Features & Opinion
Happy New Year, everybody, and I hope you all found some time for reading — by which I mean reading for the fun of it — over the December holidays. (Mine was divided between The Turn of the Key, Ruth Ware’s recent homage to The Turn of the Screw, and...
This past November we put out a call on the Calling Caldecott blog for mock “nominations,” asking readers to name a few 2019 books they considered top contenders for the Caldecott Medal. Horn Book Editor in Chief Roger Sutton cheekily touted Small in the City — knowing full well that...
Over on a great Facebook group called Jewish Kidlit Mavens, the members have been discussing their childhood reading (or not) of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series and how each maven variously dealt with its Christian themes and allegorical elements. The reactions in the group have run from childhood delight to adult reservations, but...
I have my own version of the Anthony Browne story Cathie Mercier tells on page 26 in commemorating her great colleague and friend Susan P. Bloom, who died on June 7th at the age of eighty. In my version, it is the summer of 1989 and I am at Boston's...
Thank goodness the inclusion of the 2019 ALA awards speeches in this issue allows me to talk about the Coretta Scott King Book Awards again (see our just-previous May/June issue celebrating the CSK’s fiftieth anniversary). Congratulations to all the winners, as well as to those receiving Legacy, Newbery, and Caldecott...
Welcome to The Horn Book’s celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards. As you may know, we publish a special themed issue annually, and when Andrea Davis Pinkney called to ask what The Horn Book might be able to do to commemorate the CSK’s fiftieth...
Our lead article, “In the Breaking, Maybe Something Beautiful,” is by acclaimed author and poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz, adapted from his profound and powerful 2018 Charlotte Zolotow Lecture. In it (and be sure to read every word), he says, “I believe that my dissent is what makes me a loyal...
Happy New Year, everybody. I hope you got some good reading done over the holidays. Me, I shuttled among Tim Mohr's Burning Down the Haus (a history of punk rock in East Germany), Ruth Ware's The Death of Mrs. Westaway, and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, those latter choices, each about...
The January/February Magazine is a good metaphor for the new year, with its ruminations on What Came Before and an eye toward the future. In October we celebrated the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, where Elizabeth Acevedo performed a powerful original poem; Isabel Quintero and Zeke Peña shared their origin story...
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