Book Reviews
Why We Broke Upby Daniel Handler; illus. by Maira KalmanHigh School Little, Brown 355 pp.12/11 978-0-316-12725-7 $19.99Min and Ed’s differences are profound — most obviously, she’s a quirky aspiring filmmaker and he’s a popular jock. Readers see immediately, though, that it’s not simply these practical differences that caused their breakup,...
The No. 1 Car Spotterby Atinuke; illus. by Warwick Johnson CadwellPrimary, Intermediate Kane Miller 112 pp.9/11 Paper ed. 978-1-61067-051-7 $5.99Oluwalase Babatunde Benson, called No. 1, is the best car spotter in his African village. His unnamed country has cities and towns with skyscrapers, hotels, offices, tap water, electricity, and televisions,...
Lisa Loeb (and her iconic, adorable cat-eye glasses) burst into popular consciousness in 1994 with the smash single “Stay (I Missed You).” She apparently didn’t fall off the face of the earth since then: Lisa Loeb’s Silly Sing-Along: The Disappointing Pancake and Other Zany Songs (Sterling, January) will have children...
In Brian Selznick’s Caldecott Medal–winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, protagonist Hugo muses, “Machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason....
Bluefishby Pat SchmatzMiddle School Candlewick 229 pp.9/11 978-0-7636-5334-7 $15.99e-book ed. 978-0-7636-5614-0 $15.99“Stupid bluefish” Travis Roberts finds “lowlife trailer-trash loser” Vida “Velveeta” Wojciehowski in a lovely, understated book that celebrates the possibility of a kind and humane friendship between an eighth-grade girl and boy. Travis and Velveeta meet while both are...
Welcome to Fanfare, the Horn Book’s selection for the best books published for children and teens in 2011. Publishing trends being what they are, the editors make no attempt to provide a balanced list (where’s the folklore?), but you will find the thirty choices fairly evenly divided among picture books,...
In rounding up what we think are the best picture books of the year and discussing them through a Caldecott committee lens, it can be easy to assume that we are looking for the best picture books of the year, period. But we're not really, because the Medal can't go...
Sharp-eyed intern Jamie caught this gem when opening boxes:Extreme promotional blurb close-up!What do you think—is this an in-office memo? Or is it meta-narrative marketing genius? ...
I was the type of kid who lingered in stairwells trying to overhear adult conversation and who sneaked downstairs to catch my babysitter making out with her boyfriend. As a six-year-old, I blew Santa’s cover after noticing that “his” handwriting on gift labels was just like my dad’s. My mother was...
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