Publications about books for children and young adults
I’ve been a steadfast follower of blogger Tavi Gevinson and her fashion/feminist escapades for years now, so perhaps I am a biased reader, but I absolutely loved Rookie Yearbook One (Drawn & Quarterly, September 2012), a massive compilation of all of Rookie Mag‘s brightest moments. Rookie Magazine, an online magazine aimed at teenage girls, was [...]
[cue 20th Century Fox intro] [cue Star Wars theme song] Tomorrow, Saturday October 6, 2012 is the first National Star Wars Reads Day, designed to “celebrate reading and Star Wars.” While this may be an unusual pairing, I’m all for promoting events that encourage children to read. So in honor of the inaugural event, I’ve [...]
In Julianne Donaldson’s Edenbrooke: A Proper Romance (Shadow Mountain, April 2012) Marianne Daventry is sent to live with her cantankerous grandmother in “stifling” Bath after the death of her mother, abandonment by her grieving father, and separation from her socially ambitious twin sister. Unsurprisingly, Marianne soon feels dejected and out of place. She welcomes an [...]
California high school English teacher Ann Camacho challenged her students (current and past) to “Find a quote from ANY book you’ve read…and use it as the foundation or seed to developing your personal philosophy about how you live your life.” Fifty of the students’ short essays come together in Bookmarked: Teen Essays on Life and [...]
Following the Great East Japan Earthquake, editor Holly Thompson, a YA author (Orchards, a 2012 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults book) and a longtime resident of Japan, became especially concerned about teen survivors of the quake and tsunami. She decided to collect YA short fiction from writers and translators connected to Japan either by [...]
Is it too early to get excited about the Summer Olympics? I’m not really a sports person, but I do get excited about my two favorite events: the 400 meter Drool-Over-Michael-Phelps relay and women’s gymnastics. I was eleven years old when the Magnificent 7 dominated the 1996 summer games—the perfect age to marvel over the [...]
From the celebrity dirt of tabloids to government conspiracies, crimes that shook the world, and ethical outrages, Hallie Fryd’s Scandalous!: 50 Shocking Events You Should Know About (So You Can Impress Your Friends) (Zest Books, February) offers a delicious dish of infamous gossip from twentieth century for rumor-loving teens. The fifty highlighted events, presented in [...]
About eleven years ago, I fell in love with Miss Agnes. Kirkpatrick Hill’s The Year of Miss Agnes is one of my first-weeks-of-school read-aloud books. Miss Agnes’s loving but no-nonsense teaching methods inspire me every time I read it, which is just about every year. Now, more than a decade since that book was published, [...]
In a sort of coloring book meets Diary of a Wimpy Kid meets Choose Your Own Adventure, Nosy Crow’s new Mega Mash-Up series by Nikalas Catlaw and Tim Wesson (December) combines marginally true information about, say, Roman gladiators, with dinosaurs (or, in another volume, aliens vs. mad scientists and—well, you get the idea) into an [...]
Now that March has finally arrived, we’re officially in the “T-minus” phase for The Hunger Games movie adaptation, hitting theaters on March 23. In anticipation, I’ve been perusing several pieces of fine literature, to wit: The Hunger Games: The Official Illustrated Movie Companion (Scholastic, February), Stars in the Arena: Meet the Hotties of The Hunger [...]
