Photo: Cynthia K. Ritter

Q: How long has it been since the last Children’s Books Boston Trivia Night?

A: Too long!

For a bonus point: Children’s Books Boston returned this year as part of a larger event. Name the event.

A: Boston Book Festival's Lit Crawl Boston!

Concurrently with events including Ekphrastic Writing and a Flash Fiction Workshop — and immediately followed by Romance Mad Libs — came CBB Trivia’s triumphant return on Thursday, June 9, 2022 at 6 p.m. The place: Mamaleh’s Kendall Square. The host: our own Acting Editor in Chief Elissa Gershowitz. The bagels and whitefish: delicious.

A team composed mostly of librarians squared off against a team of mainly teachers. Cindy and I joined the latter team, which one of the teachers dubbed Are You There God? It’s Me, Mamaleh’s.

And then we wracked our brains. (Or struggled to keep our mouths shut on the occasional questions we’d helped with ourselves; thank you, spring interns Julie and Monica, for having written so many!) We named Newbery, Caldecott, and Belpré winners and honorees from various years. We named a girl genius (Lisa Yee’s Millicent Min). We named what Sal lost in One Morning in Maine. (Well, I didn’t, but my teammates did, and I kicked myself in the teeth over it.)

When we’d plumbed the depths of our Penderwicks knowledge (mine, it seems, runs as far as Batty but stops short of Lydia), we added up the points, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Mamaleh’s emerged victorious. But there were enough prizes (books and ARCs, of course) for all, so really, everybody won.

Are you there, trivia? Book nerds rejoice: the answer is yes.