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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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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) [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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?) [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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: [...]
