The post >Win Jan Brett appeared first on The Horn Book.

Vine reviews, customer reviews, and, sorry, blog reviews–they are all too damned long. That’s the problem I have with ‘em. Just because the technology allows one to prattle on forever should by no means encourage one to do so. The one Amazon review I remember appreciating was a negative review of a recording I adore, Adam Guettel’s musical Floyd Collins. It read, in its entirety, “Too much yodeling.”

The post >Too damned long appeared first on The Horn Book.

Props to SLJ for getting this story out in the first place, but I have to note one thing that skeeved me out about the lede in the original article: “Don’t expect to see Lauren Myracle’s new book Luv Ya Bunches (Abrams/Amulet, 2009) at Scholastic school book fairs this year. It’s been censored—at least for now—due to its language and homosexual content.” Calling the presence in a children’s book of a couple of lesbian mothers “homosexual content” is gross unless the two of them are totally going at it.

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The post >The science museum had lost its charm appeared first on The Horn Book.

The post >Happy to help! appeared first on The Horn Book.

Everybody except jester-under-the-table Jonathan Hunt is being soooo polite. This makes the competition look a lot less random than it actually is. Think about it: the winner will be chosen via a sequence of fifteen decisions that operate under no common principle, leading in the end to a choice that means nothing. (Go, Lois.) While I’m enjoying the judges’ explanations, we each employed criteria exclusive to us and to the two books we were comparing. The winning book will be one that four people liked better, for different reasons, than one other book. A few commenters here and elsewhere have sniped that the BoB is really “all about the judges.” As far as I can tell, it’s not really about anything else.

The post >I didn’t see this coming. appeared first on The Horn Book.

Goofus, on the other hand . . . .

The post >Reading Fun with Goofus and Gallant appeared first on The Horn Book.

Elizabeth thinks not. We just talked and she opined that the pirate thing had already run its course anyway. But there was a sturdy tradition of jolly pirates in children’s books before the current craze, all more or less dependent on the assumption that pirates were far enough removed from a reading child’s reality to be practically folklore. Will the current situation, terrible but absorbing and updated in real time, put Captain Abdul (already unfortunately named) out of business?

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The post >"Oh yes, the new Lowry. Haven’t quite got to it yet, but the woman’s a genius." appeared first on The Horn Book.

The post >Complete with pop-up nuns but no Nazis appeared first on The Horn Book.