February 17, 2013

Fly blind, suggests Susan

Illustration by Amy Wasserman.

Horn Book reviewer Susan Dove Lempke writes about being a proud defender of spoilers who met her Kryptonite in Code Name Verity. I recently listened to the fabulous audio edition of the book, and, despite, knowing how everything would turn out, found myself so taken in by the voice that I kept hoping the book [...]

Which would YOU rather read?

  Personally, I find the ARC cover more to my liking (and truer to the story), and the final art makes the book look like it’s about an angel who moonlights as a stripper. But then, I’m not a fourteen-year-old girl.

Eat up

Lolly just brought me a copy of the November/December Horn Book Magazine and I must say it looks like candy, all chocolate and caramel and cream. Yum. May print never die.

Calling all wolves

Calling all wolves

  Joan Aiken’s daughter Lizza is hosting an evening in New York to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. You should go. The anniversary has also prompted a new audio edition of the novel (Listening Library) about which Martha says: “I’ve just started listening to it, narrated by Joan Aiken’s daughter [...]

Will the Common Core open the door

to the crazies? I worry that the Core’s laudable emphasis on teaching children how to evaluate information and arguments will inadvertently fuel the cry to “teach the controversy” about natural selection.   (Neat Neptune and other freethinking t-shirts can be found here.)

Apres la guerre

Pursuant to an article coming up next year in the Magazine, we were having an old discussion today: how do teen readers feel about downer endings? Conventional professional wisdom has long been that teens themselves and open-minded adults applaud (where appropriate) an “uncompromising” conclusion to a book, and only conservative, rigid adults who don’t like [...]

Let me give you what you’ve been waiting for

Elissa and Katie have begun uploading our reports and photos from the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards and Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium this past weekend. Aside from having to periodically remind people to speak into their microphones, the two days went very smoothly. The highlight for me was a panel I moderated for HBAS with [...]

Thom speaks

Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards chair Thom Barthelmess talks to Nina and Jonathan over at Heavy Metal. Thom and his fellow judges (Lauren Adams and Megan Lambert) will be in town Friday for the Awards and Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium. I think it’s a lot more work being a BGHB judge than it was when [...]

November/December starred reviews

The following books will receive starred reviews in the November/December 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?; by Debi Gliori (Walker) Little Tug; by Stephen Savage (Porter/Roaring Brook) Abe Lincoln’s Dream; by Lane Smith (Roaring Brook) Pinned; by Sharon G. Flake (Scholastic) My Book of Life by Angel; by Martine Leavitt (Ferguson/Farrar) Starry River of the Sky; by Grace Lin (Little, Brown) [...]

When parents are pigs

SLJ’s Kathy Ishizuka links to a recent study suggesting that parents prefer to share print books rather than ebooks with their young children. Who could disapprove, really, but I wish the researchers had looked a little harder at their finding that 30% of parents don’t read ebooks with their children because then the brats will [...]

Finding the work-home balance

Batman-NYCC297

Simultaneously trying to read, for work, Clare Vanderpool’s forthcoming Navigating Early (about two troubled boys in boarding school), and trying to read, for fun, Denise Mina’s latest The End of the Wasp Season (about two troubled boys in boarding school) has me positively confuzzilated. So far, Mina’s boys are in much bigger trouble, but they [...]

While Texas pageant queens weep (carefully)

I feel like we should send this guy a copy of this book.

Go visit Nina and Jonathan

As we get Calling Caldecott ready to rev today, I must also remind you to keep tabs on Heavy Medal, SLJ‘s blog on the race to the Newbery, run by Nina Lindsay and Jonathan Hunt. Jonathan has just posted on Wonder, a book that got starred reviews just about everywhere but here. So good to [...]

Calling Caldecott back on the hunt tomorrow

Lolly Robinson and Robin Smith will inaugurate this season of the Calling Caldecott blog tomorrow, and I know that the questions posed in the logo (What can win? What will win? What should win?) will provide plenty of discussion. At the HBAS colloquium later this month, I’m going to be talking to Erin Stead, Phil [...]

Strike that

The Chicago teachers’ strike is reminding me of one of the more embarrassing moments of my professional career. I was working at Chicago Public Library  as the manager of a small branch on the North Side, and there was a teacher’s strike. According to the news, CPL was offering alternative programming for children at all [...]

Apologies

Apologies to all who tried to come here or elsewhere on our website this weekend only to be greeted with warnings of MALWARE. We quickly determined that this was a false alarm, but getting Google to drop the warning pages took some time and doing. (Who knew Google could thus hold one in its thrall?) [...]

Democrats are up

novelrock

Now that the Young Republicans’ Club has chosen its ticket, the Democrats are off and running. Far more of them to wade through (why IS that?*) but the Party has thinned the herd down to four potential candidates who will be presenting their platforms this week. First up, Octavian Nothing. *Really, why? I think I [...]

Vote!

Everybody gets a vote in the Horn Book elections! The Repubs are nominating this week and the Dems the next. Don’t miss our election coverage as it develops.

and Joan Allen still gets the best lines

Having loved the original trilogy so much, I had some misgivings about seeing The Bourne Legacy, with Jeremy Renner picking up where Matt Damon left off. Not quite–one of the neatest things about this movie is that for its largest part it takes place at the same time as The Bourne Ultimatum, the last of [...]

Look Out!

We’re taking registrations for the 2012 Horn Book at Simmons colloquium, and I hope you can attend. Following the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards ceremony and reception (to which all colloquium participants are invited), we will be spending a day with the BGHB honorees examining their books in the many lights of this year’s colloquium theme: [...]