Publications about books for children and young adults
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 [...]
Three new picture books for young children feature the great outdoors as the setting for small, familiar dramas. On the nonfiction side, a new photo-essay celebrates a school garden as an outdoor classroom and gathering place for the school community. In David Martin’s Peep and Ducky, two bird pals meet in the park for an [...]
Table of Contents Features Caroline Fraser 10 Peter Rabbit and the Tale of a Fierce Bad Publisher The bunnysploitation of a children’s literature icon. Jeanne Birdsall 27 Middle Grade Saved My Life In praise of middle grade novels—and why not to confuse them with YA. Jonathan Hunt 31 The Amorphous Genre Needed: a gateway [...]
Ask the Passengers by A. S. King High School Little, Brown 295 pp. 10/12 978-0-316-19468-6 $17.99 Astrid would be the quintessential Q-for-Questioning girl in her high school’s LGBTQ support group if her small-town, small-minded school had such a thing — and the gay question is only one of many weighing her down. When her humanities [...]
Review of The Dark by Lemony Snicket. From the March/April 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.
