Publications about books for children and young adults
Checking a fact about Joan of Arc, I found myself on the Wikipedia garden path, cruising through various manifestations of the saint on stage and screen. That led me to The Miracle of the Bells starring Italian actress Alida Valli, who, it turns out, was once married to Oscar de Mejo, a painter who did [...]
Here we are in Provincetown with friend Pam (other friend Lori was taking the picture), replete from days of Chex Mix and chocolate and Yahtzee, a game I thought I had mastered after years of battling AI opponents only to lose every time in this my first experience with the non-virtual dice variety. Also did [...]
I neither read nor saw Breaking Dawn, and The Mary Sue explains why. Thanks to David Maybury for the link.
In Brian Selznick’s Caldecott Medal–winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, protagonist Hugo muses, “Machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have [...]
The fallout over the New Yorker‘s decision to break an embargo to review The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo early is probably more entertaining than the movie is going to be. (Some commenter somewhere called it The Girl with the Thing on Her Arm, which I am immediately adopting). It is also convincing me that [...]
We talked about this trend of shiny-ing up books last week when Martha P. and I did a Family of Readers gig at the Duxbury Free Library for the Westwinds Bookshop. I speculated that the books that would best survive digital competition would be those that most rewarded or required physical presence–airport novels out, picture [...]
I hope everyone who celebrates it had a good Thanksgiving. Yesterday I dined in the company of, among others, a high school freshman who declared her absolute allegiance to Kristin Cashore. We are both looking forward to Bitterblue. She also bragged about having read Ayn Rand, but I put that little notion in its place [...]
>The Boston Globe’s thumbnail review for Captain America says the movie “packs a powerful, but predictable, patriotic punch.” How is that different from saying that it “packs a predictable, but powerful, patriotic punch?” I’m curious about which construction you all think is the more positive, because this is a trick reviewers use all the time, [...]
