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Whenever I hear the first couple seconds of 50 Cent’s In Da Club on a Saturday night, my first instinct is to get up and visit the bookstore to purchase children’s books. Above is my most recent haul – a mix of gap-fills, extra copies, and new high-interesty selections. Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life Last [...]

Neil Gaiman's bestselling urban fantasy novel Neverwhere is still available to students at the library at New Mexico’s Alamogordo High School, despite recent news reports that it is “banned,” the school’s librarian and media specialist Vicki Bertolino tells SLJ. The district is currently accepting written public comments ahead of its planned review of the book’s literary merit.

Teen Read Week, YALSA's annual national adolescent literacy initiative, was held this year from October 13-19. Librarians who serve teens organized events, displays, and programs to encourage them to be lifelong readers and library users. This year's theme, "Seek the Unknown @ your library," is illustrated in this terrarium based on Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Boys, created by Molly Wetta of Lawrence Public Library, Kansas.

Teen Read Week (TRW) kicked off with a lively Twitter chat among supporters of teen literacy and leisure reading on October 15. SLJ, Blink, Goodreads, Merit Press, Soho Teen, and AASL participated in the hour-long virtual conversation, highlighting ways librarians can help celebrate teen reading. The following are some of the tweets that resonated with SLJ editors.

School librarians are currently an endangered species in Houston—and the future doesn’t look very bright. Decisions in the district on librarian staffing levels are left to the principals, with no mandates at the district level for certified media specialists in the schools. The result? A dramatic decline in the number of these professionals serving students in Houston, according to the Texas Education Agency.

An awe-inspiring new app from Touch Press offers a look at the history of animation through all 53 of Disney's animated productions. For students, there's a lot to learn here about crafting a good story in any medium.

Three friends who want to leave high school and move on describe their anguish in Emma Cameron’s novel, Out of This Place, written in verse. Three narrators tell the story from alternating points of view in this audiobook version. Read this starred review

Can you guess the classic children’s book by its scathing one-star review on GoodReads or Amazon? I found this book incredibly frightening for a child. It should only be read to 4th or 5th grade students due to its graphic content. The premise of playing a dangerous game because one is being forced to is [...]