Publications about books for children and young adults
I recently started reading Ann Brashares’s Sisterhood Everlasting (Random House, 2011), a ten-years-later installment of the popular YA Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series (Sisterhood is shelved in the grown-up section at my library). The story picks up with the girls (women) pushing thirty, successful in life and love (for the most part) but wistful [...]
Children’s Book Week is May 7–13, 2012. Visit the Children’s Book Council’s website for events and information. You may also get a kick out of these early ads for Children’s Book Week. They came to us courtesy of K. T. Horning whose article in the upcoming July/August 2012 Horn Book Magazine examines the old-as-the-hills arguments [...]
Staid and predictable chapter books these aren’t. Oddball characters (a pair of hands?!), weird situations, and off-kilter settings make these selections stand out from the crowd. In Sonya Hartnett’s Sadie and Ratz, the titular characters are the pair of hands that belong to Hannah — and get her into trouble. Most especially, they try to [...]
Oh, wait; that’s not unleavened bread, it’s a board book. In Dayenu: A Favorite Passover Song (Scholastic, February), Miriam Latimer illustrates everyone’s favorite Passover ditty. Instead of tongue-twisting Hebrew lyrics (fifteen verses worth!), the condensed text is twelve pages of cheerful, toddler-friendly gratitude, mostly in English: “When the Jews came out of Egypt, / That [...]
All the artsiest toddlers (and their parents) will be clamoring for these “coffee table board books” published by Appleseed, a new Abrams imprint catering to aesthetics-minded birth-to-five-year-olds. French import Hippopposites (May) by Janik Coat brings the hip to opposites books. In every spread, a pair of hippos demonstrates the featured concept. The old standbys are [...]
Who says little kids are the only ones who like being read to? The expertly performed audio versions of these books for older readers capture the stories’ affecting dramas and strongly felt emotions. In Patrick Ness’s haunting tale of pain and redemption, A Monster Calls, thirteen-year-old Conor O’Malley faces the death of his mother from [...]
The formidable Kenneth Kidd explores the entwined history of children’s literature and psychoanalysis in Freud in Oz: At the Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature (Univ. of Minnesota, November). Essays include “Three Case Histories: Alice, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz,” “’Maurice Sendak and Picturebook Psychology,” and “T Is for Trauma: The Children’s Literature [...]
The next best thing to tromping around outdoors on a crisp January afternoon is snuggling up inside. Here are five winter-themed picture books that are just the ticket for those sub-zero days. In Keith Baker’s No Two Alike, two little red birds explore a snowy landscape. Rhyming text coaxes readers to look carefully at the [...]
