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Dear friends: It’s the first week of August, and thus we remember eternal Friend of the Horn Book Natalie Babbitt, not because it is her birthday but for Tuck Everlasting’s enduring opening line, “The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long...
A Bowl Full of Peace: A True Story by Caren Stelson; illus. by Akira Kusaka Intermediate, Middle School Carolrhoda 40 pp. g 8/20 978-1-5415-2148-3 $17.99 e-book ed. 978-1-5415-8219-4 $18.95 Each evening Sachiko’s family gathers around their table in Nagasaki, Japan. Before the Second World War, Grandmother’s bowl is the centerpiece...
The first thing I think of when I think of Tomie dePaola (who died in March at the age of eighty-five, from complications following a fall) isn’t a book at all. It’s Christmas. I think of a Tomie dePaola nativity set my family had growing up. I’m not even talking...
War at the Snow White Motel and Other Stories by Tim Wynne-Jones Intermediate, Middle School Groundwood 245 pp. g 5/20 978-1-77306-047-7 $16.95 e-book ed. 978-1-77306-048-4 $11.99 Most of the protagonists in these nine short stories are twelve years old and bumping into the realities of human nature — their own...
Good Guys, Bad Guys by Joanne Rocklin; illus. by Nancy Carpenter Preschool, Primary Abrams 32 pp. g 5/20 978-1-4197-3417-5 $16.99 Rocklin and Carpenter present a rollicking homage to neighborhood kid–summertime play. The story begins on the title-page spread as two children get ready to greet the morning. On the left-hand...
Dear friends: Lori-from-New-York was visiting this week and we got to talk about prime numbers! (She’s a math teacher.) When I asked her if all the primes were odd numbers she replied, “We don’t know.” Chills! Prime numbers are my next-favorite thing to talk about after diegetic music. We can...
This is the centennial year of illustrator Margaret Bloy Graham’s birth. Graham (1920–2015), who gave children lasting images of a good-natured dog “who liked everything, except…getting a bath,” is almost always associated with her then-husband, Gene Zion, author of Harry the Dirty Dog (1956) and three sequels. After the couple...
On the Horizon by Lois Lowry; illus. by Kenard Pak Middle School, High School Houghton 80 pp. g 4/20 978-0-358-12940-0 $16.99 e-book ed. 978-0-358-12938-7 $9.99 In a poetry collection that’s as much structure as style and theme, Lowry considers two events: the bombings of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. In the...
The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales told by Virginia Hamilton, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1985. We look back on this iconic Coretta Scott King Author Award winner (also a CSK Illustrator honor) as it celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary. Since...
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