Publications about books for children and young adults
Last summer, website mom.me asked us to contribute to their feature “Books to Read With Your Teen Daughter.” Here are our recommendations from that article — plus a few new ones! — to get you ready for Mother’s Day. What YA book would you recommend for a mother-daughter read? Cindy: Cinder (Feiwel, 2012), the first [...]
Originality is everything in literature, as in art. “Originals never lose their value,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said. He may have been referring to Shakespeare and Wordsworth, but the statement is just as true of children’s literature. Of course, even originals owe something to the past — “we all quote,” Emerson acknowledged — but he did [...]
Author Emily Jenkins seems equally at home in picture books and intermediate fiction (and even — shh! — in YA, under nom de plume E. Lockhart). Like several of Emily’s previous books, her latest, Water in the Park: A Book About Water & the Times of the Day (illus. by Stephanie Graegin; Schwartz & Wade/Random; [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I had to chuckle when I first read Jeanne Birdsall’s article (“Middle Grade Saved My Life”) about the attempted land grab by YA of middle-grade books. Not just in recognition, but at how I see this work in sort-of reverse, too: I’ll get calls from writers and publishers of books for adults, asking if their [...]
My mother is a writer, and as a small child, I would wander into her office and look through the magazines scattered across her desk. I remember wondering why the magazines were called The Horn Book, because they didn’t seem to be about horns, and also why they had the neat covers, even though the [...]
From Dr. Robert Needlman explaining the difference between babies falling asleep and learning how to go to asleep, through Cambridge librarians Julie Roach and Beth McIntyre coaching us through selecting books for preschool story time to Anna Dewdney using photographs to demonstrate how to transform unpleasant expressions on family members faces into picture book gold, [...]
Pictures from the Fostering Lifelong Learners conference. Photos by Shara Hardeson. For more on the day-long event, click here.
We mourn the death (last Friday) of E.L. Konigsburg, who never wrote a book I didn’t want to read. (Not that I love them all, but even where she went wrong, she did so magnetically.) I remember a slightly uneasy conversation with Konigsburg’s editor Jean Karl right after Elaine had won her second Newbery Medal [...]
