17 Best Books for 4-Year-Olds 2023, Chosen by Experts

The most beloved new picture book in our 2023 Good Housekeeping Best Book Awards, according to editor Karen Cicero, who works with the librarians and families who judge the awards, is about a squirrel delivering soup to her sick grandma. The brave yet scared squirrel traverses Buckthorn Forest, showing readers that helping others is worth conquering their fears. It’s pure fiction and fairytale with a sweet message and a twist ending for the 4-year-old set. Librarians, parents and children all gave it high praise and its author, Matthew Cordell, previously won the 2018 Caldecott Medal for Wolf in the Snow.

Does your 4-year-old show interest in sounding out words? They might be able to pick out a few in any of the 25 simple — and simply hilarious — Elephant and Piggie books. Author and illustrator Mo Williams uses the most basic of language and repeats words to tell stories of happy Piggie and grumpy, worried Elephant. Show your preschooler the word “bird,” for instance. This one won the 2008 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award, named for Dr. Seuss, an award that goes to the year’s most distinguished book for early readers.

Here’s another great book series for age 4, and if your kid likes it, buckle up: There are more than 50 Pete the Cat books. “They’re all a big hit with us,” says Apparel Lab Executive Director Lexie Sachs, a mom of two who also helms our Family Travel Awards. This title incorporates the concept of subtraction and gets kids counting in a sing-song way. It earned a Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor in 2013.

Expressive, shimmery fish rule this fun read-aloud picture book that ultimately helps 4-year-olds deal with their big feelings. “The Pout-Pout Fish offers a creative way of teaching kids about emotions and how to turn ‘dreary-wearies’ into ‘cheery-cheeries,'” says one mom of a 4-year-old, echoing others who enjoy this read. “My son loves pointing out all the different sea creatures — squid, jellyfish, octopus, clam. He especially gets a kick out of Pout-Pout Fish’s catchphrase, ‘blub, bluub, bluuuuub,’ and insists I say it with an exaggerated ‘pout-pout’ frown. Admittedly, the rhyming and alliteration can get kind of tongue-twisty to read but that’s all part of the fun.”

This one got top marks from librarians and families in our 2022 Good Housekeeping Best Book Awards. Done as a series of handwritten diary entries, along with a bit of regular text, you can follow one girl’s efforts to convince her parents that she’s hard-working enough to grow a garden of berries. “This book explores themes of responsibility, passion and entrepreneurship while explaining the process of growing one’s own food,” said our judge Sandhya Nankani, founder of The Story Seeds Podcast. Bonus: The publisher is a nonprofit!.

All the other fruit have rhyming words — why not Orange? Orange is feeling super sorry for itself, as noted in many asides across these imaginative pages. But this book has a happy ending, and is a hoot to read aloud, says our Good Housekeeping Parenting & Relationships Editor Marisa LaScala. “The first time I read this through with my daughter, we were laughing so hard we had to wait to turn the page,” she says.

We’re suckers for funny books, as are 4-year-olds — and this one’s got more than 23,000 five-star Amazon reviews to boot. The crayons are mad, each for their own reason. They’ve gone on strike and have issued their grievances to their young-boy owner, Duncan. It’s up to him to convince each crayon to come back, a lesson in unity and recognizing worth. The illustrations are child-like to depict the kind of drawings that kids really do. This was Goodreads’ Best Picture Book of the Year when it came out in 2013.

Socio-emotional health is a hot topic and rightly so — kids have a lot of feelings to process that go way beyond just happy and sad. We put this book on our 2023 Best Book Awards list, noting how helpful it is for neurodiverse children who struggle to read others’ body language. Instead of demonstrating each feeling with a single picture, this book utilizes 10 inclusive images to show a range of what, for instance, frustration might look. A mirror on the final page lets your kids make their own faces.

One of the testers for our Parenting Awards turned us onto this inventive book, which starts with your child letting Nibbles out of his cage by opening up a flap. He then runs rampant through the book. “Nibbles like to eat books so the way the book is built, there are lots of holes in the pages,” she says. “Then he starts eating his way through fairy tales and changing the stories. At the end he escapes so there’s a big hole in the back of the book. We have lots of laughs with this, and it’s interactive. Sometimes I see my daughter just paging through it on her own, looking at the pictures.”

If you don’t yet have this classic in your library, get it while your 4-year-old is still young enough to love the delicious anticipation of finding and escaping from the bear. It also introduces sequence: Readers follow the family swishy-swashying through grass and splash-sploshing through water on their way to a cave, then going in reverse order on their way out. “It’s still a big hit in my son’s Pre-K 4s class,” says our Executive Technical Director Rachel Rothman, a mom of three young kids.

It can be tough to find a father-daughter tale. In this book, a tie-in to Academy-Award Winning Short Film “Hair Love,” a girl named Zuri describes all the different ways her hair can look. Then her Daddy offers to work through some trial and error to give her yet another hairstyle she’ll love. It’s a message about self-confidence and loving the hair that you’re born with.

One of 93 books in the Lets-Read-And-Find-Out Science series. This shows kids, with simple illustrations, the journey their food goes through, beginning with chewing food and breaking it down in their mouth. They learn how the body digests — changing food into fuel. It ends, naturally, with food coming out as poop. It’s an educational read for any 4-year-old who questions how things work (especially their own body!) and useful, perhaps, for both picky eaters and reluctant potty-users. Not only that, but it’s all part of the process of living, kids!

This oldie but goodie, first published a couple of generations ago, is just a simple tale of friendship that also tickles a 4-year-old’s imagination. What dinosaur-loving child wouldn’t want a playdate with a dino? It’s a level-one reading book, which means you can read it to your preschooler now and in a few short years they should be able to read it to you.

This new story also made our 2023 best-of list. “This book celebrates the uniqueness in all of us,” said our judge Jenna Bush Hager. “My youngest, Hal, laughed out loud.” The boy, Liam, comes up with inventive ways to try and get snow on his tongue, a lesson in creativity. In the end, he gets more snow than he bargained for!

This naughty seed’s list of naughty deeds spells out what people shouldn’t do — things like being late, not putting objects back where they belong, not washing hands, and so on. At the end, after some misadventures, he decides he wants to be happy and good. If your 4-year-old enjoys this, there are six more in the series including one about a good egg and one about a cool bean.

Here’s our final new-to-2023 release: A book about ramen that serves as a lesson in self-love. A package of ramen sitting in a grocery story wishes to be more like spaghetti, all “thin” and “popular,” but learns from other pasta that they’re all just perfect being themselves. Once the ramen is cooked that it realizes “being yourself is tasty.”

The books in the extensive Little Critter series are inexpensive and reliably entertaining. This one sees Little Critter go through a bedtime routine, which he pretty much fights all the way. (Sound familiar?) The little guy’s procrastination is impressive, and the parents do their best to stay calm before finally losing it with one final, “Go to bed!” It ends sweetly with him tucked in and dozing off while his parents sneak a peek from the door.