Alligator Slim is tired of singing sad songs and playing the blues down in the swamp. From now on, he’s going to play jazz!

Arturo and his grandmother return in this charming bilingual sequel.

Bo the Mexican free-tailed bat is one of 100 million bats that live in Texas, and in this colorful picture book, he takes children on an exciting trip across the Lone Star State and educates readers with dozens of “bat facts.”

This coming-of-age story shows how two boys work hard to fix a practical joke gone bad. Brandon and Wayne really enjoy going to the Houston Mounted Police’s stables after school to do odd jobs and help out with the horses. That is until they get into trouble with Chris Parker, a rookie cop. 

With curiosity as her guide, Bluebonnet, the most traveled armadillo in Texas, leaves her home in the Hill Country for a visit to Dinosaur Valley State Park.

Bluebonnet, everyone’s favorite Texas armadillo, is about to take a trip that will elevate the reputation of armadillos to new heights and altitudes! She’s blasting off on the space shuttle to become the first armadillo to attempt a spacewalk. She and her sister, Normadillo, are touring the Johnson Space Center in Houston when the scientists and astronauts ask her to help them out with their next space-shuttle mission. Paperback.

Bluebonnet, the armadillo, is on her first visit to the Texas state fair. Things get exciting when she is sent on a search through the fair to look for clues to help her find her Aunt Armadilly. Along the way, Bluebonnet is mistaken for a football during a Longhorn versus Sooner Cotton Bowl game and makes friends with Joe Bob, a rabbit who has lost his boy.

After singing the Texas State song, Bluebonnet admires the Goddess of Liberty statue on top of the state capitol dome. Filled with pride, she wishes that she could climb to the top to see the statue up close. To her amazement, someone tells Bluebonnet that he has been to the top, more than three hundred feet above the ground!

Jake and his book from the library are placed in one sticky situation after another in this cute cumulative tale, an original adaptation of the classic There Was an Old Lady.

The African-American buffalo soldiers, nicknamed by the Cheyenne Indians because of their curly hair and bravery, joined the six black regiments commissioned by an act of Congress in 1866. These men, many of whom were former slaves, enlisted in the army to earn a steady income, acquire an education, and gain respect.

A cultural spin on the classic Chicken Little tale, this story follows Chachalaca Chiquita, a colorful southwestern bird, through her journey after a pebble falls from the sky and hits her right on the head. On a mission to tell the jefe (boss) that the sky is falling, Chachalaca Chiquita joins the feathered flock of Lina Gallina, the prairie hen, and her chicks and heads to the mountain.

Charles Marion Russell was the first artist to live most of his life in the West, sketching and painting not only from live subjects, but from actual experience. Becoming a frontiersman at a young age in 1880, he rode and worked with horses on a daily basis, something that no other Western artist had done before. This biography for children is the first of its kind about Russell, and the subject’s own vibrant paintings illustrate his life story. It follows Russell from his school days through adulthood and reveals how he held on to his dreams, living out a child’s cowboy fantasy.

At last! It’s time for the annual Texas State Fair, and young Jake knows exactly what he wants to do first. He passes up all the other booths to buy his favorite treat—a cone of sweet and puffy cotton candy. Young readers will enjoy Jake’s comic misadventure, set among landmarks like the Cotton Bowl and the Texas Star, America’s tallest Ferris wheel. Hardcover.

Anyone who has lived in the Southwest or grown up on dime-store Westerns, John Ford or roadrunner cartoons will probably understand the gist of that paragraph. So too will those who are comfortable with a well-worn saddle and knotted reins or who have tussled with dogies and teethed on alphabet blocks that spelled of their own accord: bronc and quirt and waddy. Hardcover.