Publications about books for children and young adults
Belt up your kirtles and hold onto your snoods. Fleas, Flies, and Friars: Children’s Poetry from the Middle Ages by Nicholas Orme (Cornell University Press, May 2012) presents a variety of verse from days of yore. After a brief context-setting chapter (“Children’s Poetry from the Middle Ages”), Orme provides sections on “Growing Up,” “Words, Rhymes, [...]
–F4I [fan for illustrator] (Boston) I saw you from across the Paresky Center at the 2011 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards ceremony. You were accepting your honor for illustrating Pecan Pie Baby. Charmed by your watercolors, your accent, and your admission that you can’t draw bicycles, I was too shy to ask you to sign my [...]
I’ve never witnessed an actual sumo wrestling match, so this graphic novel about sumo caught my curiosity. Thien Pham’s Sumo (First Second, December 2012) follows Scott, an American college graduate who thought he was heading toward the NFL but didn’t make the cut and subsequently lost the love of his life, Gwen. A new opportunity [...]
The Fairies Return, Or, New Tales for Old (Princeton University Press, October 2012), an anthology of revisioned fairy tales originally collected and published in 1934 by Peter Davies, was recently re-published. The collection offers unique, satirical versions of many of the beloved classics, but I was struck most by the biographical information regarding Peter Davies [...]
Chris Pauls and Matt Solomon’s adult novel Deck Z: The Titanic: Unsinkable. Undead. (Chronicle, September 2012) begins in early April, 1912, when German pathologist Theodor Weiss is summoned to Manchuria to investigate what appears to be a particularly virulent strain of plague. Weiss takes a recently infected victim to a laboratory to study the disease, [...]
I recently started reading Ann Brashares’s Sisterhood Everlasting (Random House, 2011), a ten-years-later installment of the popular YA Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series (Sisterhood is shelved in the grown-up section at my library). The story picks up with the girls (women) pushing thirty, successful in life and love (for the most part) but wistful [...]
The formidable Kenneth Kidd explores the entwined history of children’s literature and psychoanalysis in Freud in Oz: At the Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature (Univ. of Minnesota, November). Essays include “Three Case Histories: Alice, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz,” “’Maurice Sendak and Picturebook Psychology,” and “T Is for Trauma: The Children’s Literature [...]
Lucy Hull, protagonist of Rebecca Makkai‘s adult novel The Borrower (Viking, June), is a sardonic twenty-something children’s librarian. Her favorite patron, ten-year-old Ian, runs away to escape his parents and the anti-gay youth group they’ve stuck him in. Like Claudia Kincaid before him, Ian realizes that he needs somewhere to run away to, and the [...]
Publisher BOOM! Studios usually sends review copies of their entire frontlist—kids’ and grown-ups’ comics alike—which means we get everything from Wall-E and Cars to Pale Horse and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Cindy snatched up The Muppet Show, a series she remembers fondly from childhood, but as a zombie fan I’m excited for the [...]
Yesterday’s mail brought a letter promoting Henry P. Gravelle’s The Fort Providence Watch. Being a big fan of all things morbid, I’m intrigued by the synopsis: London surgeon Dr. Paul Barnet’s career is shattered by a botched surgery and brazen attack that nearly takes his life. Because of his downfall from society, loss of skills [...]
