Best books of 2002 Chosen annually by our editors, Fanfare is The Horn Book Magazine’s selection of the best children’s and young adult books of the year. Picture Books A Bit More Bert written by Allan Ahlberg; illustrated by Raymond Briggs (Farrar) Our child-man hero is back in six more chapters — and we are […]
Archives for 2002
An Interview with Russell Freedman
November 5, 2002 by Leave a Comment
Russell Freedman has illuminated the crossroads of the biographical and the historical in more than forty nonfiction books for young people. He spoke with Roger Sutton last June in New York City. ROGER SUTTON: For this special issue we asked a number of writers to give us the unanswered question from history that most nags […]
Children of the Quest: The Irish Famine Myth in Children’s Fiction
November 1, 2002 by Leave a Comment
by Siobhán Parkinson The potato crop failed over several successive years in Ireland in the 1840s; a million poverty-stricken peasants died of hunger or famine fever; and another million or so emigrated, mainly to North America, on “coffin ships” (so called because many of the emigrants did not survive the voyage on the fever-infested, often […]
Editorial: Classic Reckoning
July 1, 2002 by Leave a Comment
With our publication this month of John Rowe Townsend’s pellucid appraisal of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, some readers might feel that the Horn Book is overindulging its notorious Anglophilia. Along with reviewing each of the three volumes, the last covered at some length by guest critic Gregory Maguire, we published Mr. Pullman’s thoughts […]
Editorial: Hansel, Hobbits, and Harry
March 1, 2002 by Leave a Comment
I recently had the good fortune to see a brilliant production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel at the Chicago Lyric Opera. Directed by Richard Jones and designed by John Macfarlane, it was not intended as a production for children; nevertheless, it neatly focused the work using its most child-compelling theme: hunger. The first-act curtain displayed […]
Reasons to Get Out of Bed
January 22, 2002 by Leave a Comment
Despite my dedication to the cause, I never thought a children’s book would have me voluntarily up and out at four-thirty on a frosty November Sunday morning. But the heavens and the forecast were so arrayed that I wanted to take my chance to watch the Leonid meteor shower light up the sky. I wasn’t […]
On the Cover: Houses
January 13, 2002 by Leave a Comment
My father’s house was made of sky. His bookcases stood twelve feet high. The snowy owl my father tamed, the stones he showed me, stars he named, agate, quartz, the Milky Way— “It’s good to know their names,” he’d say, “so when I’m gone and you are grown, in any world you’ll feel at home.” […]
A Tale Out of Time
January 13, 2002 by Leave a Comment
By Nancy Willard I recently asked my students in a class on the history of fairy tales a simple question: What was your favorite fairy tale when you were growing up, and how did you find it? Or, to put it differently, how did that particular tale find you? These are students who can’t imagine […]
Carver: A Life in Poems: Author Marilyn Nelson’s BGHB 2002 Fiction and Poetry Award Speech
January 5, 2002 by Leave a Comment
by Marilyn Nelson Abracadabra, alakazam, paz, salaam, shalom, amen My deep thanks go to the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award selection committee, and to Stephen Roxburgh of Front Street Books, who saw the potential of my manuscript. Thanks, too, to Helen Robinson of Front Street, whose design made the manuscript a beautiful and informative book. Thanks, […]
