>The New York Times obituary for Eden is a gracious tribute but does that thing I hate: “Eden Ross Lipson . . . was a force in bringing the enchanting but often overlooked world of children’s literature to wide public awareness.” The REASON children’s literature is overlooked is because we persist in regarding it as [...]
>R.I.P. Eden
May 12, 2009 By 3 Comments
>X hits the spot
April 24, 2009 By 17 Comments
>Reviewer X has a good discussion going on blog reviewing. I confess I’m dying to try Twitter if only to see just WHO is: comparing their “hit lists” for authors they plan to ask for ARCs, trading e-mail addresses and results, complaining about whether they’re getting an ARC, and actually encouraging each other to send [...]
>A conspiracy theory of reviewing
April 22, 2009 By 9 Comments
>Editorial Anonymous has, for writers, some good news and some good news about children’s books reviews. The good news, she (?) says, is that good reviews can help sell books. And the other good news is that bad reviews won’t hurt selling books. I have a more nuanced opinion. More and more children’s books are [...]
>Shoot me now.
March 9, 2009 By 25 Comments
>Still, it’s not like a book can give you polio.
January 18, 2009 By 20 Comments
>From the would-be author who insists to his would-be editor that “my grandkids love this story” to the award committee member who says “my ten-year-old thought this book was boooorrrring,” the children’s book world is replete with those who use their own children as test subjects. Expanding the notion of “my kids” to those children [...]
>Amazoning Out
November 8, 2008 By 17 Comments
>JasonB’s post at Galleycat about Thomas Nelson’s new program of supplying free books to bloggers on the condition that they review the book and copy said review to an online vendor such as Amazon.com brings up lots of questions, and don’t miss the link to the Guardian’s essay on the subject, which includes an entertaining, [...]
>Think Pink!
October 22, 2008 By 13 Comments
>Mitali Perkins Facebooked and Twittered a question to her friends: “should an author describe the race of a character or leave it to the reader’s imagination?” Good question, and she got some good answers. (Thanks, Gail, for the tip.) It’s a question we also face in reviewing–when do we mention the ethnicity or skin color [...]
>Star bar
September 25, 2008 By 2 Comments
>My favorite curmudgeonly critic Norman Lebrecht offers his point of view about the ever-increasing trend toward using stars as critical shorthand:Of all the devices that devalue the function of criticism, the bar of stars is among the most pernicious. It suggests that artistic creation can be ticked off like a school essay and subjected to [...]
