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Katie Bircher and Elissa Gershowitz bring you our annual list of summer reading recommendations for kids. Strictly recreational, of course, and librarians are welcome to place a “COMMON-CORE FREE!” sticker on the PDF. What about your own reading? I’m juggling audio editions of The Woman Upstairs and Inferno on my phone; The Oracle Glass and [...]
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I had a great time at the Children’s Literature Council of Southern California Spring Workshop last Saturday in South Pasadena. Kristin Fontichiaro and I each spoke about the Common Core State Standards, she offering a great perspective on the ways school and public librarians can support CCSS curriculums while I pondered what effects and implications [...]
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There’s a provocative new comment over on Yolanda Hare’s “Beyond the Friends.” It has me wondering if the CSK awards ever suffer from Newberyitis, where some kids see the sticker and think, “oh, this is one of those books that’s supposed to be good for you.” Because light escapist fare they ain’t. (Nor are they [...]
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From Dr. Robert Needlman explaining the difference between babies falling asleep and learning how to go to asleep, through Cambridge librarians Julie Roach and Beth McIntyre coaching us through selecting books for preschool story time to Anna Dewdney using photographs to demonstrate how to transform unpleasant expressions on family members faces into picture book gold, [...]
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We mourn the death (last Friday) of E.L. Konigsburg, who never wrote a book I didn’t want to read. (Not that I love them all, but even where she went wrong, she did so magnetically.) I remember a slightly uneasy conversation with Konigsburg’s editor Jean Karl right after Elaine had won her second Newbery Medal [...]
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Boston was certainly an eerie place last Friday. I had gone to bed early the night before, missing all the news about the pursuit of the bombers, and was catching up early Friday morning when the news flashed across my phone that the T was shut down. I texted the Horn Book staff to wait [...]
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Thanks to all who have emailed, called, texted or tweeted their concern for our safety and well-being. We are all fine. The attack coincided with an all-staff conference call with our New York colleagues, so I didn’t find out about it until later in the day when information was available but fragmentary and spookily fact-free, [...]
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Llama Llama… author-illustrator and rock star to preschoolers Anna Dewdney will be our special guest at the Fostering Lifelong Learners conference on April 25th, joining in the conversation about making and sharing great books for preschoolers. Here are five questions for her. 1.What did your own children teach you about creating books for preschoolers? My [...]
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When I first started reading on my Kindle with some regularity, I would assiduously report typos and formatting issues via the “report content error” option you can get via highlighting a word (other options include looking up the word in a dictionary, which is handy indeed). When you tattletale on a misspelled word, you get [...]
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Cambridge Public Library youth services manager (and Horn Book reviewer) Julie Roach will be discussing library services for preschool children at our Fostering Lifelong Learners event (free; you should come) at CPL on April 25th. I asked her to share some of her thoughts on serving this (very) particular audience. (I think her answer to [...]
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In international news, French President François Hollande announced today that in gratitude for our loan of Elizabeth Law to La Ville-Lumière, he is sending some of his country’s most esteemed illustrateurs to New York City for a series of public pourparlers avec some of our own. Here’s the full lineup and schedule.
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The winner of our first, and most likely last, Judging the BoB Judges (if this features DOES come back we need a snappier name) contest is Martine Leavitt. For her enthusiasm, her no-dithering policy, and her frankness about her own reading tastes: “[Endangered] has a happy ending, too. Was it too happy? Not for me. [...]
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Our third round is a three way, comprising BoB’s two-semifinal rounds (Lynne Rae Perkins judging Bomb and The Fault in Our Stars; James Patterson doing the same for No Crystal Stair and Splendors and Glooms) and the Big Kahuna round (Frank Cottrell Boyce judging The Fault in Our Stars, No Crystal Stair and the resurrected [...]
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At our upcoming Fostering Lifelong Learners: Prescribing Books for Early Childhood Education conference, Horn Book Guide Executive Editor Kitty Flynn will be leading a presentation about how the Horn Book evaluates and reviews preschool books. This is one aspect of her work that also engages her off the clock: Kitty and her husband are parents [...]
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Did anyone see the recent episode of Project Runway where they designed tearaway clothes for strippers? BOTH teams lost. I wish we could do the same here. Pitting Starry River of the Sky against Splendors and Glooms, Thanhha Lai incomprehensibly evokes a video game junkie “from, say, Dallas” to say that both books work as “entertainment.” [...]
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We’re onto the second round of the BoB, with Donna Jo Napoli choosing between Code Name Verity and Bomb, and Martine Leavitt adjudicating Endangered v. The Fault in Our Stars. Napoli has already been called out for including spoilers to Code Name Verity (while, hilariously, saying “I won’t spoil it for you”) but I don’t [...]
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The following books will receive starred reviews in the forthcoming May/June issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Crankee Doodle; by Tom Angleberger; illus. by Cece Bell (Clarion). Picture a Tree; written and illustrated by Barbara Reid (Whitman). That is NOT a Good Idea!; written and illustrated by by Mo Willems (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins). Bo at Ballard Creek; by Kirkpatrick [...]
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