Publications about books for children and young adults
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell High School St. Martin’s Griffin 328 pp. 2/13 978-1-250-01257-9 $18.99 e-book ed. 978-1-250-03121-1 $9.99 It’s the start of a new school year in 1986 Omaha when sophomores Eleanor and Park meet for the first time on the bus. They are an unusual pair: she’s the new girl in town, [...]
The Horn Book Magazine asked Christine Taylor-Butler, “What’s the strangest children’s book you’ve ever enjoyed?” A freak tent, a dust witch, a quote from Macbeth, and a villain named Mr. Dark. Such was the stuff of Something Wicked This Way Comes. I’d always been fascinated by carnivals. They seemed to spring out of vacant parking [...]
The Horn Book Magazine asked Susan Marston, “What’s the strangest children’s book you’ve ever enjoyed?” In a field that celebrates the works of Maurice Sendak, William Steig, and Jon Scieszka, and in which anthropomorphic animals are regularly clothed only from the waist up, “weird” is difficult to define. In 1994, I had worked at Junior [...]
The Horn Book Magazine asked Deborah Stevenson, “What’s the strangest children’s book you’ve ever enjoyed?” This ended up being a challenging assignment, because much literature for youth is pretty weird when coldly explained (kids travel through space and time to duel a giant brain!), and we don’t think twice about it. Saying that I adore [...]
Are they weird? What is weird, anyway? And will Jack ever reply to Polly? From the March/April 2013 special “Different Drummers” issue of The Horn Book Magazine.
by Ludwig Bemelmans About seven years ago a typographer brought Miss Massee to my house for dinner. It was a dreary building of six rooms in a noisy neighborhood. The windows of my living room looked out at a cobweb of telegraph wires, a water tank, and a Claude Neon sign that flashed “Two Pants [...]
by May Massee Every writer leaves bits and pieces of his own story in his books whether he knows it or not, so I thought I’d look through some of Ludwig Bemelmans’ books to see what he says about himself here and there. The trouble is, I find a paragraph that shows what a good [...]
by Ludwig Bemelmans *Paper read at the meeting of the American Library Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 22, 1954. My deep gratitude to the members of the American Library Association for the Caldecott Medal. Now we shall talk about art. There is one life that is more difficult than that of the policeman’s and that is [...]
Deadly!: The Truth About the Most Dangerous Creatures on Earth by Nicola Davies; illus. by Neal Layton Primary, Intermediate Candlewick 64 pp. 3/13 978-0-7636-6231-8 $14.99 Readers with a taste for the grisly realism of nature will revel in the latest Davies and Layton collaboration, featuring the ways in which animals cause lasting harm or death [...]
It’s a simple formula. Boy meets girl (or, more often, girl meets boy. Or, less frequently, boy meets boy or girl meets girl). Boy and girl fall in love. One loses the other, or some other conflict arises. Then comes the happy ending. This plot, or some variation of it, is one we’ve read over [...]
