Publications about books for children and young adults
Promoting good books for children and young adults is the heart of The Horn Book’s editorial mission.
Last summer, website mom.me asked us to contribute to their feature “Books to Read With Your Teen Daughter.” Here are our recommendations from that article — plus a few new ones! — to get you ready for Mother’s Day. What YA book would you recommend for a mother-daughter read? Cindy: Cinder (Feiwel, 2012), the first [...]
All signs point to happily-ever-after in this interactive picture book app of the classic fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood (Nosy Crow, April 2013). Vibrant, cheery colors set a lighthearted tone for wide-eyed and well-freckled Red’s familiar adventure through the woods to Grandma’s house. Unlike other, more gruesome renditions which often include an ax-wielding woodsman, [...]
Originality is everything in literature, as in art. “Originals never lose their value,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said. He may have been referring to Shakespeare and Wordsworth, but the statement is just as true of children’s literature. Of course, even originals owe something to the past — “we all quote,” Emerson acknowledged — but he did [...]
Five questions for Emily Jenkins Water in the Park: A Book About Water & the Times of the Day written by Emily Jenkins, illus. by Stephanie Graegin, Schwartz & Wade/Random, 4–7 years. Lemonade in Winter: A Book About Two Kids Counting Money written by Emily Jenkins, illus. by G. Brian Karas, Schwartz & Wade/Random, 4–7 [...]
Water in the Park: A Book About Water & the Times of the Day by Emily Jenkins; illus. by Stephanie Graegin Primary Schwartz & Wade/Random 40 pp. 5/13 978-0-375-87002-6 $16.99 Library ed. 978-0-375-97002-3 $19.99 On a warm day, just before six a.m., a city park starts to stir: turtles laze on rocks by the pond, [...]
Epic Tales’s Hansel & Gretel (2012) revisits the well-known fairy tale with tongue firmly in cheek. An affable bookseller/storyteller named Silvertongue narrates the story of an impoverished woodcutter, his shrewish wife, and their two children. The plot contains several differences from more traditional versions of the story: Tiny, bad-tempered gnomes are ubiquitous in the illustrations and [...]
Fill those earbuds with great adventure books, from a WWII spy thriller to sci-fi dystopias. These four audiobooks will keep teens on the edge of their seats. Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity was among the best of last year’s young adult fiction, and this audio version does it justice. Here is the intimate story of [...]
Baseball and basketball, auto racing and boat-jumping. The following picture book biographies of historical sports stars will inspire youngsters to pick up a bat, go for the dunk, or just zoom around for a while. Is there a bigger baseball fan in the children’s book world than Matt Tavares? His sixth title on the sport, [...]
Bad things were done to me when I was small. Lacking adequate physical defenses, I escaped into my imagination, where I could be all-powerful and the scariest monster was the witch in my closet. Imagination expands when exercised; mine grew strong and wily, and a pleasure to me, too, when the bad things were in [...]
Strong-willed, memorable female protagonists are the stars of these historical novels for middle-grade and middle-school readers. A small gold-mining town in Alaska; early-twentieth-century San Francisco; 1870s rural Wisconsin; and Reconstruction Louisiana provide the backdrops for their entertaining adventures. Sugar by Jewell Parker Rhodes is the story of a spirited ten-year-old African American girl who works [...]
