I’m currently appreciating Teeth: Vampire Tales (HarperCollins), an upcoming short story anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. The big-name contributors such as Neil Gaiman, Ellen Kushner, Holly Black, Tanith Lee, and Garth Nix initially caught my attention, but it’s refreshing to find tales by authors I haven’t read before (Suzy McKee Charnas, Steve [...]
Cover girls
March 14, 2011 By 2 Comments
I smiled when I saw Mitali Perkins’s Facebook status update the other day. Apparently it was World Read Aloud Day—one of those things, like Mitali, that I can usually feel pretty good about (unlike Turn Off Your TV Week or Stop Eating So Much Takeout Month). On World Read Aloud Day I read a chapter [...]
Celeb BFF wisdom?
March 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Like many children who grew up in the nineties, I know who Elizabeth Berkley is—she played Jessie Spano on the popular, heavily syndicated Saved by the Bell. So when Ask Elizabeth (Putnam, March) came into the office, I snatched it up out of curiosity (and perhaps fear). As it turns out, it’s getting a lot [...]
Keep your friends close, and your frienemies closer
March 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I have to admit that when I slipped Amy Holder’s debut novel The Lipstick Laws (HMH/Graphia, April) off the shelf, I was motivated mainly by the jacket summary’s similarity to Mean Girls. Packed with cliques, hot boys, revenge, and a tyrannical friendship pact sealed with a bright red kiss, The Lipstick Laws would be ripe [...]
Newbery shocker!
January 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
What?? Glee: The Beginning isn’t even an honor book? I know! Shocking. And I wouldn’t have even brought it up (mostly because a novel based on a TV show that’s successful due to the fabulous musical numbers doesn’t have much to offer—even if it does include a “Gleetastic Poster Inside”), but when we received ALA’s [...]
I thought you would be a children’s book
December 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Dispatches from Transylvania
November 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment
“To my son, my husband, and my cell phone.” — iDrakula‘s dedication Bekka Black’s new novel iDrakula (Sourcebooks Fire) retells Bram Stoker’s classic epistolary story entirely through digital communication, including text messages, email, and websites. This “e-pistolary” format itself is still unusual, but it’s quickly gaining ground, particularly for teen readers (see Elizabeth Rudnick’s Tweet [...]
Extra points for participation
November 15, 2010 By 1 Comment
You may have heard this summer’s buzz surrounding Jodi Lynn Anderson’s (bestselling author of Peaches) Loser/Queen (Simon & Schuster), an “interactive” novel for which cyber fans voted weekly on turns in the plot. With the paperback edition’s release date of December 21 approaching, and the ARC landing in the Horn Book offices, I came to [...]
