Owen is another big Ivy + Bean fan.

There are certainly fancier button-making kits out there for kids, but they cost twice as much—and, of course, they don’t feature pictures of this fab duo. However, I can’t quite see Ivy and Bean enjoying the button maker—it seems a tad tame for them. Wouldn’t they just use the pins to poke big sister/babysitter Nancy? Indeed, an online search led to an excellent list of the type of crafts and activities Ivy and Bean really find of interest. (And the materials involved are easy to locate—a banana, scotch tape, red twisty ties, and a soft place to fall, like a bed or sofa.) My advice? Forget the button maker and find a banana. Then check out even more neat Ivy and Bean activities on Chronicle’s website for free.

The post Arts + crafts with Ivy + Bean appeared first on The Horn Book.

I was eleven years old when the Magnificent 7 dominated the 1996 summer games—the perfect age to marvel over the mysterious creatures that are competitive gymnasts. So tiny. So powerful. So much glitter hairspray. My favorite Olympian was thirteen-year-old Dominique Moceanu. I read and re-read her autobiography (Dominique Moceanu: An American Champion) so many times that I ran my paperback copy quite ragged.

Lucky for young fans, Moceanu is back in the book business with a new middle-grade series, The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts (Disney-Hyperion, April), co-written with Alicia Thompson. Seemingly created specifically for eleven-year-old me, this series follows four young gymnasts who train together at a fictional elite gym in Texas, with each girl taking turns as protagonist, Babysitter’s Club style. In the first title, Winning Team, Britt is the new girl at the gym. Her new teammates give her the cold shoulder because she is a show-off with a perfect full double-twisting somersault—don’t you hate those? But with life lessons gleaned from To Kill a Mockingbird, Britt avoids becoming the Boo Radley of the Texas Twisters by taming her sassy, self-centered ways.

Along with the inner emotional struggles of tweendom, Winning Team also reveals those coveted details of gymnast-life that only Moceanu could provide: the superhuman training schedules, the bizarre and disgusting athletic rituals, the catty in-fighting. The characters also speak in thick gymnast-dialect—you might need to spend some time on YouTube learning the difference between a “full-in” and a “half-in, half-out”. And let’s not forget the requisite eating disorder plotline! Don’t worry: by the end of the book, everyone has regained health and attained a sense of team spirit, and you’ll be more than prepared to cheer on the newest pack of little 2012 USA competitors this summer.

The post Going for gold appeared first on The Horn Book.

Now, I doubt there are many second graders out there clamoring for a book of their own about the estimable Mma Ramotswe: The Great Cake Mystery (Anchor Books, April) is being released at the same time as the latest No. 1 Detective Agency novel, and it will likely be purchased by series fans with young readers in their lives quicker’n you can say “mother-daughter book group.”

Fortunately, The Great Cake Mystery transcends such cynicism. The mystery Precious solves—who is behind the spate of thefts on the school playground?—is audience-appropriate; the prose style is welcoming and intimate (“What would you do if you found yourself face to face with a great lion?”); the Botswana village setting is evoked clearly but simply; the page design is generous and inviting, with wide margins and plentiful spot illustrations. The book’s provenance is unusual (it was originally published in a Scots-language edition), and the plot borrows liberally from “Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby” (with a bit of Caps for Sale thrown in), but the qualities that make the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series so popular and beloved are much in evidence here. Readers should take great pleasure in joining Precious as she solves her Very First Case.

The post Have your cake and read it, too appeared first on The Horn Book.

Having spent the summer in her native England, Miss Agnes  returns, this time with a ginger cat. Miss Agnes and the Ginger Tom (CreateSpace, December) is also told in eleven-year-old Fred’s straightforward prose, so again we see the school year through her eyes. This year, the focus is not the fear that Miss Agnes will leave the community and never return. The children and parents have another worry: will the gifted Jimmy Sam pass the challenging entrance test to a boarding school that will allow him to use these intellectual gifts?

This sequel will appeal most to people like me: people who loved the community and characters of the first book. The first installment painted a marvelous picture of life in the fish and hunting camps and gave a peek at the challenges of life in post-WWII Alaska, and this offering provides more of the same. There is a fair amount of repeating the life stories of the children, because, like life in rural Alaska, little changes in a few months.

I don’t know very much about the publishing industry or why this little volume is self-published. I wish it had had the tender touch of an editor who would have tightened it up, fixed the typos, and added characters and some plot twists to help keep young readers engaged. I was hoping that someone new would move in or Miss Agnes might have a love interest or the community might face threat from weather or encroaching development… Something. But no matter. I still loved reading more about these children on the Koyukuk River. And I love sharing the lives of Fred and Jimmy—and even the surprising ginger tomcat—with their modern counterparts.

The post Miss Agnes is back appeared first on The Horn Book.