New York Public Library 100 Best Books for Kids Books

Every year the New York Public Library's children's librarians publish a list of the year's best books for kids, building on what the library describes as a century-old tradition of recommending the best-loved titles published for children each year. For decades it appeared as Children's Books: 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing, later as 100 Best Books for Kids; recent editions are published simply as Best Books for Kids and have outgrown the round hundred — the 2025 list carries 125 titles. Selections are made by staff committees and sorted into picture books, young readers, and middle grade.

The selectors are librarians in a system that lends books to a very large and very mixed readership, and the list reads that way: it is assembled to be handed to families, not argued over. Every title is in the library's collection, and the age bands make it usable as a year-end sweep — a way to see what came out this year worth reading aloud to a five-year-old or handing to a fourth grader, rather than a verdict on which single book was best.

Information from the New York Public Library.