Facial hair is the one grown-up thing a child cannot fake, which is exactly why it is so funny. A mustache means you are a cowboy or a villain, a beard means you are a lumberjack or a king or Santa, and the only way to get either one is to wait roughly fifteen years—or find a marker. Picture-book authors have been mining this for decades. The beards on these pages hide birds, win contests, choke on soup, get outlawed by a vain monarch, and in one case hypnotize an entire town into electing a fifth grader president.
Bookroo's collection of beard and mustache books runs from wearable board-book masks to a middle-grade caper about a $99 handlebar with mind-control powers. Our editors picked thirteen that cover the range: the baby whose mustache might be a bad-guy mustache, the moose whose whiskers ruin dinner, the gnome who cannot grow a beard at all, and the eleven-year-old girl who wrote to Abraham Lincoln and changed how we picture him forever. Start with the shortlist, then browse the picture-book shelf for read-alouds or the chapter-book shelf for readers who want a longer joke.
Baby Billy is born with a mustache. The only question is whether it is a good-guy mustache or a bad-guy mustache.
Casper buys a fake mustache at a novelty shop. Within a week he has robbed a bank and entered the presidential race.
Jim Hickory chops down the tree the birds were living in, so the birds move into his beard.
Mo the monster gets a fine black mustache. By the next page, every monster in town has one too.
A moose's mustache refuses to behave. It ruins the soup, the dancing, and eventually the moose.
Maddie's collection of fake mustaches is how she gets a laugh. Then a doctor finds a tumor on her brain.
In 1860 an eleven-year-old girl wrote to Abraham Lincoln and told him to grow a beard. He did.
Every gnome has a beard. Albert does not, so the Beards International Gnome-athalon will not have him.
The king loves his golden beard so much that he outlaws everyone else's. Then it keeps growing.
Six die-cut beards—lumberjack, pirate, Viking, Santa—that you hold up in front of your own face.
Ben wants a beard like his dad's. His face declines to cooperate, so he locates a marker.
Baby Billy has a mustache. Baby Javier turns up with a full beard. It escalates immediately.
Moose has finished every item on his Christmas list except the tree. He does, however, have a very large mustache.
Pirate babies, bedtime knights, a mustachioed Christmas elf, and a duck with a duckstache—read-alouds for ages 3–8.
Babies turn pirates to recover treasure but face a moral dilemma on the high seas.
A mermaid and an octopus find friendship by embracing their uniqueness.
A mustachioed baby learns giving is better than receiving after landing on the naughty list.
A mustache contest spirals into chaos with unexpected animal competitors.
Two baby knights battle their greatest foe: bedtime.
A fractured fairy tale, a small-town ghost story, and a seventh grader counting the hairs on her lip—for ages 6–12.
Middle school looms as Karma faces friendship shifts and an unexpected mustache.
The adventures of a princess who falls into a magical land called the Land of Fake-Believe
Two kids face a haunted mustache seeking a new lip in a spooky town.
