Publications about books for children and young adults
Once upon a time — last Friday, March 1st, to be exact — my friend and former writing professor Anna Staniszewski released My Epic Fairy Tale Fail (Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, March 2013), sequel to her debut novel My Very UnFairy Tale Life. Returning with her deliciously droll wit and a brand new mission for her now-thirteen-year-old [...]
Once upon a time, two Henry Holt board books arrived in our office. Cinderella and Snow White (October 2012) are part of the new Les Petits Fairytales series written by Trixie Belle and Melissa Caruso-Scott and illustrated by Oliver Lake. These minimalist texts (with one- or two-word explanations of each image) read like concept books, but [...]
You are about to enter the courtroom of Judge Judy. The cases are real. The creatures are folkloric. The rulings are final. . CASE #10705: EVIL STEPSISTERS v. CINDERELLA Judge Judy: You two stepsisters are suing Cinderella and her prince because your feet were irrevocably damaged after trying on some shoes, correct? Evil Stepsister #1: [...]
I just watched the pilot episode of ABC’s Once Upon a Time, a dark-ish fairy-tale show from Lost’s executive producers. In the first scene, Snow White (played by Ginnifer Goodwin, Margene from Big Love) lays lies in a glass coffin, apparently dead. A kiss from her prince wakes Snow, as we know it will, and [...]
The June issue of Notes from the Horn Book should be in your inbox. I talk to Printz winner Gene Luen Yang, and we recommend some great new YA, middle-grade animal stories, picture books about summer, truck books for preschoolers and audiobooks for those long family drives. Enjoy! And Claire has a new list of [...]
>–Claire has a new booklist of fairy tales up on our site. –Cynsations interviews my pal Cathie Mercier, director of the terrific Simmons College Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, which includes among its founders Horn Book editors Paul and Ethel Heins, and for which I will be leading a seminar next summer. –Mother [...]
>Claire is going to be reviewing The Golden Compass for you all, so let me skip my opinions on that for the moment to recommend what we saw as the first half of our Saturday night double-feature: Enchanted. Pretty hilarious if insidious, too, wrapping a Disney-princess-power theme in so many layers of parody and sincerity [...]
>Equally inspired and deflated by the imminent release of the third Shrek movie, Time‘s James Poniewozik has an article this week about the fracturing of fairy tales in both movies and books. He’s right about how such twisted retellings can appeal to both children and their accompanying adults (“the Shrek movies have a nigh-scientific formula [...]
