News & Features

This is Sonia Sotomayor’s 8th week on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list, up to #4 from #5 last week. (Sandra Day O’Connor’s book, Out of Order, debuts at #11.) I am particularly excited to write about My Beloved World this week because I recently had a chance to booktalk it to a [...]

Picture book author Jon Klassen, Little, Brown editor Susan Rich, and Little, Brown Art Director Patti Ann Harris at the Little, Brown picture book celebration.

National Poetry Month is nigh, and I’m posting a book spine poem every Friday until April. Want to try it? Maybe give it a shot with kids? Click here for some tips on creating your own. If you do give it a go, take a picture and post it to your blog, or send it [...]

As a part of YALSA’s year-long National Forum on Libraries & Teens project, the association is sponsoring three virtual town halls via its Adobe Connect space. The first session, scheduled for March 19 at 2:00 PM ET, will focus on partnerships. As facilitator Linda Braun explains, library staff are encouraged to invite stakeholders from their communities to join the conversation. YALSO also be using Twitter (#yalsaforum) and Facebook to encourage participation.

It’s March, and do you know what that means? It means the March/April 2013 Edition of  Horn Book is available! Making this more exciting than usual, at least for me, is what can be found on page 47: “Reading: It’s More Than Meets The Eye, Making books accessible to print-disabled children” by “Elizabeth Burns.” Yes, [...]

Award-winning poet, author, and photographer Nancy Wood, who devoted her career to exploring the culture and lives of the Native American people of the Southwest, died this week in Santa Fe, NM.

Twenty-five years after its publication, Matilda (Viking, 1988) is still high on the list of Roald Dahl’s most beloved children’s books. This anniversary year, it really gets the star treatment, with a new Broadway musical, a new edition of the book, and continued accolades from critics who are discovering (or rediscovering) the quirky heroine, her author, and her illustrator.

 

Endangered by Elliot Schrefer Scholastic Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage Dial/Penguin Judged by Kathi Appelt

 

 

Set these two books side by side, and with the exception of their trim sizes, it would be difficult to find anything about them that is similar.  But once I sat back and let the full impact of both stories settle in, I realized that they had more in common than one might imagine.  For one, they both feature orphans.

One is the story of an orphaned girl, raised on the bayou by a quirky cast of townsfolk.  The other is the story of a displaced girl raised in the jungle by a cast of orphaned bonobos.  (Okay, I promise, that’s the end of my cleverness).

Both stories have strong narrative voices, told in the first person past tense.  Mo LoBeau, of Tupelo Landing, is the natural sister of so many well-loved middle grade heroes.  One can’t help but read her and conjure up Opal, Frankie and Turtle. She shares their attributes as well:  pluck, smarts, and gumption.  It’s easy to get on her side from the very opening pages, and the reader is literally lifted through the story by the buoyancy of the language.  This book was written in my native tongue, and it made my ears happy to hear it.

Sophie’s voice, in Endangered, is not nearly so dear.  Hers is older, and more melancholy.  But it is just as distinct.  In it, are the echoes of …

» Continue Reading: Round 1, Match 3: Endangered vs Three Times Lucky

Smartphone adoption among American teens has increased substantially in the past year, and one in four teens now connects to the internet primarily on mobile devices, according to a national technology-based report from the Pew Research Center.