Roger Sutton

Back from New York, where I spent Saturday morning at Bank Street College talking about book reviewing with my sisters at SLJ (Luann Toth), Kirkus (Vicky Smith), and the New York Times (Sarah Harrison Smith). We talked about numbers of books (too many), lengths of books (too long) and the thinking involved in matching the […]

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                Saturday morning AT THE UNGODLY HOUR OF 9:00AM I’ll be joining my book reviewing sisters Sarah Smith (NYTBR) Vicky Smith (Kirkus) and Luann Toth (SLJ) for a panel discussion of book reviewing at Bank Street College in New York. I hope you can join us.

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I saw Ender’s Game last weekend and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. What impressed me most was how much a true children’s movie it is; like Asa Butterfield’s (Ender) previous movie Hugo, Ender’s Game neither winks over children’s heads to an adult audience nor sexes things up for putative YA interest. Although […]

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Peter Gutierrez has an excellent essay up over at SLJ about the calls to boycott the just-opening film adaptation of Ender’s Game. As Gutierrez points out and The Wrap confirms in greater detail, a boycott of the film has no impact on Card’s wallet–what you need to do is get people to stop buying his […]

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School Library Journal threw a nice party for retiring Book Review Editor Trevelyn T. Jones in the Louis L’Amour room at Random House on Tuesday night. It was so great to see Trev, who has been indefatigable for the past thirty years–I first worked with her when I was  a reviewer for SLJ in the […]

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If you’re free and in Boston Wednesday night, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion of the Common Core State Standards for Bookbuilders of Boston. Other panelists include Simmons GSLIS prof Amy Pattee and educational publishing consultant Steve Pekich; the program runs from 6:00-8:00PM at 501 Boylston Street in Copley Square. Bring ID to get […]

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I’m still thinking about “literary fiction” and what it might mean in the context of books for young people. The National Book Awards named their shortlist of finalists yesterday, and I’m guessing those lucky ducks can serve as at least a pretty good approximation of what researchers Kidd and Castano were looking for when they [...]

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Congratulations to Alice Munro. What should I read by her? You might guess from that question that I am not the world’s heaviest lifter of “literary fiction,” and am not even sure I know it when I see it. The New York Times recently reported on a study published in Science which purported to suggest [...]

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