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SLJ’s Battle of the Books has begun, with Kenneth Oppel judging Wonder v. Bomb. After Margarita Engle finishes with Code Name Verity v. Titanic tomorrow, I’ll weigh in on who was the better judge. Preliminary cavil: I’m a little bothered by Oppel’s ambiguous use of the word “faultlessly.” I spent most of yesterday at home, [...]
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The Morning News started its tournament of books yesterday with a match between Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. I thought the critic, Edan Lepucki, did a great job of assessing each book’s strengths and shortcomings and coming up with a winner. Today, the match between Adam Johnson’s [...]
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It’s Women’s History Month and thus the Kidlit Celebrates Women’s History Month blog is back. I’ll be over there later this month to write about our beloved Bertha; but go over there now to see accounts of the likes of Emily Brontë, Julia Morgan, and Temple Grandin. On a related note, I’ve been enjoying my [...]
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The March/April issue of the Horn Book Magazine just arrived in my office and it looks great. Unfortunately, the printer had a traffic jam (although telling me enthusiastically about how much work your plant is getting means nothing to me if MY WORK ISN’T GETTING DONE) and the issue is being mailed out only this [...]
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For COLLEGE. Ruta Sepetys and Penguin Young Readers Group are running an essay contest in conjunction with the release of Ruta’s new book, Out of the Easy, a tale of growing up in the French Quarter of 1950s New Orleans. The prize is $5000 toward college; full details can be found at the Out of [...]
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The Morning News has begun its Tournament of Books, and SLJ is slated to begin its Battle of the Books on March 12th. I was pleased to see that the Morning News has already taken the gloves off, with Nathan Bradley calling The Yellow Birds a “slathering of wan cliches,” and I hope the SLJ [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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!)
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