Publications about books for children and young adults
And now for something completely different. William Low’s work involves details, details and more details. This offering is for the young reader who loves trucks and machinery. It does not disappoint. Following the pattern he introduced in Machines Go To Work, the straight-talkin’ text introduces a piece of machinery and ends with a question. The question [...]
Pirateria: The Wonderful Plunderful Pirate Emporium by Calef Brown; illus. by the author Primary Atheneum 40 pp. 7/12 978-1-4169-7878-7 $16.99 e-book ed. 978-1-4424-3897-2 $12.99 Brown presents a book-length advertisement for an imaginary emporium of all things pirate. Whether you need rags or pantaloons, spinnakers or planks, you can be sure to find them at Pirateria. [...]
The stack of books stares at me. Where to start? So, I did what I always do when struck with the paradox of too many choices: close my eyes and grab. So I will start this year’s discussion with a book I have admired for a long time. As a knitter, it was natural that I [...]
A Home for Bird by Philip C. Stead; illus. by the author Primary Porter/Roaring Brook 32 pp. 6/12 978-1-59643-711-1 $16.99 g Stead (author of A Sick Day for Amos McGee, rev. 5/10) returns with another terrific tale of devoted friendship. Starting on the copyright page, we see a little bird thrown from the back of [...]
Jimmy the Greatest! by Jairo Buitrago; illus. by Rafael Yockteng; trans. from the Spanish by Elisa Amado Primary Groundwood 48 pp. 5/12 978-1-55498-178-6 $18.95 e-book ed. 978-1-55498-206-6 $18.95 What happens when a boy from a nondescript small town grows up to be a talented boxer? Most would dream of bigger and better places, but not [...]
Oh No! Not Again!: (Or How I Built a Time Machine to Save History) (Or at Least My History Grade) by Mac Barnett; illus. by Dan Santat Primary Disney-Hyperion 40 pp. 6/12 978-1-4231-4912-5 $17.99 g Barnett and Santat reunite with this companion to Oh No! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World). This time [...]
About eleven years ago, I fell in love with Miss Agnes. Kirkpatrick Hill’s The Year of Miss Agnes is one of my first-weeks-of-school read-aloud books. Miss Agnes’s loving but no-nonsense teaching methods inspire me every time I read it, which is just about every year. Now, more than a decade since that book was published, [...]
I know you have all heard the Youth Media Awards compared to the Oscars, but that has never been how I felt. I mean, we are all wearing convention-wear (sensible shoes and the like), toting bulging cloth bookbags, gripping paper, pen, various electronic devices and our boarding passes for the post-announcement sprint to Love Field [...]
Picking honor books is one of the mysterious parts of the whole book committee experience. On the Caldecott committee, the manual is strangely quiet on the question of honor books. After the winner is (finally, sometimes) chosen, ”The committee then addresses the question of whether to name honor books. The committee may name as many or [...]
I have to say that watching the votes come in was plenty exciting for me! Lolly gave me the super-secret location of the returns so I could check them obsessively all night long. Lolly and I had a face-to-face (really screen-to-screen) chat about how to decide where to go from here. It’s clear that FIVE [...]
