News

For those who can’t wait two more weeks to see Catching Fire, relief is at hand. The taut How I Live Now offers a slimmed down dystopian world at its most bucolic—a survival tale meets hot-and-heavy first love with a punkish swagger. The screenwriters have tweaked the snarky-but-soft-hearted narration of Meg Rosoff’s absorbing novel (Random, 2004), but given the heroine a still-defiant voice.

American students’ skill levels in mathematics and reading have risen marginally since 2011, according to the National Center for Education Statistics . However, The Nation’s Report Card: 2013 Mathematics and Reading shows challenges to student success remain. Gains in reading have not quite kept pace with those in math, and achievement gaps are still evident between racial/ethnic groups and among states.

SLJ has compiled an expansive page of diversity resources—including materials on people of color, non-American cultures, LGBTQ issues, and disability—to help librarians better serve children and teens. From author interviews to collection development tools and from blogs to news coverage, these articles and reviews aim to give insight into issues that are becoming more relevant for kids each day.

Roxie Munro has created a number of maze books; here she takes that concept and turns it into a puzzle app that offers both depth and detail for a range of ages.

The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater. Book II of the Raven Cycle. Sequel to Book I – The Raven Boys. Scholastic. 2013. Reviewed from ARC. The Plot: In Book I, Blue Sargent became friends with the “Raven Boys” — Richard Campbell Gansey III, Ronan Lynch, Adam Parrish, and Noah Czarny. All had become involved in [...]

Can you guess the classic children’s book by its scathing one-star review on Goodreads or Amazon? I really did not like this book. As a parent I couldn’t comprehend having to send my child to some work camp in the desert, I understand that it was just a plain old good story telling, but the [...]

Being able to easily locate LGBTQ-friendly materials for children is an important task for librarians seeking to support their diverse reading communities. Kids must be given opportunities to explore literature from multiple points of view, yet it’s sometimes challenging to meet this need, especially for grades 3–5.

If the "Harry Potter" books opened up fantasy for generations of readers, what will be the "gateway drug" for nonfiction readers? The author considers Jonathan Hunt's question.

Recently, I’ve reconsidered that element of human experience called interest, thanks to Annie Murphy Paul and Mimi Ito. Murphy Paul is a journalist covering cognitive science and Ito, a cultural anthropologist, is a proponent of the Connected Learning concept, but their ideas both relate to the power of interest, and the impact on kids when it is fostered.