Publications about books for children and young adults
About a month ago I began an email conversation with Molly Leach about her new cover and interior book design for Macmillan’s 50th anniversary edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time. Have you seen it? The dust jacket is an updated homage to Ellen Raskin’s original, redrawing the circles and the small silhouettes of [...]
Dan Yaccarino has an aficionado’s old-fashioned regard for picture-book artistry and a techno-geek’s new-fangled fascination with screen-based storytelling. He has illustrated more than thirty children’s books and is the creator of the Nick Jr. television series Oswald and the Emmy Award–winning Willa’s Wild Life, which currently airs on NBC and Qubo. Having recently played an [...]
Circumstance as well as preference dictated that I read the 2012 Newbery Medal– and Scott O’Dell Award–winning Dead End in Norvelt in four flavors: advance reading copy, finished book, iBook, and as an audio download from Audible.com. I read the ARC and bound book in editing the Horn Book Magazine review; when I needed to [...]
Early in the summer of 2009—many digital generations ago—HarperCollins set out to experiment with several iPhone/iPod Touch apps. We decided to create two apps based on easily searchable and popular topics (example: ABC), and one app based on a classic and best-selling picture book. The staff at Greenwillow Books was charged with figuring out how [...]
A couple of weeks ago Roger let me out of the office to attend the big 50th anniversary event for A Wrinkle in Time in NYC. I was going to post about this along with a piece on the new book design, but time’s moving on, so watch for a separate interview with Molly Leach [...]
Roger Sutton: Your new book, Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, weaves together historical facts—about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, real people like Rosa Parks and Dr. King—with the stories of the relatives of your fictional narrator. It must have been quite complicated to do. What was your entry point? Kadir Nelson: [...]
Ladies and gentlemen, winners of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, people of the book…
We gather to ask our annual question: “Can there still be books for the young?” Even now, in these darkening days, while Barnes & Noble eats independent booksellers, and Amazon eats Barnes & Noble. New problems to mask the old ones we never solved, since you can still sit out twelve years of school in the “remedial” program not because you’re “learning disabled” but because you aren’t home at night. Can our books still tell their stories in the age of the “digitally reduced attention span”? Can we still reach a generation whose own parents lost eye contact with them long ago? In the full knowledge that there is no app for eye contact…
Oh, yes. The answer is yes because never have the young needed us more. Never has a young generation on their way to adulthood lived this far from adults. Never has a generation needed an adult voice more, if only on the page and well disguised.
When the 2010 Man Booker shortlist was announced in the UK, the Daily Telegraph ran this headline: “Philip Pullman and Philip Hensher criticise Booker Prize for including present tense novels.” In fact, what Pullman said, as he explained in an article in the Guardian, was that “the use of the present tense in fiction had [...]
Our Salley Mavor swoon-fest continues: check out her blog post about how she created the stunning cover for the January/February 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. Salley’s also offering a poster giveaway–get over there and get in on the action!
Here’s a glimpse at what came out of a FedEx box I found on my desk this morning: nine pages of watercolor from Susan Meddaugh, plus nine more in black and white with word balloon text. Such a good way to start the week! Susan (or rather Martha) has written an article about the transition [...]
