We are so excited to have Caroline Kusin Pritchard join us today to share information about Surprise Ending Picture Books!

Caroline Kusin Pritchard (she/her) is a children’s writer and former educator. She has worked across the education field, including teaching brilliant third graders and building online educator communities. Her debut picture book Gitty and Kvetch (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster) was a Tablet Magazine Best Jewish Children’s Book of 2021.

Caroline is currently an MFA Candidate in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has multiple upcoming picture book and middle grade projects that she is excited to share more about soon, including Where Is Poppy? (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2024). Caroline lives in Palo Alto, CA with her husband (Tavita), two kiddos (Afi and Manu) and their 120-lb dog (Misha).

I hate surprises. I hate surprises so much that I read the Wikipedia plot spoilers before watching a new movie. I’m a real blast to have around, if you can’t tell. But I love surprises endings in picture books. There is nothing like the “WHAT! Get. out. of. here!!!” that comes with subverting the expectations of not just kids, but adult readers, too.

Surprise twists are often untethered from the constraints of our collective socialization. Many times they are irreverent, expressing a hope that we never thought to name out loud. What matters most is that these surprise endings reveal something true— about the world, the characters at their core, or even ourselves.

So, how to achieve the stunned reaction you felt after watching Sixth Sense for the first time? (If only Wikipedia was around back then, I could have saved decades of terrified, sleepless nights…) You achieve this reaction with a stack of post-its, of course!

Fill 20 post-its with 20 possible endings to your story. Yup. 20. Because that first idea, the one you’re sure no one will see coming? We have to remind ourselves that it was our first idea for a reason… that we saw it coming. Even if you end up in the zip code of your original ending, listing out 20 fresh possibilities will likely offer a new layer you hadn’t yet considered.

Take my debut picture book Gitty and Kvetch, illustrated by Ariel Landy. I knew from the very beginning that Gitty was schlepping her curmudgeonly bestie to put up a perfect painting in their perfect purple treehouse. My big surprise? That the painting was a portrait of Kvetch all along! M. Night Shyamalan-level brilliant, right? Sure, this premise mostly holds in the final version. But 20 post-its later, I suddenly had a stack of fresh layers to bake into the ending. A backstory! An apology! A surprise party! A storm! But the real surprise? The one I never saw coming until I physically pieced the post-its together in a scene straight out of A Beautiful Mind? Kvetch is the one who saves the day and surprises Gitty in the end! You’ll have to read the book to find out how (or hopefully someone will make a Wikipedia page soon so that you can spoil it the proper way).

Here are eleven of my favorite picture book surprise endings, many of which were suggested from friends (complete with their Instagram accounts, too!). I’m not including descriptions because, let’s be serious, I can’t trust myself not to spill the beans.