Publications about books for children and young adults
The Horn Book Magazine asked Luann Toth, “What’s the strangest children’s book you’ve ever enjoyed?” I have to confess upfront to being a word girl. Don’t get me wrong: I love art, especially when the interplay of a book’s words and images click to form the perfect vehicle for the storytelling, but it is usually [...]
Follow Follow: A Book of Reverso Poems by Marilyn Singer; illus. by Josée Masse Primary Dial 32 pp. 2/13 978-0-8037-3769-3 $16.99 g “It’s not easy,” warns Singer in a note about the “reverso,” a verse form she created and first used in Mirror Mirror (rev. 3/10); and the first poem (“Fairy Tales”) in this companion [...]
While marketed as a two-volume music CD with an accompanying booklet, Natalie Merchant’s Leave Your Sleep might be better understood as a fascinating anthology of children’s poetry accompanied by biographical notes and two CDs on which each of the twenty-six poems is set to music. But it is even more than that. Leave Your Sleep [...]
Caroline Fraser examines the sordid publishing history of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Foreign Correspondence: Karen Jameyson takes us deep into Jeannie Baker’s process for creating the cross-cultural picture book Mirror. Author Jeanne Birdsall stresses the importance of letting middle grade be middle grade. Jonathan Hunt on the future of connecting kids with nonfiction. Caldecott [...]
The Horn Book Magazine asked Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, “What’s the strangest children’s book you’ve ever enjoyed?” My mother introduced me and my siblings to the wonderful weirdness in Howard R. Garis’s Uncle Wiggily tales. Garis gave us old Uncle Wiggily Longears and his adventures with Sammie and Susie Littletail, Johnnie and Billie Bushytail, the Wibblewobbles, [...]
Miss Moore Thought Otherwise: How Anne Carroll Moore Created Libraries for Children by Jan Pinborough; illus. by Debby Atwell Primary Houghton 40 pp. 3/13 978-0-547-47105-1 $16.99 Nowadays, Anne Carroll Moore is remembered as the fiercest of the library ladies whose influence on children’s library service and publishing was both inspirational and — sometimes — intractable. [...]
Several years ago, I was invited to an all-day reading festival held at a brand-new library in a mid-sized town in South Carolina. Four authors had been invited to speak and sign books, one for each age group. I was the young adult author. At the lavish party held the night before the festival, I [...]
Annie on My Mind and I grew up together. Published twenty-five years ago in 1982, this now-canonical lesbian-coming-of-age novel was one of the first books I ever reviewed. Sally Holmes Holtze was then assistant editor at School Library Journal’s book review section, working with Pam Pollack, and I was a new SLJ reviewer. I was [...]
In my family there are two moms and five kids. I’ve yet to find a children’s book that depicts a cast of characters that looks anything like our particular multiracial, foster-adoptive family constellation, and I know there are lots of artistic, social, political, and market-driven reasons for this; for one thing, such a book would [...]
