Horn Book Recommended Fantasy Books

There's a long list of recommended fantasy books on the Horn Book blog today, ranging from picture books and primary to fiction for intermediate and older readers (all published within the last several years). Here are some of my favorites from each category, most of which I meant to review when they first came out!

Picture books
The Boy in the Garden by Allen Say (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). A beautiful garden, a bronze statue, a Japanese folktale come to life. I'm always interested in Allen Say's work, and this is particularly lovely. I couldn't remember having seen any other picture books by Say since this one, but it looks like The Favorite Daughter (Arthur A. Levine) just came out on May 28; maybe I will review that one!

Primary
Earwig and the Witch by Diana Wynne Jones (Greenwillow, 2012). A great introduction to DWJ and a Baba Yaga story to boot. Ordinarily I love Paul Zelinsky's illustrations, too, but these are a little creepy. Maybe that's why we preferred the audio.

Intermediate
I love middle grade, but apart from A Cabinet of Earths by Anne Nesbet (HarperCollins, 2012; how have I not written about Cabinet here? I've already read the sequel, A Box of Gargoyles), I'm not too excited about the books on this list. Sage Blackwood's Jinx is on it, at least.

Older fiction
Perhaps I've aged into this category. I loved everything about Seraphina by Rachel Hartman (Random House, 2012), and there are quite a few others here I also enjoyed. Not to mention one I'm reading right now: A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty (Levine/Scholastic, 2013). Review to follow, really.

How to Draw a Bear

I love the Guardian's How to draw... series by children's book illustrators. Today it's Jon Klassen with "How to draw...a bear thinking about something." The finished bear will look familiar if you've seen Klassen's I Want My Hat Back (Candlewick, 2011); I was under the impression that the bear in that book was rendered digitally, but you can draw (or rather paint) your own with brown ink or watercolor. After the success of the Oliver Jeffers-inspired moose, I think we will try to paint some Klassen bears this weekend. What do bears think about?

Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon's children's books

Peggy Bacon was an American artist and printmaker who also wrote and illustrated a lot of charming children's books--one of which, The Ghost of Opalina (Little, Brown, 1967), is reviewed today at Charlotte's Library. I was curious about Bacon and delighted to discover that she's the subject of an exhibition, Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon, now showing at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art (I haven't seen it yet; the photograph is by Michael Barnes, from a Virtual tour of the exhibition on Peggy's Facebook page).

The exhibition focuses on Bacon's connections to people in the art world, but I wonder if we could do the same thing for children's books? Bacon herself illustrated books by everyone from Lloyd Alexander (My Five Tigers: The cats in my life; Thomas Y. Crowell, 1956) to Betsy Byars (Rama the Gypsy Cat; Viking, 1966--I still have my childhood copy of this one, fortunately). She seems to have been the go-to illustrator for cats in the 1950s and 60s, and a fascinating person besides. More Peggy Bacon, please!

Best Horn Book Cover Ever?

My long-awaited copy of the January/February 2012 issue of The Horn Book arrived today and it is gorgeous.  The cover illustration is by Salley Mavor, who illustrated the 2011 Boston Globe-Horn Book picture book award winner, Pocketful of Posies: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; link is to my review). You can see and read more about the process of making the cover illustration (I love the way she renders the Horn Book logo in particular. Also the little girl dressed as a lamb) and enter a poster giveaway on Salley's blog, or just order your poster directly from The Horn Book.

I've been a Horn Book subscriber for two years now (the inside of the magazine is just as good). Other favorite covers are Marla Frazee's hollow tree (May/June 2011), which also appears in her illustrations for the picture book Stars by Mary Lyn Ray (Beach Lane Books, 2011); and Anita Lobel's guardian angel (November/December 2010).

Which are your favorites? [There are lots more to choose from in the Horn Book Magazine's gallery of covers, too.]

A Family of Readers

Many thanks to the folks at the Horn Book, who recently sent me a copy of A Family of Readers: The Book Lover's Guide to Children's and Young Adult Literature (Candlewick, 2010), signed by editors Roger Sutton and Martha V. Parravano. I've been dipping into A Family of Readers here and there since it arrived, concentrating on the chapters about genre, nonfiction, and Girl and Boy Books in Part Three: Reading on Their Own. Each section closes with a list of More Great books of that particular sort, and since I tend to like what the Horn Book likes (see: this year's Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winners), I'm usually either nodding my head in agreement or adding titles to my TBR list. [Roger and Martha were at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast when A Family of Readers first came out to note which new books they would have liked to include, too.]

On a related note, the Horn Book is starting a new blog, Calling Caldecott. A companion to SLJ's Newbery blog, Heavy Medal, Calling Caldecott will also run from early fall through the winter (basically award season for children's books). And now that I've taken KT Horning's Caldecott class, I hope to be able to contribute something to Calling Caldecott other than its name.

Why couldn't I have come up with something catchier when I named this blog, though?

Thank you, Greenwillow!

I was the lucky winner of this big box of Greenwillow books last December.  Can you see what's in there?  Everything from Kitten's First Full Moon by Kevin Henkes, winner of the 2005 Caldecott Medal, to The Thief by Meghan Whalen Turner, which won a Newbery Honor in 1997.  I read Turner's Attolia books, of which The Thief is the first, for the first time last year (no, I have no idea why I waited so long), and it was definitely a Peak Reading Experience--sort of a combination of Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo books and C.S. Lewis's Til We Have Faces.  The latest, A Conspiracy of Kings (2010), is my favorite in the series.

But my very favorite Greenwillow book is this one: The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. It was the first book I bought in hardcover, probably before it won the Newbery in 1985 (my copy, a first edition, doesn't have the gold sticker); and it still sets the standard against which I judge high fantasy for young readers. By now I've read it so many times that I can remember certain passages and fragments of dialogue almost word-for-word: Aerin's centuries-long climb up the spiral staircase to Agsded's chamber; Aerin and Luthe (their final scene together is Martha Mihalick's favorite, too); the lovely last lines. Thank you, Greenwillow!

Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour

Announcing:  The Sydney Taylor Book Award will be celebrating its 2010 gold and silver medalists and special Notable Book for All Ages with a Blog Tour, February 1-5, 2010.  I'm especially happy to be hosting Margarita Engle, author of Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (Henry Holt, 2009), on Monday, February 1.  Tropical Secrets was the SBTA winner in the Teen Readers category; my regular readers already know that I think it's an outstanding book, haunting and ultimately hopeful.

The full schedule for the STBA Blog Tour appears on People of the Books, the official blog of the Association of Jewish Libraries.  I hope you'll join me on Monday for a short interview with Margarita, and then follow the tour throughout the week.  Thank you!

Booklights

There are a lot of great children's book blogs out there, but Booklights, the new children's book blog at PBS Parents, promises to be one of the best and brightest.  Booklights contributor Jen Robinson has the details:

"I [Jen] am delighted to announce the launch of a new children's book blog from PBS Parents, Booklights. Pam Coughlan (MotherReader), Susan Kusel (Wizards Wireless), and I will be working with Gina Montefusco from PBS, along with various guest contributors, to bring literacy and reading content to the PBS Parents audience. The goal of Booklights, in line with the goals that Susan, Pam, and I have for our personal blogs, is to help people to inspire a love of reading in children."

[Me again.]  Up for discussion now are Pam, Susan, and Jen's top ten picture book lists (see mine here, although it's up to 13 books and still missing a few).  Check them out!

Picture Book Poll

Betsy Bird (Fuse #8) announced The Top 100 Picture Books of All Time Poll on her blog at School Library Journal earlier this week. Details and deadline here; but in a nutshell, she's looking for your top ten personal favorites, in order of preference, by March 31. You can submit a justification for each book if you like. Then she'll tally up the totals and count them down from 100 to 1.

I've been thinking about what to include on my list (I haven't even gotten around to ordering it) and have decided to stick to personal or family favorites.  That is, I'm not concerning myself with objective or even relative merit.  Here's what I've come up with so far (in no particular order):

  • Rapunzel by Paul O. Zelinsky
  • Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney
  • Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel and Blair Lent
  • Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola
  • The Maggie B. by Irene Haas
  • The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
  • Apple Farmer Annie by Monica Wellington
  • Peek-A-Boo by Janet and Allan Ahlberg
  • The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle
  • Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
  • Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey
  • The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordecai Gerstein
  • Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell and Lillian Hoban
  • Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter

Yes, there are more than ten of them!  Still, I would love to know what you would add to (or remove from) my list.  Have you made yours yet?

Twittering the Newbery

I watched the live webcast of the ALA Youth Media Awards yesterday morning, but I also got the Twitter feed, which was somehow a couple of seconds ahead of real time. Maybe someone noticed this, because ALAyma stopped twittering just before the big announcements.

But if you were following neilhimself on Twitter, you would have already gotten this series of tweets, earlier in the morning:

  • woken up by assistant at 5.30 in the morning. Not quite sure why. All rather bleary, to do with someone trying to call. argh. 8:47 AM Jan 26th from web
  • oh. forget about it. 8:50 AM Jan 26th from web

And you might have guessed.  And been mightily pleased about it!

[Read Neil Gaiman's account of the phone call itself in this journal entry, (Insert amazed and delighted swearing here).  If you need help with the swearing bit, try here.]

Cybils 2008: Nominations Now Open

Nominations for the third annual Children's and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards (the Cybils) are open from now til October 15th.  The Cybils recognize children's books that combine literary quality and kid appeal.  Anyone (that means you) can nominate a book in any or all of the following nine categories:

Easy Readers
Fantasy & Science Fiction
Fiction Picture Books
Graphic Novels
Middle Grade Novels
Nonfiction Middle Grade/Young Adult Books
Nonfiction Picture Books
Poetry
Young Adult Novels

 

To nominate a book, visit the Cybils blog and leave a comment (title and author will do) on the appropriate post.  Clicking on the category links above will take you right there.

Remember:

  • Nominated books must have been published in 2008
  • One nomination per person, per category
  • Multiple nominations will not help a book's chances.  Pick another book!

I'll be offering my short lists (um, for your consideration) over the next week or so.  What are you nominating?

It's Paul O. Zelinsky Day!

Well, if it isn't, it very well could be.  Online today, illustrator Paul O. Zelinsky answers 7-Imp's Seven Questions Over Breakfast and chats about his work at Just One More Book.  Not to be missed, especially if you're interested (as I am) in fairy tale retellings..

For the record, I consider Zelinsky to be past master of the art of fairy tales.  His Rapunzel (Dutton, 1997) is an exemplary book:  beautifully retold and illustrated in oils, following the traditions of Italian Renaissance painting.  The source notes (I love source notes) are both scholarly and insightful.  Rapunzel won the Caldecott Medal in 1998.

Zelinsky says he's not good at choosing favorites.  Neither am I, ordinarily; but I can say that Rapunzel is mine.

Goodreads

I've been looking for a way to keep track of what I'm reading since January (see this post) and finally decided to commit to Goodreads.  You can find me (and add me as a friend) there at www.goodreads.com/profile/bookstogether.  If you're on Goodreads, please consider adding me as a friend; and if you're not, please consider joining.  I would love to see what you're reading.

N.b, the Goodreads widget in my sidebar is showing someone else's books at the moment!

[Updated to add:  I switched to a different widget.  And, Goodreads is addictive.]

Poem in Your Pocket Day

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Tomorrow is the first national Poem in Your Pocket Day (New York City has been celebrating it since 2002).  I love this idea in theory, and will put a poem (TDB) in my pocket before I take the kids the school in the morning, but will I read it to anyone?  Probably not.  Wait--the kids!  I'll read it to them, and send them off with poems in their pockets, too (maybe Milly could memorize a short one).

If you're looking for a poem for your pocket, check out these pocket-sized Poem PDFs, some poems about pockets (love this idea, too), or just browse poets.org.  It is National Poetry Month, you know.

The Edge of the Forest, March/April 2008

The March/April 2008 issue of children's literary magazine The Edge of the Forest went online yesterday.  Here's what I had to read right away:

There's lots more in this double issue of The Edge of the Forest; thanks to all of the contributors, and to Kelly Herold at Big A little a for putting it all together.

Children's Choice Book Awards

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Children's Book Week is May 12-18.  This year, kids can vote online for the first annual Children's Choice Book Awards.  The nominees (5 in each category: books published in 2007 for grades K-2, 3-4, and 5-6; plus favorite author and illustrator) were selected by kids across the country.  I was a little disconcerted when I saw the nominees for favorite books, none of which I've read.  Am I completely out of touch with children's choices?  I hope not!

[Children's Book Week Official Poster by Mary GrandPre.  I love GrandPre's work: she illustrated the lovely Lucia and the Light (reviewed here) and some books about a wizard you may have heard of.  Posters are available from the CBC; see here for how to get one.]

Podcasts!

I know, I know:  I'm late to the podcast party.  But this morning I had the bright idea of listening to Just One More Book! on the laptop while I worked on another project.  Thank you to Jen Robinson, who recommended Andrea and Mark's podcast of the Before Green Gables book launch at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada.  It was excellent (and I think the book will be worth reading, too; more about that later).  I went on to listen to a handful of other podcasts: some of them conversations between Andrea and Mark (recorded in Ottowa at their favorite coffee shop); others, interviews with authors or illustrators.  Thank you, Andrea and Mark!  You have one more loyal listener.

Jen Robinson at PBS Parents

Jen Robinson of the eponymous Book Page is this month's expert (on children's literature, of course) over at PBS Parents.  She's written a short introductory essay on "The Power and Wonder of Children's Books" and is moderating a great discussion over there, all about books and encouraging reading.  Bring your questions and your comments!  Jen is incredibly knowledgeable and generous; and (as she's pointed out elsewhere) it's a good opportunity to show the folks at PBS how interested we are in book-related content.  Congratulations and thanks, Jen!

Carnival: Alterna-Princess

The theme for December's Carnival of Children's Literature, hosted by Kelly Herold at Big A little a, is gift books.  If you have a little princess on your list (Disney or otherwise, but probably Disney; I hear those princesses are pretty popular), these suggestions are for you--but also for anyone, big or little, who loves fairy tales.

Consider giving a beautifully retold and illustrated edition of a favorite fairy tale.

cinderella%20mcc.jpg One of our favorites is Cinderella, retold and illustrated by Barbara McClintock from the Charles Perrault version (Scholastic, 2005).  McClintock's illustrations (in pen, india ink, and watercolor with gold endpapers) were inspired by a trip to Paris; the prince's palace is based on Versailles and the Paris Opera, and the clothes and hair are from the Louis XIV period.  Cinderella's dresses are gorgeous, dripping with flowers or covered in tiny pink ruffles ("The ladies studied her so that they could copy her hair and dress the next day").  McClintock's retelling is as lovely as the illustrations.  And there is a little gray cat on almost every page.

Look for retellings of the familiar princess stories from other cultures, too.

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Cinderella again.  I think there are more Cinderella stories than any other fairy tale.  This year's Glass Slipper, Gold Sandal:  A Worldwide Cinderella by Paul Fleischman; illustrated by Julie Paschkis (Henry Holt, 2007) proves my point.  Fleischman's text weaves strands of many (17, by SLJ's count) multicultural Cinderellas into one story; Paschkis's illustrations keep them (or rather you) from getting tangled up.  I haven't seen this book yet and am curious about how, exactly, it works.  The reviews say it does, splendidly.  I hope it also includes good source notes, in case I'm compelled to seek out one of the Cinderellas for myself (n.b., I love source notes).

Or introduce a new princess (one who doesn't have a movie contract. Yet).

princess%20pea%20child.bmpThe Princess and the Pea is my favorite of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales.  This retelling by Lauren Child, captured (photographed) by Polly Borland (Hyperion, 2006) is wonderful: literally full of dollhouse (1/12) scale wonders.  A note at the back of the book explains how Child created the sets (out of cornflake boxes!) and drew, cut out, and dressed the characters: it might inspire some small set designers and photographers at your house, too.  Child's text, which stays close to Andersen's original, is charming and clever; best of all, it points out that "any real princess has such impeccable manners that it would be impossible for her to tell her host...that it was the most uncomfortable night that she had ever had, in all her life."

Finally, a good collection of fairy tales, including those familiar and new, is always welcome.

SurLaLunefairytales.com is an excellent resource for all things fairy tale (and some folklore, too).  The work of Heidi Anne Heiner, SurLaLune features 47 (and counting) annotated fairy tales.  Especially helpful in the context of this post (what was that again?  oh yes, gift books for princesses and people who love fairy tales!) are the picture book galleries for each fairy tale (here's Cinderella's).  Which are your favorites?