Publications about books for children and young adults
Having grown up in the Free to Be generation, I’ve tried as a parent to steer clear of limiting gender norms in raising, and reading to, my son. We’ve read about boys and girls of all types, and (just as Hilary Rappaport describes in her May/June 2012 Horn Book article “On the Rights of Reading [...]
May/June 2012 Horn Book I want to thank you for publishing the piece by Hilary Rappaport (“On the Rights of Reading and Girls and Boys”). I really appreciated seeing some of my concerns about the gender divide in reading articulated so well. I have examined my biases related to literature and preferences, and have made [...]
In a much talked about opinion piece published in School Library Journal in 2008, former Horn Book editor Anita Silvey asked, “Has the Newbery lost its way?” She made it clear that she thought it had, after interviewing “more than 100 people—including media specialists, children’s librarians, teachers, and booksellers—in 15 states across the country.” A [...]
Did you know it was Gerry Goffin, not Carole King, who wrote the lyrics to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”? That’s just one of the fun facts I’ve picked up in listening to King’s new autobiography called, what else, A Natural Woman. Her stories about working for hit factory Aldon Music (not in the Brill [...]
Discussions about gender issues in children’s literature are perennial (even in the pages of this magazine; see the special issue on gender in September/October 2007; articles on boy and girl reading in the September/October 2010 issue; and, most recently, Carey E. Hagan’s “One Tough Cookie” in the September/October 2011 issue). My personal experiences differ from [...]
SLJ has a report up on a library’s attempt to lure more boy readers. Lots of good comments over there; I’ll only add two observations and one plug. Observation #1: it’s funny how in this field you can’t say anything about the needs of male readers without getting people het up about the needs of [...]
In a sort of coloring book meets Diary of a Wimpy Kid meets Choose Your Own Adventure, Nosy Crow’s new Mega Mash-Up series by Nikalas Catlaw and Tim Wesson (December) combines marginally true information about, say, Roman gladiators, with dinosaurs (or, in another volume, aliens vs. mad scientists and—well, you get the idea) into an [...]
I still recall fondly the female protagonists of teen “chick lit” and coming-of-age stories I read in high school. On a given day I might feel as tormented by love and teenage awkwardness as Mia Thermopolis (Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries) or lonely and isolated like Melinda Sordino (Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak). These were gals [...]
Has anyone else read this yet? By Ernest Cline, Ready Player One is set in the near future (2044) when the world has gone mostly to shit and people spend as much time as they can in The Oasis, an enormous virtual reality universe. The enormously wealthy creator of Oasis–the most valuable property on the [...]
>Harold Underdown has done some interesting digging into the statistics about YA publishing that were used by journalist D.B. Grady for an article in the Atlantic. But whether there were 30,000 YA novels published in 2009 (unlikely, as Harold demonstrates) or 8,000 (as Harold estimates), can we all agree that there are too many? My [...]
