Dear friends:

Well, the big snow we were promised for Monday was a big bust. And Punxsutawney Phil says there are six more weeks of this. In the bleak midwinter, slush on slush on slush…. By the way, even though I had not seen the movie Groundhog Day at the time, Groundhog Day on Broadway was one of the most fun* musicals I’ve ever seen. I do hope we get musicals back in time for my traditional December trip to NYC this year.

The skies are gray but the March/April stars are out. Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club has me dying to do a compare and contrast with Annie on My Mind. It also has me rereading Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker Chronicles, which was one of the lesbian pulp hits of the late 1950s. Not nearly as pulpy as the word might suggest, or maybe the Fountas & Pinnell levels for everything were higher back then.

It’s Black History Month! We’ll be posting and re-upping articles, interviews, and reviews about African American books for young people and their creators every day of February, which, as my friend Elizabeth pointed out on Facebook, is this year perfectly square on a European calendar. (Did you know that the old countries start the week on Monday, not Sunday? I did not but now I do. What this will mean for my schedule of alternating Denmark’s Borgen with France’s Lupin with England’s The Capture, I do not know.)

Love,

Roger

* Yes, that is fun as an adjective. Deal with it. You’ll still not see it in the Horn Book Magazine as long as I work here. We do have some standards still. Subscribe!