Publications about books for children and young adults
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Nonfiction Notes from the Horn Book, a quarterly supplement to our monthly e-newsletter Notes from the Horn Book. Each issue of Nonfiction Notes will contain brief reviews, taken from the Horn Book Guide, of new and recent informational books we think would be especially good for schools looking to [...]
You can sometimes feel like the Old Stage Manager in this job, watching ’em all come and go for their hour upon the stage. Big picture books, little picture books, good girls and bad girls, vampires, angels, fallen angels, books for boys, fantasy, and realism. The players have producers: not just publishers but also the [...]
“If this book doesn’t win the Caldecott Medal I’m going to kill myself.” I heard that from Zena Sutherland, quoting Ursula Nordstrom, while Zena and I were at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum in 1982, viewing an exhibition of the complete original art for the book in question, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. That book [...]
Like you (I’m guessing), I felt my soul give a little lurch at the news that Encyclopaedia Britannica was getting out of the book business to go online, all the time. Part of my reaction was nostalgia—when I was a child we owned the first four or five volumes of some encyclopedia that my parents [...]
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 [...]
But let us here consider the books in need—those books for youth that make librarians both happy and industrious. When I look at our 2011 Fanfare list, beginning on page 10, I see an array of thirty books whose fortunes will largely depend on you. Yes, some of the choices have already established themselves (Press Here and I Want My Hat Back are on this week’s New York Times bestsellers list), and good for them. But most of the books on our Fanfare list will need your attention first if they hope to find the attention of young readers.
Although grateful for the support of publishers who place advertisements in The Horn Book, I’ve never before felt the need to direct you to such from this page. But I do so now: please go and read the advertisement on page 57 and then come back here. I’ll wait. Imagine a picture book world where [...]
In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th ten years ago, there were many books published for children and teens about the tragedy. Some were informative, and at least two transcended the moment: Maira Kalman’s Fireboat and Mordicai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. But there was a persistent strain of “helpful” [...]
We have called this special issue “Boys and Girls” in tribute to where the Horn Book’s great adventure began, as the newsletter of Bertha Mahony’s Bookshop for Boys and Girls, est. 1916. But as someone who came of age with the second-wave feminism of the 1970s, I’m anxious that we not be seen as favoring [...]
Despite my dedication to the cause, I never thought a children’s book would have me voluntarily up and out at four-thirty on a frosty November Sunday morning. But the heavens and the forecast were so arrayed that I wanted to take my chance to watch the Leonid meteor shower light up the sky. I wasn’t [...]
