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We’re trying something new this spring. With Reach Out and Read and the Cambridge Public Library, the Horn Book is presenting a one-day conference about books and the youngest readers/listeners/lookers. We thought it would be useful to cross-fertilize our areas of expertise (Reach Out and Read on brain development, CPL on using books with children, [...]
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Ha ha, not really. I hope everybody is getting some use out of our latest newsletter, Nonfiction Notes from the Horn Book. I’ve been thinking about NF a lot since ALA, where I spent two solid days talking to publishers about what they were planning for the coming year(s). Along with inflicting upon the world [...]
The post How to publish for the CCSS appeared first on The Horn Book.
This weekend I happened upon Paul Collins’ essay “Vanishing Act,” about the writing prodigy Barbara Newhall Follett, whose The House Without Windows was published by Knopf in 1927 when the author was twelve. Our own Bertha Mahony loved the book, devoting three pages to it in the February 1927 Magazine. While Follett would go on to publish [...]
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The following books will receive starred reviews in the March/April issue of the Horn Book Magazine. Incidentally, this is also our annual special issue; the theme this year is “Different Drummers” with a ground-breaking (for us, anyway) cover by Paul Zelinsky (whose absence from the recent Caldecott announcement marks a Dark Day in that award’s [...]
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The 2013 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction goes to Louise Erdrich for Chickadee, published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. The annual award, created by Scott O’Dell and Zena Sutherland in 1982 and now administered by Elizabeth Hall, carries with it a prize of $5000, and goes to the author of a distinguished [...]
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As K.T. Horning embarks on her decade-by-decade Caldecott Medal retrospective (Mei Li in January; Prayer for a Child coming up in March) in the Horn Book Magazine, I’m reminded of Leonard Marcus’s own Caldecott Celebration, a book for kids (but you’ll like it too) in which he similarly looked at one winner from each decade, [...]
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I’d like to have been at this NYPL panel on nonfiction put together by Betsy Bird. The four panelists are among the best of our nonfiction writers, and I would have loved to ask them how their job prospects were looking under the Common Core State Standards. With the CCSS (have we agreed this is [...]
The post Will this be on the test? appeared first on The Horn Book.
PW‘s Elizabeth Bluemle (who, by the way, has a wonderful article coming up in the March/April Horn Book Magazine) visits our own Liza Woodruff, who unaccountably left work as a circulation assistant at the Horn Book to live in Vermont with her lovely husband and children and dogs while she pursues a full-time career as [...]
The post OUR Liza with a Z appeared first on The Horn Book.
Lolly and trusty interns Kiona and Marisa have uploaded the complete Horn Book Fanfare, our choices from 1938 to the present for the best in books for youth published each year. I hadn’t known that on the very first list was The Hobbit, a book the Horn Book was very excited about. It was reviewed [...]
I’m pleased to give you Fanfare 2012, the Horn Book’s choices for the best children’s and YA books of the year. The complete annotated list will be sent to all Notes From the Horn Book subscribers next Wednesday (sign up now) and will appear in the January/February 2013 issue of the Horn Book Magazine. [...]
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We saw Flight last weekend, and the first two hours were completely riveting both for–SPOILER–the minute-by-minute, you-are-there depiction of a plane flight in increasingly worse trouble; and for Denzel Washington’s portrayal of a bad-boy pilot who enjoys a drink or three. Upon takeoff. But–SPOILERRR–the last twenty minutes encompassed no fewer than three endings as the [...]
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Deck your shelves with Holiday High Notes, the Horn Book’s selection of the best Hanukkah* and Christmas books of the year. (*or Chanukah. Jane, Yolen, if you’re there, we notice your new Dinosaurs book uses this spelling. Mistle-tov!)
The post Reading is the reason for the season appeared first on The Horn Book.
Don’t miss Leonard Marcus’s latest column about picture book covers, and speaking of that, SLJ stalwart Rocco Staino reports on a gallery of ‘em that would make Judy Blume blush. Or would they? The pictures were created by several well-known picture book artists in service of raising money for the National Coalition Against Censorship. They [...]
The post O Come All Ye Faithful? appeared first on The Horn Book.
Jon Klassen’s This Is Not My Hat certainly encourages discussion– see Lolly’s review here, Robin’s review here and mine over here–but over at Amazon I discovered a rather breathtaking display of the strategic (psychotic?) deployment of the non sequitur as a tool. (By a tool? Discuss.): “This book is another in the long line of [...]
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The following books will receive starred reviews in the January/February issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Building Our House; by Jonathan Bean (Farrar) Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building; by Christy Hale (Lee & Low) Ask the Passengers; by A. S. King (Little, Brown) Days of Blood & Starlight; by Laini Taylor (Little, Brown) One Came [...]
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Spent a day with our sister and brother in New York last week; while the Media Source office (in Soho) has mostly recovered from Sandy, staff in New Jersey and on Long Island had horror stories and hellish commutes. (OTOH, their office is surrounded by chicness and restaurants, whereas we have a Holiday Inn, Hess [...]
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this Saturday, with “From Screen to Book” at the Cambridge Public Library, an afternoon’s discussion of picture books and digital media. The presenters include three illustrators, Candlewick art director Ann Stott, and agent Holly McGhee; the moderator is Jenny Brown from Shelf Awareness, who, incidentally, wrote a great account of the Horn Book at Simmons [...]
The post Candlewick is back in Cambridge appeared first on The Horn Book.
but a little hard to reach. Boston was barely brushed by Sandy–we had wind and some rain but never lost power–but our email server sits in Soho in a currently shuttered building. Our LJ and SLJ colleagues are all working from home (or friends’ homes!) via the web, Twitter, Facebook and cell phone. Prayers and [...]
Henry Cole’s Unspoken: A Story from the Underground Railroad (see the Review of the Week, by Betty Carter) presented us with some very complicated questions. It’s a terrific and intriguing book, a wordless, pencil-illustrated tale of a young girl feeding and protecting a person hiding behind the cornstalks in her family’s barn; soldiers and a [...]
