Publications about books for children and young adults
Ask the Passengers by A. S. King High School Little, Brown 295 pp. 10/12 978-0-316-19468-6 $17.99 Astrid would be the quintessential Q-for-Questioning girl in her high school’s LGBTQ support group if her small-town, small-minded school had such a thing — and the gay question is only one of many weighing her down. When her humanities [...]
Follow Follow: A Book of Reverso Poems by Marilyn Singer; illus. by Josée Masse Primary Dial 32 pp. 2/13 978-0-8037-3769-3 $16.99 g “It’s not easy,” warns Singer in a note about the “reverso,” a verse form she created and first used in Mirror Mirror (rev. 3/10); and the first poem (“Fairy Tales”) in this companion [...]
My Brother’s Book by Maurice Sendak; illus. by the author di Capua/HarperCollins 32 pp. 2/13 978-0-06-223489-6 $18.95 g If, as Wordsworth wrote, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,” Sendak’s vision of a Dante-esque search for his beloved brother Jack (1924–1995) is poetry in both [...]
Courage Has No Color, the True Story of the Triple Nickles: America’s First Black Paratroopers by Tanya Lee Stone Middle School, High School Candlewick 148 pp. 1/13 978-0-7636-5117-6 $24.99 e-book ed. 978-0-7636-6405-3 $24.99 “How does one survive and outlast the racism that was our daily fare at that time?” asks artist Ashley Bryan in the [...]
Etched in Clay: The Life of Dave, Enslaved Potter and Poet by Andrea Cheng; illus. by the author Intermediate, Middle School Lee & Low 143 pp. 1/13 978-1-60060-451-5 $17.95 g Readers familiar with Laban Carrick Hill and Bryan Collier’s 2011 Caldecott Honor–winning picture book Dave the Potter will appreciate Cheng’s interpretation of the man’s life [...]
Days of Blood & Starlight by Laini Taylor High School Little, Brown 517 pp. 11/12 978-0-316-13397-5 $18.99 Star-crossed lovers Karou and Akiva, torn apart by unforgivable betrayal at the end of Daughter of Smoke & Bone (rev. 11/11), are now engaged in the renewed war between the chimaera and the seraphim. Both are repulsed by [...]
In the January/February 2013 Horn Book Magazine, reviewer Jonathan Hunt asks Andrea Davis Pinkney about selecting subjects for Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America. Read the review of Hand in Hand here. Jonathan Hunt: How did you approach the difficult task of narrowing your list? Can you tell us who almost made [...]
Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America by Andrea Davis Pinkney; illus. by Brian Pinkney Intermediate, Middle School Disney-Jump at the Sun 243 pp. 10/12 978-1-4231-4257-7 $19.99 Presenting ten biographical vignettes in chronological order — Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, Malcolm X, [...]
The Archived by Victoria Schwab Middle School, High School Hyperion 324 pp. 1/13 978-1-4231-5731-1 $16.99 g Mackenzie is a “Keeper”; her job is to return the wakeful dead (or “Histories”) to the Archive, a repository of all human memory. Persuading the dead to return to their rightful resting place often involves kick-ass combat, but never [...]
In 1973 Rosa Guy’s YA novel The Friends [read the original Horn Book review here] electrified the world of African American children’s books. The Friends was one of the first novels for teens to tell a distinctly African American story, highlighting issues of race, class, and identity that black children deal with on a daily [...]
