Deborah Zemke Books in Order

If you want her best-known series: My Life in Pictures → The Curse of Einstein's Pencil → Tale of a Scaredy-Dog → The Tree and Me
If you like silly early readers: Don't Feed the Babysitter to Your Boa Constrictor → Don't Bargain with the Tooth Fairy!
If you want sweet animal gift books: All I Want for Christmas → My Furry Valentine → Wishes For You
If you want to see her earlier picture books: The Way It Happened → The Shadow of Matilda Hunt

Deborah Zemke grew up near Detroit, Michigan, drawing, reading, and climbing trees. Those three things still feel like the backbone of her books, which are full of lively pictures, playful energy, and the kinds of feelings kids recognize right away.

She still does much the same thing in Columbia, Missouri.

Long before many young readers met Bea Garcia, Zemke had already built a wide career as an illustrator and designer. She has said that she loves putting words and pictures together to tell stories, and that approach has carried across picture books, chapter books, drawing books, early readers, and humor books. Over the years, she has written or illustrated more than fifty books for younger readers, and her work has also appeared in magazines. She also designed the ITC Zemke Hand font, which suits her sketchy, handwritten style perfectly.

Her first children's book, The Way It Happened, appeared in 1988. It takes the familiar kid game of passing a message from person to person and turns it into a comic chain of misunderstandings. A few years later, The Shadow of Matilda Hunt showed another side of her work, using a mischievous shadow and a trouble-prone girl to tell a funny story about blame, behavior, and consequences.

Then came My Life in Pictures, the book that introduced Bea Garcia. In an interview, Zemke said that while reading it aloud she realized she had come full circle from her first book, because both stories move through words and pictures together. That makes sense. Bea is a young artist who works out grief, frustration, and hope through doodles, and Zemke clearly understands how drawing can become part of a child's inner life.

Bea stuck.

In The Curse of Einstein's Pencil, Tale of a Scaredy-Dog, and The Tree and Me, Zemke keeps that same mix of humor and heart. Geography contests, missing pets, loud neighbors, and a threatened classroom tree may sound like small problems from the outside, but her books treat them with the right amount of seriousness. That is one reason the series works so well for newer chapter-book readers. The conflicts are easy to grasp, but they never feel fake or talked down.

Her shorter books show a similar range. Don't Feed the Babysitter to Your Boa Constrictor and Don't Bargain with the Tooth Fairy! are built around ridiculous rules and fast visual jokes. How to Win Friends and Influence Creatures gives social advice through animals, while All I Want for Christmas, My Furry Valentine, and Wishes For You lean into animals, holiday fun, and a lighter gift-book mood. Whether the tone is silly or sweet, Zemke tends to keep things bright, direct, and easy for kids to step into.

Trees matter, too.

On her website, Zemke writes about a 250-year-old white oak that once grew beside her studio and inspired The Tree and Me. That small detail says a lot about her work. She notices pets, neighborhoods, classrooms, and the natural world, and she pays close attention to how children move through all of it with big feelings and quick imaginations. Now living in Missouri, she still talks with kids and adults about writing, drawing, and making books. Her stories invite young readers to laugh, look closely, and maybe pick up a pencil of their own.