Finalists for 2021 Children's Science Picture Book Award

AAAS and Subaru are proud to announce the finalists for the 2021 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the Children’s Science Picture Book category. The Prize celebrates outstanding science writing and illustration for children and young adults and is meant to encourage the writing and publishing of high-quality science books for all ages. Longlists for all four categories were announced in October.

The 2021 winner will be selected from among the following finalists:

• The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity: A Tale of the Genius Ramanujan, by Amy Alznauer. Illustrated by Daniel Miyares. Candlewick Press, 2020.

  In 1887 in India, a boy named Ramanujan is born with a passion for numbers. He sees numbers in the squares of light pricking his thatched roof and in the beasts dancing on the temple tower. He writes mathematics with his finger in the sand, across the pages of his notebooks, and with chalk on the temple floor. “What is small?” he wonders. “What is big?” Head in the clouds, Ramanujan struggles in school — but his mother knows that her son and his ideas have a purpose. As he grows up, Ramanujan reinvents much of modern mathematics, but where in the world could he find someone to understand what he has conceived?

• Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera, by Candace Fleming. Illustrated by Eric Rohmann. Neal Porter Books, 2020.

  A tiny honeybee emerges through the wax cap of her cell. Driven to protect and take care of her hive, she cleans the nursery and feeds the larvae and the queen. But is she strong enough to fly? Not yet! Apis builds wax comb to store honey, and transfers pollen from other bees into the storage. She defends the hive from invaders. And finally, she begins her new life as an adventurer.

• Mario and the Hole in the Sky: How a Chemist Saved Our Planet, by Elizabeth Rusch. Illustrated by Teresa Martínez. Charlesbridge, 2019.

  Growing up in Mexico City, Mario Molina was a curious boy who studied hidden worlds through a microscope. As a young man in California in the 1980s, he discovered that CFCs, used in millions of refrigerators and spray cans, were tearing a hole in the earth's protective ozone layer. Mario knew the world had to be warned–and quickly. Today, Mario is a Nobel laureate and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His inspiring story shines a ray of hope on the fight against global warming.

• Winged Wonders: Solving the Monarch Migration Mystery, by Meeg Pincus. Illustrated by Yas Imamura. Sleeping Bear Press, 2020.

  For decades, as the monarch butterflies swooped through every year like clockwork, people from Canada to the United States to Mexico wondered, "Where do they go?" In 1976 the world learned the answer: after migrating thousands of miles, the monarchs roost by the millions in an oyamel grove in Central Mexico's mountains. But who solved this mystery? Was it the scientist or the American adventurer? The citizen scientists or the teacher or his students? Winged Wonders shows that the mystery could only be solved when they all worked as a team--and reminds readers that there's another monarch mystery today, one that we all must work together to solve.

Winners will be announced in January 2021.