Books & Media

YALSA and Dollar General Literacy Foundation are offering two $1,000 grants for Summer Reading programs: one for employing a teen intern and another for purchasing resources. The Library of Congress has launched a new Twitter feed for K–12 educators which can be found @TeachingLC. ALSC members are encouraged to send suggestions for the 2013 Theodor Geisel Award to the committee chair, Penny Peck. Capstone Interactive ebooks are now compatible with the Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

The Aerosmurf Written and drawn by Peyo Papercutz, $5.99 The latest volume of Papercutz’s welcome translations and publication of Peyo’s Smurfs comics takes its title from the name of the first story in the 56-page collection, but this one (the sixteenth in the series, already!) is much more of an anthology than some of the [...]

Wild Awake, Hilary T. Smith Katherine Tegen Books, May 2013 Reviewed from ARC Nominate in haste, repent at leisure? Well, not quite. But… I’m not entirely surprised no one, in effect, seconded this one. Wild Awake is a debut, and while I don’t have a full sense of the year’s debut slate, from what I’ve [...]

Scholastic has announced that it is donating one million books to Reach Out and Read, the nonprofit organization that helps implement early-childhood literacy awareness during a child’s regular medical office visits. The donation comes just a day after Reach Out and Read was recognized by the Library of Congress as the recipient of the new David M. Rubenstein Prize for advancing literacy.

An idyllic trip ends when Somalian pirates size a yacht and hold the family onboard for ransom.

The second volume of Benny Breakiron, the other comic by Smurfs creator Peyo, is out next week, and here’s the 411: Madame Adolphine is a kind, gentle old lady, and a good friend of the super-strong Benny Breakiron. So why is she robbing a bank, banging a man on the head with a mallet, and [...]

The Different Girl, Gordon Dahlquist Dutton Children’s, Feb 2013 Reviewed from ARC Let’s talk about voice (bay-bee), because this book features one of the strongest I’ve come across. (And before you hit the jump, please remember that we do spoilers here. All the time. So if you are reading on and you haven’t read the [...]

Acclaimed author/illustrator Kevin Henkes spoke to a live audience at Bank Street College of Education in New York City on September 17. The event, which coincided with the publication date of his latest children's book The Year of Billy Miller, was also broadcasted to classrooms and libraries across the country.

Amy Cheney is constantly on the look-out for books that will engage her incarcerated teens, but estimates that only about one in five that she encounters will pass muster. That's why she is so excited about a new self-published title, From Crack to College & Vice Versa.