Features & Opinion
from O'Dell Award Committee Chair Deborah Stevenson: Champaign, IL (January 15, 2020)—The 2020 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction goes to Butterfly Yellow, by Thanhhà Lại, published by HarperCollins. It’s 1981, and eighteen-year-old Hằng has arrived in Texas determined to find her younger brother, who’d been babylifted out of Vietnam...
Any Brits here who could check something for me? I see that the U.K. edition of Field Trip to the Moon has added an author, Jeanne Willis, who herself has added what seems to be rhyming text to this natively wordless picture book, one much lauded by reviewers and on...
Art from Black Is a Rainbow Color The following books will receive starred reviews in the January/February 2020 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Black Is a Rainbow Color by Angela Joy; illus. by Ekua Holmes (Roaring Brook) Johnny’s Pheasant by Cheryl Minnema; illus. by Julie Flett (Minnesota) Pluto...
We saw Jojo Rabbit this weekend and I think you all should see it too. It’s an anti-BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS, still a fable but blackly hilarious and not relying on a viewpoint only masquerading as childlike. Along with transitive verbs used intransitively, my biggest bête noire in...
Below is Fanfare, a list of the books that the Horn Book editors and reviewers have selected as the best of 2019. The annotated list will be published in the December issue of Notes from the Horn Book (sign up!) and in the January/February 2020 issue of the Horn Book Magazine...
Dear Sarah Dessen: I must confess that when I first read about the student who joined her school's one-college-one-book committee expressly to prevent a Sarah Dessen novel from being chosen, I laughed. Not at you or your books (or your genre or gender) but because I know that kind of student. I...
One of the cardinal sins of book reviewing is evaluating a book for what it is not. Perhaps it is not the book the reviewer would like to be reading, or is not about a subject the reviewer finds of value or interest, or does not take an approach to...
I recently fielded a letter of complaint from someone bothered by our recommendation, in Nonfiction Notes from the Horn Book, of several books in Abdo’s Hollywood Monsters series, among them Chucky and Freddy Krueger. (I haven’t seen any of their movies; have I missed anything?) The letter-writer was bothered that we would recommend books...
The 2019 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards ceremony took place on Friday, October 4, at Simmons University. The opening remarks, below, were delivered by Horn Book Editor in Chief Roger Sutton. For more about the history of the Boston Globe-Horn Book awards, and about this year's winners and honorees, visit the...
1,817 articles