News & Features

The Lockwood Lions crosstown rivals, the Grovehill Giants, seem to have it all. Or do they? When the cheer squad and the football players get together, it always gets intense. But there are two sides to every story—whose side are you on? Five lucky winners will get a collection of leveled readers, including the new Truly Fine/Forever Hot from Saddleback.

Meet Isol.  Incredibly badass Isol.  The fact that you may not know her name instantly is a crime.  We Americans are fairly . . . how to put this . . . screamingly awful about paying attention to authors and illustrators from other countries.  Isol won the most recent Astrid Lindgren Award, but she’s hardly [...]

Can you guess the classic children’s book by its scathing one-star review on GoodReads or Amazon? Why on earth would I want my child to rub her fingers on another man’s sandpaper beard? Click here for the answer. One Star Review Guess Who (#1) One Star Review Guess Who (#2) One Star Review Guess Who [...]

MARC SIMONT (1915-2013) Sad news to start things off. Legendary children’s book creator Marc Simont has passed away. School Library Journal reflects on the Caldecott winner’s life and work. WHY I BANNED A BOOK Real headline alert! Mansfield University library banned a book by a local author (and Mansfield employee) Dennis Miller as an experiment [...]

It’s official. Gum Spring Library is no longer the new kid in town. And now the realization that tweens are the most frequent Teen Center users has forced staff to look more closely at upcoming programs.

Many popular fanfiction stories are based on books that can be found in school libraries: The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, and, of course, Harry Potter. For most fanfiction authors, though, that’s where the connection between fanfiction and school ends: they've never been asked by a teacher or librarian about their out-of-school writing.

Kelly Jensen of Stacked has started writing for Book Riot and her latest, What Are Grown-Ups Afraid Of In YA Books, does not disappoint. Kelly has a nice, nuanced post that points to several recent examples of adults fretting over the books teen read. Read the whole post; I particularly liked “when you fear the [...]

Late fall 2012, SLJTeen editor Dodie Ownes was introduced to Somebody Up There Hates You by YA debut author Hollis Seamon. Her first thought was, “Oh no, a riff on The Fault in Our Stars.” But that never really should have been a concern.

Linda Lord, Maine’s state librarian, represented the nation’s 16,400 public libraries Wednesday in her call to Congress to provide a “proactive vision for meeting the educational and learning needs of our communities for the next 15 years and beyond.” Her testimony—at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation—also detailed the success of the E-rate program in helping serve more than 30 million people every week.