Illustration by E. B. Lewis from Jacqueline Woodson’s The Other Side.
Courtesy of Weston Woods.

Another school year is on the horizon and our focus this month highlights the relationships that children and teens make—with other kids and with adults—to help them navigate the stormy waters of growing up. Teachers and librarians have always been savvy about connecting kids to stories that engage with what is going on in their lives. Current research from the Search Institute of Minneapolis, Minnesota, an organization that addresses critical issues in education and youth development to discover what kids need to succeed, zeroes in on developmental relationships “to understand how the connections that kids form with peers and adults influence their mastery of the skills and habits that are essential for success in school and in life.” (http://ow.ly/m6yNM)

The 10 titles we’ve chosen will be excellent for group listening and for generating discussions about what’s happening to the young people in the stories, from the poignant depiction of friendship in The Other Side to the real drama wrought by abuse in Eleanor and Park.

These audiobooks not only provide important group literary opportunities, they also help students understand how to develop the empathy necessary to build healthy relationships. If time for group listening is limited, have students select titles, listen to them on their own, and write about them; they will still develop that needed empathy, and they’ll also practice the critical writing skills found in so many state and national learning standards, including the following examples:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.6.3 Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for English Language Arts and Reading, Grade 5, 110.16 The student is expected to: (F) make connections (e.g., thematic links, author analysis) between and across multiple texts of various genres and provide textual evidence). (http://ow.ly/mkgJN)

English Standards of Learning (SOL) for Virginia, Writing, Grade 8, 8.7 The student will write in a variety of forms, including narration, exposition, persuasion, and informational. (d) Organize details to elaborate the central idea and provide unity. (http://ow.ly/mkggo)

From left: Emily Danforth, R. J. Palacio, Ellis Weiner, J. Anderson Coats

It was R.J. Palacio’s brief encounter with a little girl who had a facial deformity that motivated the author to finish her first book.

“This girl was seared in my mind,” says Palacio, whose Wonder (Knopf, 2012) was released earlier this year to critical acclaim.

Palacio and three other first-time children’s book authors spoke at the “Stellar Debuts: Celebrating new and noteworthy arrivals to the publishing scene” panel during SLJ‘s Day of Dialog on June 4 at New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Center.

Five years ago, Palacio says, she and her two young children sat next to a girl who looks like Auggie, the fifth grade main character in her book, about an ordinary kid with an extraordinary face who’s about to enter a mainstream school for the first time. “My youngest son, who was three at the time, started crying. And my oldest son looked shell shocked.” Palacio and her kids fled the scene in a hurry, but it “ignited this well of feeling in me, and I thought what life must be like for them.”

A graphic designer by day, Palacio says writing Wonder was cathartic and “a giant act of atonement” because she wishes she would have acted in a “kinder way.”

Ellis Weiner, a writer since 1976, says he was inspired to write for kids after reading a description of pasta puttanesca in Lemony Snicket’s first book. “I wanted to write something funny,” says the author of The Templeton Twins Have an Idea (Chronicle), about the hilarious and wacky adventures of 12-year-old twins. “But if I wrote a comic novel for adults, I’d have a small readership-and a small advance.” Weiner ended up putting a full recipe for meatloaf in his book.

J. Anderson Coats’s says she’s been writing since she was 13, but the 11 previous attempts “were awful.” When she wrote her debut novel The Wicked and the Just (Houghton Harcourt), about two feisty teens in 13th-century Wales, she thought it would never be seen. “But I consciously chose to write something the way it needed to be told.”

The voices in her novel “come from a geeky place: research,” say the author, explaining that her book is about an obscure event in history, the violent and bloody 1293 Welsh rebellion. “I listened for voices that emerged,” says Coats. “The characters [in her book] come from history, but I had to make it accessible for a modern audience.”

When asked if she had an audience in mind or just wrote her book hoping it would find a readership, Emily Danforth says The Miseducation of Cameron Post (HarperCollins), a coming-of-age novel about a girl who had been kissing another girl hours before her parents die in a car crash, stemmed from the “gay 14-year-old me.”

“I would have benefitted from Cam’s story,” says Danforth, who received her MFA from the University of Montana and initially wrote her novel as a short story. “But I only write for me, initially.”

Inspired by the book, about a fifth grader named Auggie who has a facial deformity and attends a mainstream school for the first time, the website offers a place where readers can share their experiences—either as victim, bully, or bystander—and pledge to combat the nationwide rise in bullying with every day acts of kindness.

“Celebrating those who have made the choice to be kind—not always an easy thing to do when you’re a kid!—is the best way to raise awareness to this very simple fact: kindness is a virtue whose ripple effects can literally change the world,” says Palacio (pictured below), whose debut novel is now a New York Times bestseller. “One child at a time, one person at a time, there’s no greater antidote to bullying than the steadfast refusal of children, teachers, and parents to accept a culture where bullying is tolerated.”

Choose Kind was designed for fans and supporters of the novel who’ve asked for additional resources to use when sharing the book and its message with families, schools, and communities across the country. Each section of the site offers an interactive user experience, where people can share a post, ranging from personal experiences of being bullied to moments where they wished they had stood up for someone else. Librarians can download lesson plans and a digital toolkit that offers printable stickers and web badges, as well as links to other anti-bullying efforts like the National Bullying Prevention Center, the It Gets Better project, and the National Education Association’s Bully Free: It Starts with Me. They can also sign an online pledge to Choose Kind as a way to end bullying and print a certificate to display in the classroom. Also available are a video trailer of Wonder, many reviews, and links to the novel’s social media channels. Random House UK, which published the book in March, and publishes Wonder for adult readers on June 6th, 2012, has joined the effort as well.

“Wonder has inspired us, and captured our hearts entirely,” says Chip Gibson, president and publisher of Random House Children’s Books. “The outpouring of enthusiasm from book lovers and educators moved us to share the poignant message of this novel with a wider audience. I am proud to give them-and anyone around the world-the opportunity to discover the story and to pledge with us to Choose Kind.”

SLJ‘s starred review of Wonder describes it as a well-written, thought-provoking, fast read that would be a great “discussion starter about love, support, and judging people on their appearance.” And the book has done just that in the few short months since its February release.

News of the novel spread quickly by word-of-mouth through its Twitter hashtag, #thewonderofwonder and its Facebook page, and the buzz grew as it became the topic of blog posts from parents, teachers, and librarians praising its universal message of empathy and kindness. There’s even talk about it being a frontrunner for the 2013 Newbery Medal.

“Put this [book] in every school library everywhere, please! Every library anywhere, really,” wrote Nicole Johnston on Betsy Bird’s SLJ blog, which ranked Wonder #65 of the top 100 Children’s Novels. “What I think it does best is create a magnifying glass that shows us how we react to differences through the frank and honest perspective of various kids’ voices.”

The Associated Press interviewed Clara Beatty, a nine-year-old girl with Treacher-Collins Syndrome, for a story and she already was reading Wonder. Her parents Janet and Eric said they were impressed with Palacio’s ability to realistically portray Auggie’s experience, noting “As a family with a child of facial difference, Wonder gives an amazingly accurate view of our world from a number of perspectives. We are hopeful that this story raises awareness of how being kind can be powerful.”

Be sure to check out our interview with Palacio, who is one of our guest speakers at SLJ‘s Day of Dialog on Monday, June 4 at New York City’s Jacob Javits Convention Center, where she’ll talk about the book and its new campaign as part of our “Stellar Debuts” panel discussion focusing on new and noteworthy arrivals to the publishing scene.