News & Features

Rocco Staino, SLJ’s contributing editor, offers an insider’s look of the filming of Scholastic’s spring 2014 preview video, which will reveal “38 Books in 38 Minutes” from more than a dozen authors on November 13. Staino also had a few moments to chat with Sharon Robinson, picture book author and daughter of legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson, and her mother, Rachel.

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 [...]

A parent in Marietta, Georgia, has lodged a complaint with his local school board about the inclusion of Hena Khan’s picture book Golden Domes and Silver Lanterns: A Muslim Book of Colors at his daughter’s Scholastic Book Fair on October 17. Thomas Prisock claims that the book is “an indoctrination of Muslim culture,” according to the The Marietta Daily Journal.

Animals with transparent guts! Fish that make their own light! An underwater bird? Booktalk audiences hungry for adventure and monsters can find both in remarkable books on marine mysteries. While the following titles are aimed at fourth grade and above, even younger readers will find the pictures irresistible.

Star Wars: Jedi Academy Written and drawn by Jeffrey Brown Scholastic, $12.99 Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown made a name for himself in the 2000s with a series of self-published black-and-white, highly confessional autobiographical graphic novels, like Clumsy, Unlikely and AEIOU. More recently, Brown has made many more fans with his Darth Vader & Son and Vader’s [...]

The Silver Six By AJ Lieberman Illustrated by Darren Rawlings Graphix (Scholastic) ISBN: 9780545370981 $10.99 Grades 4-7 In Stores Find it at: Schuler Books | Your Library Go ahead and take a look at your graphic novel collection. What do you see? Fantasy, definitely. Superheroes galore. Some adventure too. Question: Do you see any science [...]

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.

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.

After the storms last spring devastated the Moore (OK) community, Capstone recently sent a shipment of 3,000-plus books to support the city’s two elementary schools, Briarwood Elementary and Plaza Towers Elementary.