Omnivoracious

Vampires? In May? Why, First Second, You Are a Cheeky Publisher, Aren't You?

One of my favorite graphic novel publishers, First Second, has declared May "Vampire Month" in one of those audacious out-of-season moves that means October/Halloween is now officially "Island Vacation Month". So far, the extraordinarily cool First Second blog has brought readers a downloadable vampire kit, and links to features at Comics Worth Reading, Colleen Mondor's blog, and Interactive Reader.

In heavily related news, First Second is promoting Little Vampires by Joann Sfar this month. The book collects a previously published story about a vampire going to school with two new adventures. The artwork is stunning, with crisp, deep colors and genius-level compositions. These are sly, funny, often slapstick narratives that adults and children alike will find delightful--all in one neat, new trade paper edition put together with First Second's usual attention to detail.

In spirit if not style, Little Vampires reminds me of one of my favorite kid's books: Bunnicula, the tale of a carrot-draining vampiric rabbit. Both are mischievous and hilarious, for one thing. Narrated by the family dog, Harold, and enriched by the clever cat Chester, Bunnicula recounts Harold and Chester's investigations into the new rabbit in the house. When tomatoes wind up being sucked dry, suspicions arise that the the bunny might not be as innocent as it seems. Although it seems unlikely anyone hasn't heard of Bunnicula by now, definitely check it out. It's a classic.

As is Little Vampires, frankly. Sfar is just a brilliant artist and storyteller.

James Owen's Search for the Red Dragon

Some multi-talented creators can write books and produce cover art for them. That's the case with James Owen and his Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographic series for young adults. The second book, The Search for the Red Dragon, was released this year. It's a gorgeous book in addition to a thrilling adventure, in no small part due to Owen's marvelous illustrations and cover art. The sketches above showing the creation of that cover art come from a page on his website where he details the whole process. I've posted the finished cover below so you can see the full realization of his vision.

The Search for the Red Dragon has been getting great reviews, and I recommend you pick it up. Here's a little bit more about the book:

It has been nine years since John, Jack, and Charles had their great adventure in the Archipelago of Dreams and became the Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica. Now they have been brought together again to solve a mystery: Someone is kidnapping the children of the Archipelago. And their only clue is a mysterious message delivered by a strange girl with artificial wings: "The Crusade has begun." Worse, they discover that all of the legendary Dragonships have disappeared as well. The only chance they have to save the world from a centuries-old plot is to seek out the last of the Dragonships -- the Red Dragon -- in a spectacular journey that takes them from Sir James Barrie's Kensington Gardens to the Underneath of the Greek Titans of myth.

 

New Anthologies: The Starry Rift and The Del Rey Book of SF and Fantasy

                   

The prolific anthologists Ellen Datlow and Jonathan Strahan have been up to their usual creative antics again, bringing to fruition yet more unique fiction projects for hungry genre readers.

Datlow's The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction & Fantasy is an unthemed collection of stories by the likes of Margo Lanagan, Elizabeth Bear, Maureen McHugh, Nathan Ballingrud, Jeffrey Ford, and eleven others. Locus wrote about the anthology, "....Datlow's ambitious volume could easily be [the now defunct online fiction site] Scifiction resurrected in trade paperback. Much the same authors, much the same sensibility--edgy contemporary or near-future stories, full of good prose and suspense, with a touch of horror often evident. ...a feast of good short fiction..." Although not as focused as Datlow's previous anthology, Inferno, genre enthusiasts should enjoy this interesting selection of tales. Datlow also has a blog where she writes about a variety of topics, including her anthologies.

Strahan enters the YA world with his The Starry Rift, which collects new science fiction stories for teens by Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, and Scott Westerfeld, among others. Strahan says about the anthology, "started with the idea that when people talked about science fiction for young adult readers they kept talking about the classic juveniles of the 1950s. Those books, novels like Robert Heinlein’s A Door into Summer, are wonderful, but they were written by people born before the First World War and were published not that long after the Second. However great those books might be, I wondered if they could possibly be meaningful to someone who’d been born in 1995. It seemed to me that it would be worth asking today’s best SF writers to write new stories that hopefully would resonate with readers today. And writers responded." For more information, check out the website created for the book.

Catching Up with Rebecca Woolf in Seattle

After I had my son, I went in search of all these DIY, irreverent mommy blogs that I just knew were out there. All I found were tips and tricks, ways to pamper myself or get organized, or cool gadgets I had to buy. I quickly gave up, and now I realize that I missed at least one irreverent mommy, who, thankfully, has now turned her blogs into a book.

Rockabye: from Wild to Child is Rebecca Woolf's first book, and it's more than just a compilation of entries from her blogs. (She writes Girl's Gone Child and Babble.com's Straight from the Bottle.) It's a fully formed book of essays about her experience of motherhood.

Woolf had always planned to become a writer, and she had been freelancing since she was 16. She was living in L.A., collaborating with a guy on a script, then they started dating, then she was pregnant. She was 23. She decided to have the baby, marry the guy, and keep writing. After her son, Archer, was born, she not only worked two jobs, she kept blogging and freelancing, writing when he took his naps.

People kept giving her unwanted advice: you need to cover his face, you can't be out walking with him, he's too little, etc. One stranger even grabbed her son's hands and tried to teach him how to walk (!). Exploring these anecdotes allowed her to keep asking, Why? Why do I need to do this? Why do I need to do it this way?

On Saturday, Woolf had a reading a couple of blocks from my house, so I got to meet some of her very loyal fans, who braved the neighborhood on the day of a baseball game and a gigantic motocross event (read: $40 parking). Here are a few highlights from the reading and Q/A:

After she read the title of the first chapter, "Holy Shit! I'm Pregnant," she looked around the room to see if any kids were there. "I have to edit the expletives," she said. "I keep saying, Duck. Duck. Duck. Everyone gets very confused."

For Rockabye, Woolf said she took the blog entries, hundreds of pages worth, and put them in order to decide what she wanted to use. About 25 percent of the book came from the blog, then she went back and filled in the rest.

The book is not exactly what she pitched. Her original pitch to Seal Press was a DIY Parenting Guide with lists and funny anecdotes.

For her next project, she was going to pitch a book called Love in the Time of Jason Priestly, essays about growing up in the '90s. But when she started to write them, they were too much in her teenage voice. (One of her teen writing gigs was Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.) Instead, she is writing fiction and working on a pilot with her husband, Hal, based on Rockabye.

Someone in the audience asked, "How long did it take you to get to the new normal, as a mom?" Her answer: "I don't think you ever go back to what normal was. I know that I'm more myself now than I ever was. You figure out a way to be engaged with your life. But you have to do it for yourself. You can't fake it. What's the point of life if you just lie there and wait?"

Oh, and she's pregnant. She finds out whether her second baby is a boy or girl as soon as she gets home from the book tour. --Heidi

Checking in on YA Titles: Gwenda Bond's Picks

Shaken & Stirred, run by Gwenda Bond, is one of the most literate and interesting blogs out there. Especially in the last couple of years, it has also been of great use for those interested in Young Adult fiction. Bond is a bit of an expert on the subject--in addition to writing for Publishers Weekly, the Washington Post, Kirkus, and Strange Horizons, she is working on a young adult novel and pursuing an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College. She also writes an advice column for Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet as everyone's Dear Aunt Gwenda. You can read much of her published work online for free (or buy some in print if you'd rather).

I recently interviewed Bond about current and classic YA. Bond is an enthusiastic advocate for the form: "The great thing about YA--and children's literature, in general--is that genre divisions are a lot less set in many ways. All the books are in the same section of the bookstore, with the exception that series books are generally broken out on their own. I believe that the overall level of quality in YA is higher than in adult books--perhaps because less is published--and so I'd encourage a person to just wander the section and take a chance on something that piques their interest."

Pop-Up Minimalism

Has the Rinehart/Sabuda-led pop-up-book moment peaked? It's been one of the most fun trends to watch in bookmaking (the legal kind) the past few years, and perhaps it's a sign of maturity that, along with the increasingly baroque constructions from the masters, some artists are stepping back toward simple elegance. Via Paper Cuts, you can see (read?) the complete three-dimensional text of Marion Bataille's ABC3D, which despite a release date still half a year away has already made an appearance in our Top 100 (at least according to Paper Cuts: it's at the still-respectable #1,257 as I write). The pleasure and the playfulness of the demonstration speak for itself:

Trust no one over 14: The Children's Choice Book Awards

I know. I know. Another set of book awards. But this one is actually different, I promise. This time the kids get to decide who wins.

Finalists have been posted for the first-ever Children's Choice Book Awards (sponsored by the Children's Book Council). Finalists in the following categories were determined through the CBC's Children's Choices program, which means that they were chosen by kids from all over the country:

Favorite Book, Grades K to 2

Dino Dinners by Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom
Five Little Monkeys Go Shopping by Eileen Christelow
Frankie Stein written by Lola M. Schaefer, illustrated by Kevan Atteberry
Three Little Fish and the Big Bad Shark written by Ken Geist, illustrated by Julia Gorton
Tucker's Spooky Halloween by Leslie McGuirk

Favorite Book, Grades 3 to 4

Babymouse #6: Camp Babymouse by Jennifer L. Holm and Matt Holm
Big Cats: Hunters of the Night by Elaine Landau
Magic Treehouse #38: Monday With a Mad Genius written by Mary Pope Osborne, illustrated by Sal Murdocca
The Richest Poor Kid (Another Sommer Time Story) written by Carl Sommer, illustrated by Jorge Martinez
Wolves  by Duncan Searl (Smart Animals series)

Favorite Book, Grades 5 to 6

Beowulf: Monster Slayer written by Paul D. Storrie, illustrated by Ron Randall
Encyclopedia Horrifica:The Terrifying TRUTH! About Vampires, Ghosts, Monsters, and More by Joshua Gee
Ghosts by Stephen Krensky (Monster Chronicles series)
The Short and Incredibly Happy Life of Riley by Amy Lissiat and Colin Thompson
When the Shadbush Blooms written by Carla Messinger with Susan Katz, illustrated by David Kanietakeron Fadden

Kids can also vote on finalists in these categories, which were essentially the top-selling books of 2007:

Author of the Year

Anthony Horowitz for Snakehead (Alex Rider Adventure Series) (ages 9 to 12)
Erin Hunter for The Sight (Warrior: Power of Three, Book 1) (ages 9 to 12)
Jeff Kinney for Diary of Wimpy Kid (ages 9 to 12)
Rick Riordan for The Titan's Curse (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Book Three, grades 6 to 9)
J.K. Rowling for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (YA)

Illustrator of the Year 

Jan Brett for The Three Snow Bears (ages 4 to 8)
Ian Falconer for Olivia Helps with Christmas (ages 4 to 8)
Robin Preiss Glasser for Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy (ages 4 to 8)
Brian Selznick for The Invention of Hugo Cabret (ages 9 to 12)
Mo Willems for Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity (ages 4 to 8)

Children have until May 4 to cast their votes at bookstores, school libraries, or online. (Actually, anyone can vote on the website, but of course we know that you'll all stick to the honor system.) Winners will be announced during Children's Book Week, which runs May 12-18.--Heidi

A Real-life Kids' Publishing House, and its Really Close Imitation

"My mom says you write kids books."

"I don't write kids books. I edit kids books. It's a very different job. Hard to explain."

"She said you wrote Brambles McGee."

"I didn't write Brambles McGee. I edited Brambles McGee."

"How come you made Brambles die?"

"I didn't make him die, I made him die quicker. And with a fancier font."

So began last week's pilot of The Return of Jezebel James, the latest show by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino (the pop-culture quipping creators of Gilmore Girls). The new sitcom, which will run its next episode tonight on Fox, features a children's book editor, Sarah (Parker Posey), who asks her sister (Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose) to have her baby.

It's no mistake that Sarah's office looks like the real-life Harper Collins Children's Division. PW had a nice article today about how the Palladinos worked with HarperCollins to make the show as true to life as possible, down to the classic book quotes painted on the conference room windows. Their attention to detail is no surprise to Gilmore fans.

(True confession from one of those fans: Silas is napping while I write this, and G.G. is playing in the background--our afternoon nap routine since I received the complete series over the holidays. The credits just came on and I'm waiting for his head to pop up.)

Now, Fox and Harper Collins are commemorating the TV show with a sweepstakes. If you want to fly to New York City for three nights and get a tour of Harper Collins Children's Division--home of Charlotte's Web, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and a few other children's titles you may have heard of--you just need to go to the Jezebel James website and register by March 28.

In the final scene of the pilot (which you can watch online, if you missed it), Sarah looks out at her sister through the conference room window. The quote painted in cursive above her head sets the tone for shows to come: Let the wild rumpus start!--Heidi

Amulet: The Fantasy Worlds of Kazu Kibuishi

                  
            (The cover of Amulet, and author self-portrait from Scholastic's Amulet site)

One of the great pleasures of reading is coming across a book that surprises you and exceeds your expectations. Amulet, Book One: The Stonekeeper by Kazu Kibuishi is one of those books, a graphic novel from Scholastic that is aimed at children and young adults, but which rewards adult reading as well. Right at the beginning of the book, a family loses its father. The mother, son, and daughter relocate to an old ancestral home, only to be immediately engulfed by a rich, fantastical world beneath the house.

Kibuishi, who edits the magnificent Flight series for Villard, does several things incredibly well in this opening volume: he raises the stakes from the beginning and makes it clear to the reader that this is serious and that actions have consequences. He also manages to create a vivid, deeply imaginative fantasy world that is evocative of his influences but not derivative of them. From the strange house underground to be-tentacled assailants and bizarre tick-like creatures, the setting comes alive and seems deeply believable. Scholastic has an amazing interactive webpage for Amulet that explains even more--definitely something to amuse and entertain you for more than a couple minutes. Curious about the origins of what seems to have all the makings of a modern classic, I recently interviewed Kibuishi via email...

Amazon.com: Please describe where you are while answering these questions.
Kibuishi: I am sitting in my studio where I work, located in Alhambra, California.  It's a fairly large loft with hardwood floors and lots of natural light.  A few of my friends work here with me on their own projects, and when we're at the final stretch of production on an Amulet book, a few more artists are working in here to help me get it done.  Today, my wife Amy and I are the only ones working in here.

New This Week: Foxie is Back in Print

This week (today, actually) The New York Review Children's Collection is releasing the latest installment of the works of Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire: Foxie, a stunning reprint of their 1949 picture-book adaptation of Chekhov's story, Kashtanka, about a "singing" dog who loses her master.

The d'Aulaires are best known for the way their children's books were made, particularly in the early years of their nearly 50-year career. At the time of the original Foxie, they were sketching their illustrations onto slabs of Bavarian limestone (weighing up to 200lbs a piece!), and one four-color illustration would require four slabs of limestone. This gave their books a hand-drawn vibrancy that the re-issue has definitely captured.

Other bonuses that set this book apart are the endpapers, with a storyboard extra of Foxie and her bone (the coveted item that sparks her master's teasing, and leads to her getting lost), as well as two musical notes on the first page, so we know how it sounds when Foxie's master calls her name.

Foxie is the sixth of the d'Aulaire's books that the press has re-issued since 2005. It follows their acclaimed collection of Norse myths, D'Aulaires' Book of Animals, D'Aulaires' Book of Trolls, The Two Cars, and The Terrible Troll-Bird. --Heidi

Golden Kite Award Winners

The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators recently announced the winners of their Golden Kite Awards, which honor the most outstanding children’s books published during the previous year. The SCBWI distinguishes the Golden Kites from the slew of book lists and prizes as "the only award presented to children's book authors and artists by their peers."

2007 winners include:

Fiction: Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate (ages 9-12)
"American culture, the Minnesota climate, and personal identity are examined in this moving first-person novel written in free verse."--School Library Journal

Nonfiction: Muckrakers by Ann Bausum (ages 9-12)
A story of investigative journalism in America.

Picture Book Text: Pierre in Love by Sara Pennypacker, illustrated by Petra Mathers (kindergarten-grade 2)
Pierre, a mouse who sails a fishing boat, falls in love with Catherine, a ballet-teaching rabbit.

Picture Book Illustration: Little Night illustrated and written by Yuyi Morales (preschool-kindergarten)

"Morales has created a sumptuous feast of metaphors in her text: a bathtub filled with falling stars, a dress crocheted from clouds." --Booklist

Honor recipients:

Fiction: Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree by Lauren Tarshis (ages 9-12)

Nonfiction: 1607: A New Look at Jamestown by Karen Lange (grades 3-6)

Picture Book Text: The End by David LaRochelle, illustrated by Richard Egielski (preschool-grade 3)

Picture Book Illustration: Who Put the B in Ballyhoo? illustrated and written by Carlyn Beccia (kindergarten-grade 4)

The awards panel members aren't the only ones who think these are really great books: they've also received consistent five-star ratings from Amazon customers. --Heidi

Winners Announced for the 2008 Weird-Ass Picture Book Awards!

The results are in! The 2nd annual Weird-Ass Picture Book Awards concluded this week, ending frenzied speculation and putting to rest months of controversy over the WAPBA's arcane selection process as well as ballot-stuffing rumors related to the 2007 WAPBA winner The Fuchsia Is Now, by J. Otto Seibold.

Actually... almost none of that happened, aside from the Weird-Ass Picture Book Awards themselves. The WAPBAs are a fiction created by popular kid-lit blogger MotherReader, while she was antsy waiting to hear the Oscar nominations in January. But it's such an entertaining fiction that it's hard not to love. And the winners? They're all great books--nominated by MotherReader readers and selected by the MR herself:

WAPB Award for Cover Art: New Socks, by Bob Shea

WAPB Award for Illustration: Bow Wow Bugs a Bug, by Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague Cash

WAPB Award for Story: Five Little Gefiltes, by Dave Horowitz

2008 Award for Best Weird-Ass Picture Book: Cowboy and Octopus, by Jon Scieszka, illustrated by Lane Smith

And alas, there's no love for what many pundits and odds-makers put as a favorite for the Best WAPB award: the Steve Martin and Roz Chast collaboration The Alphabet from A to Y With Bonus Letter Z! ("[While it] was nominated and considered, ultimately it was rejected by the committee (uh, me) as being an adult book in children’s picture book clothing, and therefore ineligible for the award. Plus it sucked.") --Paul

Do Adult YA Readers Need to Grow Up?

Roger Sutton, editor-in-chief of The Horn Book, sparked an interesting discussion on his blog today with some casually derisive remarks about grown-ups who prefer to read children's books and YA novels:

As annoying as adults who dismiss children's books as unworthy of attention can be, I also feel my jaw clench when a fellow adult tells me that he or she prefers children's books to adult books because they have better writing or values or stories. This is just sentimental ignorance. ... Adults whose taste in recreational reading ends with the YA novel need to grow up.

Some fans of his Read Roger blog (with its "rants and raves" on children's books) were not too happy when he turned his barbs on them. Many of the commenters gave surprisingly specific reasons for liking YA better, like this one:

Ouch! I feel indicted. I do prefer to read children's literature, mainly due to narrative structure. I like fairly linear plots and neatly resolved endings, which puts me off a lot of adult literary fiction (with the exception of some South American authors). So I read a lot of Dickens and children's lit.

Commenters identified Scott Westerfeld and Stephenie Meyer among the YA authors who write the kind of stories they like to read, grown-up or not. --Heidi

Cool new kid-lit blogs: one here and one on the way

It's a lucky day when you discover not just one but *two* brand-new kids' book blogs worth checking out. One is already up and the other is still coalescing into blog-ificence:

1. I.N.K., i.e. Interesting Nonfiction for Kids. This blog promises to bring even more "charm, wit, and good looks" to this sometimes-neglected subphylum of kid lit. So far so good, with savvy recommendations like these "handsells":

   You say you really enjoyed the terrific humor and insights of the recent Newbery honor winner THE WEDNESDAY WARS? Well, let me tell you, if you liked those rats, you'll be blown away by Rats. The Story of Rats and People by Al Marrin. It's rats through the ages, reproducing and thriving, even in a court of law.

   Are you the more sensitive type who usually enjoys a tender tearjerker like Jenny Downham's BEFORE I DIE about a girl's battle with incurable cancer? We NF people do diseases--and lots of them. Why not give ace NF writer James Cross Giblin's When Plague Strikes. The Black Death, Smallpox, AIDS a try? Mr. Giblin does not disappoint in his ability to totally immerse his readers in infection, illness and disease.

2. Guys Lit Wire. Don't get too excited just yet: this site still isn't up, but it should soon be a great resource for teen-boy-book recommendations--both for people seeking books for teen boys and (it is hoped) for "actual teenagers," too. With its Guys Read-flavored mission and help from multi-talented bloggers like Colleen Mondor and Sara Lewis Holmes, it's bound to be great.

And it should be noted: I found I.N.K. via Tea Cozy, which points out another great kid nonfiction resource, the ALA's Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults' list "I'm Not Making This Up." --Paul

Nikki McClure and The Midnight Folk

When I got Nikki McClure's The First 1000 Days: A Baby Journal and Awake to Nap as pre-baby gifts, I knew these were not your average baby books. What I didn't know from looking at her serene paper-cut illustrations--of babies, moms and dads, crows, boats, and vegetable gardens--is that Nikki McClure is a rock star.

A Different Stripe, the blog for NYRB Classics, clued me into this when they posted an appreciation of McClure with a preview of a cover she illustrated for The Midnight Folk, an upcoming edition in their children's classics line. This 1927 story by Brit poet John Masefield will be coming out in September as a follow-up to last October's The Box of Delights (Masefield's other Kay Harker book, written in 1935). 

McClure is definitely emerging as a rock-star illustrator. Her books and calendars are on display everywhere from quirky children's boutiques to chain bookstores to galleries. She cuts her illustrations by hand from a single sheet of black paper, a process she has used to propel herself from starving artist to the author-illustrator of an annual calendar series, various children's books, and, most recently, a collection of images from her calendars and other works, Collect Raindrops: The Seasons Gathered.

And she's a real rock star. McClure has been part of the Olympia rock scene as a collaborating visual artist since the early '90s and has designed posters and CD covers like this one for years. (Her website has a discography, as well as a portfolio of her current work.)

The downside to having a baby journal illustrated by Nikki McClure? Fear of spoiling the paper-cut images with ugly handwritten notes. Our pages all look something like this:

I'd better dive in soon with a black Sharpie so Silas doesn't get a baby journal on his 21st birthday full of stickie notes. --Heidi

Moomin Moomin Moomin: Bliss for the Whole Family

 

Everybody give a big thank you to Drawn & Quarterly Press, which has begun reissuing Tove Jansson's Moomin comic strips in graphic novel form. The second volume just arrived at my door and like the first it's a beautiful oversized book featuring the antics of the hippo-like Moomin and his family. From dealing with obnoxious neighbors to doing ridiculous things for love, the Moomin family's adventures are funny, surreal, sometimes melancholy, and always rich and whimsical. In less skillful hands, this would be fodder for sticking one’s finger down one’s throat in revulsion at the treacly whimsy of it all. However, Tove Jansson was a pragmatist and also, if her work is any indication, a wise person. Beneath the gentle surface of Moomin there is a sly, wicked wit and much non-didactic commentary about the world and people’s place in it.

Something must be said about the effortlessness of these comic strips. There isn’t a word or image out of place. I cannot think of another comic strip that gives me as much pleasure as this one. There is also something uniquely calming and stress-relieving about reading Moomin that I can’t quite put into words but has something to do with the effortlessness I mention above. As Neil Gaiman says, "A lost treasure now rediscovered--one of the sweetest, strangest comics strips ever drawn or written. A surrealist masterpiece. Honest." You owe it to yourself to check it out.

A Six-Word Memoir Family

Heidi: Bookish farm girl citifies, finds love.

Silas: Almost a year, not much sleep.

And, after a grueling session of rejections, almost culminating in "Still deconstructing after all these years"...

Paul: You can do it, Charlie Brown.

More Margaret Wise Brown... And More Moon

What's the deal with Goodnight, Moon? That's what I thought every time I saw it on a toddler's shelf or at a baby shower, and when Seattle Children's Theater made it into a play (now playing in Dallas!). Even when I first started reading it as part of my son's night-time ritual, I didn't really get it: Goodnight nobody? Huh? And what's that mush doing in his bedroom?

Like so many great things, the brilliance of Goodnight Moon reveals itself only with repetition. Silas caught onto it before I did; it's the only book he can sit through without squirming. I've even found myself reciting the rhymes in a cheap effort to make him laugh when he's cranky.

I recently found this fun, thoughtful analysis of the book by Elizabeth Kolbert in the December 6, 2006 New Yorker. Kolbert includes some background on its author, Margaret Wise Brown (who admitted to Life magazine, "I don't really like children..."), and says of the book:

Goodnight Moon is more restrained, more exacting, and more lyrical than anything written for children today. In its own quiet way, it is also more brutal.... Time moves forward, and the little bunny doesn’t stand a chance.

Now that the book is a family favorite, we were excited to see that a new Margaret Wise Brown story, The Moon Shines Down, is about the see the light of day.

Thomas Nelson acquired Brown's manuscript, which was found among a "sheaf of yellow pages held together by paper clips" in her sister's attic, according to Publishers Weekly. The picture book, with Clement Hurd-style illustrations by Linda Bleck, will be available in November of this year.

This time the moon story is based on an old prayer/nursery rhyme: I see the moon, and the moon sees me... --Heidi

 

 

Essex County Volume 1--A Highly-Recommended Alex Award Winner

As reported on Amazon a couple of weeks ago, the American Library Association have announced their Alex Award picks, spotlighting adult books with specific teen appeal. One of them was a favorite graphic novel from 2007, Jeff Lemire's Essex County Volume 1: Tales From the Farm. It's been five years since a graphic novel made the list. As I wrote in a Bookslut column several months back, "In this heartfelt and beautifully sparse tale of an orphaned ten-year-old named Lester, Jeff Lemire uses an illustration style that perfectly captures the wide open spaces of rural Ontario. After Lester’s mother dies, he’s sent to live on his uncle’s farm. He hardly knows his uncle and his father has long since left the scene. Lester forms a friendship with a gas station attendant named Jimmy Lebeuf who used to be a professional hockey player until a bad hit knocked him out of the game. Together, the two comics fans build a rich fantasy life revolving around the possibility of an alien invasion. In a watermark grayscale, Lemire also provides flashbacks to both Lebeuf’s career and the details surrounding the death of Lester’s mother. Another section, showing pages from Lester’s own home-made comic book, is imaginative and funny."

    

Highly recommended for all ages--and best of all, the equally evocative Essex County Volume 2: Ghost Stories is also available! - JeffV

100 Books Every Child Should Read, UK-style

In mid-January, Telegraph.co.uk published a list of the "100 books every child should read." Like many must-read lists, it includes expected stalwarts such as Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte's Web, The Chronicles of Narnia, and To Kill a Mockingbird. But this Brit list focuses on stories that are exciting to read (vs. books that teach you things you ought to know) and it actually has some titles I haven't seen on American recommended book lists.

I'm adding a sampling here, but I recommend clicking through to the actual list for the thoughtful introduction by author Michael Morpurgo about kids and stories, as well as fun thumbnail reviews like "A stirring tale," "No reader remains untouched," and my favorite: "Runcible."