way. When she saw the first marsh marigolds blooming along the shore, she found herself thinking she’d have to show the bright-yellow flowers to Lizzie. She thought she should get the pontoon out earlier than usual and take a spin around the lake with Lizzie. She wondered if Lizzie would like to go fishing with Bud — once the northern season started. She imagined taking Lizzie to pick raspberries — until she remember that no, Lizzie would be gone by then.”

Related Articles

Literary calendar for week of Feb. 8

What’s like got to do with it? Sara Levine on the art of ‘difficult’ women

Broadway and Hollywood songwriter Marc Shaiman looks back with pessimistic humor in memoir

Literary calendar for week of Feb. 1

Readers and writers: An eye-opening read of people who are homeless, plus fiction and history