Publications about books for children and young adults
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. [...]
It’s always disappointing when we miss the opportunity to blow our horn for a really good book — but in this case the ARC arrived too late to review in the Magazine. Fortunately, this year’s Printz committee found it in time to award it an Honor and get it the recognition it deserves. And here’s [...]
“Quite a long time ago, in a small village in ancient China, there lived a boy named Bing-Wen.” So begins Dragon Brush (Small Planet Digital, 2012), an interactive picture book app created by John Solimine and Andy Hullinger. Based on a Chinese folktale (no sources are given), the story follows a young rabbit artist, Bing-Wen, [...]
In the March issue of Notes from the Horn Book, in honor of Women’s History Month, I picked out some recent picture-book biographies focusing on women who left their marks on society. Another worthy offering is Imogen: The Mother of Modernism and Three Boys (Cameron + Company, December 2012) by Amy Novesky, author of the [...]
Poison by Bridget Zinn Middle School Hyperion 280 pp. 3/13 978-1-4231-3993-5 $16.99 g Sixteen-year-old Kyra is a girl with more than her share of secrets. Living in the world of witches, dwarves, potion masters, shape shifters, and the like, she is reluctant to trust anyone, even her best friend and the future queen, Ariana. Readers [...]
Never Say Die by Will Hobbs Intermediate, Middle School Harper/HarperCollins 212 pp. 2/13 978-0-06-170878-7 $16.99 Library ed. 978-0-06-170879-4 $17.89 e-book ed. 978-0-06-222384-5 $9.99 Set in the Yukon Territory hard by the Beaufort Sea, Hobbs’s latest turbocharged wilderness survival story has heavy weather, savage river waters, treacherous trails, and, as chief antagonist, a “grolar bear.” Just [...]
My Brother’s Book by Maurice Sendak; illus. by the author di Capua/HarperCollins 32 pp. 2/13 978-0-06-223489-6 $18.95 g If, as Wordsworth wrote, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,” Sendak’s vision of a Dante-esque search for his beloved brother Jack (1924–1995) is poetry in both [...]
Courage Has No Color, the True Story of the Triple Nickles: America’s First Black Paratroopers by Tanya Lee Stone Middle School, High School Candlewick 148 pp. 1/13 978-0-7636-5117-6 $24.99 e-book ed. 978-0-7636-6405-3 $24.99 “How does one survive and outlast the racism that was our daily fare at that time?” asks artist Ashley Bryan in the [...]
Etched in Clay: The Life of Dave, Enslaved Potter and Poet by Andrea Cheng; illus. by the author Intermediate, Middle School Lee & Low 143 pp. 1/13 978-1-60060-451-5 $17.95 g Readers familiar with Laban Carrick Hill and Bryan Collier’s 2011 Caldecott Honor–winning picture book Dave the Potter will appreciate Cheng’s interpretation of the man’s life [...]
1940 INGRI AND EDGAR PARIN D’AULAIRE, Author-Illustrators Abraham Lincoln (Doubleday) “Deep in the wilderness down in Kentucky there stood a cabin of roughly hewn logs. It was a poor little cabin of only one room. But the flames flickered gaily on the hearth….In this cabin lived a man named Thomas Lincoln with his wife and [...]
