Babble!: And How Punctuation Saved It

A village is torn apart by its residents' inability to communicate, until a little girl shares the gift of punctuation in this humorous illustrated parable.

Chaos reigns in the village of Babble! All day, the residents fight, yell and argue, and no one is heard or understood . . . until a mysterious little girl arrives and gives the locals something very strange: a period. But what is this thing that looks like a freckle or a spot? The villagers don't even know how to ask. However, as the girl begins to share more gifts — a question mark, quotation marks — the residents slowly learn how to communicate. But when more fights arise and disaster strikes, can punctuation truly save the day?

CAROLINE ADDERSON is an award-winning author of more than twenty books for children of all ages, including picture books, chapter books, and middle-grade novels and short stories. As well as accumulating many stars, Caroline’s children’s books have won the Diamond Willow Award, the Helen Isobel Sissons Canadian Children's Story Award, the Sheila Egoff Award, and the Chocolate Lily Book Award. Four of her titles have been Junior Library Guild Selections and have appeared on numerous Best Book lists. Her nominations include the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award, Canadian Library Association's Children's Book of the Year, the Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award, the Hackmatack Children’s Choice Book Award, multiple Chocolate Lily Book Awards, the Rocky Mountain Book Award, and the Shining Willow Award. Caroline lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her husband and her bad dog Arlo.

ROMAN MURADOV is an award-winning editorial artist and graphic novelist who has created illustrations for The New Yorker, New York Times, Criterion, Vogue, Paris Review, Wired, the Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, GQ, Warby Parker, NPR, Monocle, Lucky Peach, Apple, Google, Airbnb, Lyft, Patreon and Dropbox, as well as the covers of the Penguin Classics Centennial Editions of James Joyce's Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He has won multiple medals from the Society of Illustrators as well as the Young Guns Award from the Art Directors Club, and his work has been featured in The Comics Journal, American Illustration and Creative Quarterly, among others.