"Moore being Moore"

I wish I had thought of this earlier, but we published a far more perceptive account of ACM and her little ways than did that upstart New Yorker. Read Barbara Bader's take here.

We guys do love our schematics

I'm so happy when a picture book for adults is published as just that. Like this one.

Leonard and Leonardo

Back in New York, touring the Met and talking with Leonard Marcus about his new history of children's book publishing. Hear the latest Horn Book podcast.

Hear Roger (and Richard Peck)

In our latest podcast Roger brings us along for an evening in New York with Elizabeth Law (Vice President and Publisher, Egmont USA), Douglas Pocock (Executive Vice President, Egmont USA), and Newbery Medalist Richard Peck. After a lively discussion about what draws adults to read young adult books, Roger talks to Richard Peck about his current project (here's a hint: "I'm bringing Grandma Dowdel back").

Bye, Bear

Betsy Bird says goodbye to the bear who has been her daily companion for lo these many years. I was glad to be able to pay my respects myself last week. Betsy was out sick when Richard and I were there, but we did get to have a nice chat with John Peters, taking a break from packing up all the stuff that is the Donnell Central Children's Room. He even showed us his collection of "wishing candles," an NYPL storytelling staple introduced (if I have this right) by Mary Gould Davis in the 1920s. I was taught in library school by Ellin Greene that one would give, say, a birthday child the privilege of snuffing the candle at the close of story hour, but John tells me that in these more egalitarian times, everybody gets to make a wish and blow the candle out.

Off till next week

Thank you all for the great discussion about adults and children reading. Richard and I are going to New York today to see Elizabeth and other assorted friends and two shows: the revival of Sunday in the Park with George, which was the first show I ever saw on Broadway, and Come Back, Little Sheba starring my favorite cop, Lieutenant Anita Van Buren.

For the Limoliner trip down and back I have the new Denise Mina, Natsuo Kirino's Grotesque, and, on Miss Pod, Ha Jin's A Free Life. Should be a sweet ride.

People Lust for Fame Like Athletes in a Game

Is or is not "Stars" the most lugubrious song Janis Ian ever wrote? And that is saying a lot.

In either event, here are the starred books from the March/April Horn Book Magazine:

Dog and Bear: Two’s Company (Porter/Roaring Brook) written and illustrated by Laura Vaccaro Seeger

Rex Zero, King of Nothing (Kroupa/Farrar) by Tim Wynne-Jones

On the Farm (Candlewick) written by David Elliott, illustrated by Holly Meade

Frogs (Scholastic) written and illustrated with photos by Nic Bishop

Spiders (Scholastic) written and illustrated with photos by Nic Bishop

What To Do about Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy (Scholastic) written by Barbara Kerley, illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham

Pale Male: Citizen Hawk of New York City (Knopf) written by Janet Schulman, illustrated by Meilo So

If you're in need of a sign of spring, go with Pale Male, one of my favorite books thus far this year. It makes you want to take a walk in the park with Janet Schulman (who I never thought of as a walk-in-the-park kind of gal) and Meilo So's watercolors have never been so rich.

A different movie

Claire is going to be reviewing The Golden Compass for you all, so let me skip my opinions on that for the moment to recommend what we saw as the first half of our Saturday night double-feature: Enchanted. Pretty hilarious if insidious, too, wrapping a Disney-princess-power theme in so many layers of parody and sincerity that your head spins. Blacks and gays provide comic relief.

Back from NYC

and a fine trip it was. Monday evening I had the chance to meet scads of people from the child_lit listserv including its creator Michael Joseph, whose glasses I want but don't think I could pull off (him or on me). The food was just-okay--wild boar shouldn't be as boring as this one was--but the conversation was lively even before Linda Sue Park showed up with a Colin Farrell story I'll let her tell.

The next day I had a commiserative--and tasty--lunch with FSG publisher Margaret Ferguson which was its own delight and came with the bonus of a gift from editor Wes Adams--Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader, a novella, Wes assured me, that would provide fine entertainment for my bus trip home. Concerning itself with what might happen should the Queen conceive a passion for reading, it did, hugely. I can already see Helen Mirren doing it as a Hallmark Hall of Fame Christmas Special.

I didn't know Lloyd Alexander but he certainly had enough friends without me, many of whom spoke warmly at the celebration in his honor hosted by Cricket's Blouke and Marianne Carus. Did you know Lloyd was "Old Cricket"? Most unexpectedly hilarious was Lloyd's longtime editor Ann Durell explaining why she agreed to publish, in a fantasy-unfriendly era, what would become the Prydain series: Lloyd's agent had plied her with martinis. My old BCCB colleague Kate Pierson Jennings was there, too--she had been exchanging letters with Lloyd since she was ten years old.

Back here to the sad news that Elizabeth Watson--Horn Book Board member, longtime reviewer and past president of ALSC--had died on October 13th. Liz was great--sometimes the conversations at our old reviewer meetings could get a bit rarefied, and cutting right through it all would come Liz's cultured and authoritative contralto: "no child is going to touch that book."

RedSoxtober

Barring funerals, pretty much the only time I hear from my now far-flung McNally relatives is when the Red Sox are doing well at whatever it is they do. Which, I guess, they've done. Honestly, I feel like I should trade houses with my California (or Delaware, Maryland . . .) cousins, because while I live a scant three miles from Fenway Park, the only reason I even check the game schedule is to find out if we're going to have trouble parking for the movies. I went to a game once, forty-five years ago with my Cub Scout troop (oops, I automatically spelled that troupe, how gay is that?) and all I remember is that we got popcorn in little cardboard megaphones. But I'm glad my family is happy.

I've got a three-way going on with Jules and Eisha, the gals of Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, reviewing Perry Moore's Hero; check it out.

Going to New York for a few days to see Elizabeth and attend a memorial celebration for Lloyd Alexander; tonight I'll be dining with the Child_Lit crowd, bloggers Betsy, Cheryl and Monica among them. That should be particularly lively as the list is currently divided among* those who think J. K. Rowling is a hero for her recent revelation re Dumbledore, those who think she is a publicity-seeking fame whore, and those like myself who haven't read Book Seven and are just staying out of the whole thing.

* Joanna Rudge Long recently called me on following between with three things. Is it really wrong?

Adolescent upsets

In addition to the satisfying spectacle of Maria Sharapova being picked off by a younger (and quieter!) player, I was also treated this past weekend to a superb exposition of teen angst, in the unlikely Broadway musical Spring Awakening. Based on Frank Wedekind's 1891 German play, the show and catchy tunes are pure YA: love, sex, death, and grades. Go see it. Take the kids!

East Side, West Side,

Brooklyn and Harlem, too. But I began my New York Time (an obscure but funny adult novel by Richard Peck, btw) with a view, from Elizabeth's living room, of the East River and ended it in Viking publisher Regina Hayes' office, which overlooks the Hudson. And had a grand time in between, too.

The memorial service for Janet McDonald was held at NYPL's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, up on Lenox Ave. in Harlem. It was great to meet so many of the people, family and friends, Janet had described in her emails. It was great to "see" Janet as well: we had never met and never spoke, so a couple of videos filled out the picture for me. (You can see her infamous Condi Rice "tribute" here.) Friends from Vassar and Paris spoke, as did Janet's editor Frances Foster, making everybody cry. Afterward we repaired around the corner to what I was told was Janet's favorite NY restaurant, Miss Maude's Spoonbread Too. Yummy. Afterward, Janet's agent Charlotte Sheedy skillfully strong-armed me a cab.

Virgin to all boroughs save Manhattan, I took my first trip to Brooklyn the next morning to meet Bruce Brooks. I totally should have rearranged my schedule to meet Jon Scieszka there, as he lives just two blocks away from Bruce. But Bruce and I had a fine time without him, reminiscing over the past twenty years of our friendship and wandering around Prospect Park in vain hopes of finding Bruce's baby son Drake, who had gone there with the sitter. We caught up with Drake (as well as Bruce's grown son Alex) back at the apartment, though, where, in an incident that would provide great fodder for my later discussion about boys and reading with Jon, one-year-old Drake became fascinated with my watch. I thought he was enjoying the sparkly blue and chrome-ness of the thing, but no, he kept twisting my hand so that he could inspect the workings of the clasp, less interested in how the thing looked than how it was put together. Score one for gendered behavior!

Then, carefully ushered via excellent directions from Atheneum editor Jordan Brown (a colleague of Bruce's wife Ginee Seo), I subwayed myself over to Penguin's offices to meet Jon, who, for the record, totally got the Big Monkey-Little Monkey thing. We spent a lively hour or so talking about boys and books and reading, and Jon showed me the first page proofs of his upcoming Truck Town empire over at Simon and Schuster. (Let me hasten to add, o Penguin potentates, that we also talked about Jon and Lane Smith's forthcoming Viking title Cowboy and Octopus.) Look for the interview in the September Horn Book special issue, Boys and Girls.

Thanks, boys, for a great trip, and girls, too: along with my best pal Elizabeth (with whom I didn't get nearly enough talk, but thanks for the hospitality!) I got some time (and choice gossip) from Regina and Sharyn November and Lara Phan at Penguin. I guess we get to do it all over again at ALA in--yikes!--two weeks.

This time, it was a friend.

Editor Frances Foster called this morning to tell me that writer Janet McDonald died yesterday in Paris, her adopted home. I never met or even spoke with Janet, but my admiration for her books led to my interest in her writing something for the Horn Book, which led to one of the richest--and definitely the most riotous--files in my email archives. There was no joke she would dare not make, but unlike many funny people, she was just as appreciative of other's (mine, I mean) jokes as she was expert at making her own. After we had finished working on her Horn Book article, our correspondence continued, with sometimes a dozen emails in a day when I was allegedly working at home and she was up late in Paris, allegedly doing the same: "I need a new YA book idea and fast, now that I'm done with the one Frances was awaiting. Or how will I pay my rent? It's too hot to set up my Love Tent in the Bois de Boulogne next to the Brazilian trannies (plus, those gorgeous wenches would get much more traffic than me)." We talked gossip, politics, sex, aging, love troubles--books, rarely. In the past year, there were some breaks in our emails due to Janet's illness, which we both thought she'd beat--she told me about doing a victory dance with Kiley Minogue in the chemotherapy ward--but when I didn't hear from her for a good long time I knew it had come back. I'll really miss her.

Her books will remain a signal contribution to YA literature: smart, teen-intriguing tales set in the African American neighborhoods of the Bronx and Brooklyn, told by someone who really knew what she was talking about, and who knew that a situation was never enough; you need a story. And while Janet's books frequently deal in tough issues, plenty of her characters have a gift for backtalk that could have you, as Janet often said, "on tha flo'!" Her novel Off-Color will be published this November by Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Whole (New) World in Her Hand

Yes, that's trinitite, the mineral created in 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico, when scientists exploded the world's first atomic bomb. A sample of it is here held in the hand of Ellen Klages, author of The Green Glass Sea, winner of the 2007 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

I met Ellen and her trinitite at a party graciously thrown for her by publisher Viking/Penguin in New York this past Monday. Fuse #8 has a lively account of the evening, and I interviewed Ellen Klages for a podcast you be able to hear, oh, next month or so. She's a good talker. When I re-read The Green Glass Sea for the occasion I was again struck by the absolute assurance of its opening pages, pulling readers right into empathy with its protagonist and making them companions on the journey--and, praise Jesus, not a metaphorical one, but an actual trip with an actual destination--she immediately begins. It's a model for How to Start a Book.

In the lineup below are, from left to right, Green Glass Sea editor Sharyn November, O'Dell committee chair Hazel Rochman, me, Ellen Klages, Penguin Books for Young Readers President Doug Whiteman, sponsor of the award Elizabeth Hall, and fellow juror Ann Carlson.

Still Baking

I know I promised another post re chicklit earlier today, but my thoughts never got quite where I wanted them. I was pushing an enormous book-truck's worth of the stuff back to the Guide after rejecting it for review in the Magazine and I found myself thinking, I bet old Michiko never has to do this. That the grown-up book world recognizes distinctions between literary, commercial, and genre fiction that we barely observe in children's book publishing. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Or is it a bad thing for Literature, but a good thing for Children? But my thinking is still half-baked so I'm not ready to offer any conclusions. Feel free to draw yours, however. I would appreciate being beaten to the punch.

Posting sporadically until Wednesday as my beloved Limoliner is taking me and a bagful and an earful of unread adult books to New York, where I'll be attending the Scott O'Dell Awarding to Ellen Klages for The Green Glass Sea, interviewing Ellen for the Horn Book podcast which is to debut in May, I think, and hanging out with Elizabeth. We're seeing Company, and she is going to explain to me the mystery of Sanjaya, and I also hope she--or someone here--can point my in the direction of a good classical cd store, as we have lost all of ours in Boston--you can get El Divo and Andrea Bocelli at Borders, but that's about it. But E and I also hope to send some posts your way. I hope you all have swell weekends, too.