2025 Caldecott Contender: The Yellow Bus by Loren Long

School buses have been an inspiration for lots of picture books over the years. Just peruse any children’s library and you’ll find stories about nervous school buses on the first day of school, books about manners on the bus, nonfiction books, books by authors as renowned as Donald Crews, and hundreds of “The Magic School Bus” titles from the series turned TV show, by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen.

All this to say, that one might wonder how many school bus tales are still left untold. That was not the case for NYT Best-Selling Author-Illustrator Loren Long whose newest book, The Yellow Bus (Roaring Brook Press, 2024) was inspired by, well, a yellow school bus. 

“Every day for years, while running along the bike trail through the woods near my home, I passed an old yellow bus. It sat, broken down, in the corner of a goat paddock behind a Civil War-era school. I often thought about how it came to be there, rusted, abandoned, and surrounded by goats. I imagined what the life of this yellow bus might have been. Surely it started in the most important way: bright and shiny, carrying children from their homes to school and back. All of this got me thinking about purpose and the passage of time, about how we feel when we do things for others.”  — Loren Long

And, as only a brilliant children’s author and illustrator can do, Long spun that sophisticated sentiment into a quiet, heartfelt tale about the Yellow Bus navigating through life, from her glory days loaded-up with giggling children to her final landing place (I won’t give it away!) and all the emotions that ebb and flow as she continues to find new purpose along the way.

The story behind Long’s artwork for this project is absolutely fascinating! In the backmatter, Long explains how he used cardboard, styrofoam, florist foam, toothpicks, tape and other household items to build a three-dimensional model of the town and the valley. By studying the model in his studio he was able to see the Yellow Bus’s world from different angles and with various lighting, which enabled him to draw meticulously detailed landscape sketches that exude just enough gray to capture the story’s earnest mood. The Yellow Bus, glowing against the dim background on every page, provides the hope that threads the story together from the beginning to the very last spread. Even the people in the illustration are shades of gray until they come in contact with the bus; simply because the bus’s joy stems from doing things for others, like driving people “from one important place to another.”

Although The Yellow Bus is not a story about death, it definitely lends itself to age-appropriate conversations about the inevitable passage of time and the different ways we might find joy in doing for others throughout our lives. 

Children ages 3 – 6 (the intended audience) can connect with the story on a literal level while still feeling “all the feels.” Kids ages 7 -10 are likely to engage with the story’s theme on a deeper level. And for grown-folks like you and me, this tender story will resonate in a million ways. Turns out, The Yellow Bus had something to give us, too. 

And the winner of the 2025 Caldecott Medal is…….. not announced until the end of January!

But it’s no surprise The Yellow Bus is at the top of some “Mock Caldecott 2025 Lists” like Newbery/Caldecott 2025: Fall Prediction Edition and
Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/16993-mock-caldecott-2025

Both Goodreads and Facebook have “Mock Caldecott” groups you can join to vote for your top picks. Just for fun, you don’t get a say in the real deal, unfortunately. I checked out some of the contenders….can you guess which book I voted for?