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Just Like Me, by Nancy J. Cavanaugh, is a funny, uplifting summer camp story about unlikely friendships and finding your place in the world from the award-winning author of This Journal Belongs to Ratchet.

This month’s best selling kids series from The Children’s Book Review’s affiliate store Captain No Beard, by award-winning author Carole P. Roman, is an imaginative picture book series loved by all.

It’s always difficult to narrow down the teetering pile of “Books I Loved” and the tottering pile of “Books to be Read” to a manageable number. Here are just a few middle grade novels author Sarah Dooley loved, and a few more she's looking forward to reading.

During her teens, Deirdre Riordan Hall, author of PEARL, traveled throughout the United States and Europe, developing a love for stories and a desire to connect with worlds imagined or real on the page.

Which five words best describe Twenty Yawns? Jane Smiley: Cheerful, colorful, loving, amusing, relaxing.

To celebrate First Second Books and the rise of graphic novels, we thought it would be fun to have graphic novelist veteran, Leland Myrick, who has been with First Second from the beginning, and Andy Hirsch, a 2016 debut graphic novelist, interview each other.

To thank our loyal readers, we are giving away a Fire HD 8 tablet. Be sure to enter daily to maximize your chance of winning.

Alexandra S. D. Hinrichs, author of Thérèse Makes a Tapestry, loves exploring new places, including France, where she once studied.

Il Sung Na, illustrator of The Opposite Zoo, talks about the art of zoo animals in picture books. "The zoo is a great and fun place for children indeed."

Paris Hop!, by Margie Blumberg, is a wonderful journey into the sights, sounds, scents, and linguistic adventures of the City of Light.

Enter to win both yoga books by Mariam Gates, GOOD MORNING YOGA and GOOD NIGHT YOGA, along with a full-color poster! Giveaway begins March 11, 2016, at 12:01 A.M. PST and ends April 10, 2016, at 11:59 P.M. PST.

Mariam Gates, author of Good Morning Yoga, selected these five family favorites.

Picture book extraordinaire Tara Lazar and the frightfully creative S. Britt interview each other about Normal Norman (Sterling Children's Books, 2016), a laugh-out-loud book that explores the meaning of normal through the study of an exceptionally strange orangutan.

Mother's Day will be here before you know it! Celebrate by entering to win a copy of You Made Me a Mother, written by Laurenne Sala and illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser. Giveaway begins March 8, 2016, at 12:01 A.M. PST and ends April 8, 2016, at 11:59 P.M. PST.

Laurenne Sala began her career as an advertising copywriter, writing national campaigns for clients like KIA Motors, Jack-in-the-Box, and Beats by Dre.

A quick search of the Horn Book Guide Online shows three picture book biographies of Hillary Clinton, including these two new ones (both published in January 2016):

   

Then there’s this new YA biography:

Along with sixteen volumes of series nonfiction (here are two):

 

 

The post There are no picture book biographies of Donald Trump appeared first on The Horn Book.

As our #HBBlackHistoryMonth16 coverage comes to a close, here is a reminder that these articles by and about African American children’s literature luminaries should be read by everyone, everywhere, everyday, not just during the shortest month of the year.

In the meantime, we’ll keep updating our Horn Book Talking About Race resource page. We’ve already gotten started compiling a set of new and archival Horn Book material for #HBBlackHistoryMonth17. Everyone keep talking and listening.

Click the tag HBBlackHistoryMonth16 for more articles in this series.

The post Shortest month of the year #HBBlackHistoryMonth16 appeared first on The Horn Book.

This column is part of a series of recommended board book roundups, formerly published twice a year, now published every season. You can find the previous installments here. Don’t miss Viki Ash’s primer “What Makes a Good Board Book?” from the March/April 2010 Horn Book Magazine.

If You’re a Robot and You Know It
by David A. Carter
Scholastic     14 pp.
9/15     978-0-545-81980-0     $16.99

Carter brings a futuristic twist to the familiar song. The text is entertaining enough (“If you’re a robot and you know it, / shoot laser beams out of your eyes”), but it’s the paper engineering that really sings. Pull the tabs to make the smiley, goofy-looking robots (one has a teakettle for a head) clap their hands, stomp their feet, etc., in such surprising, inventive ways that kids will definitely be happy — and they’ll know it.

Spring: A Pop-Up Book
by David A. Carter
Abrams Appleseed     12 pp.
2/16     978-1-4197-1912-7     $14.95

Winter: A Pop-Up Book
by David A. Carter
Abrams Appleseed     12 pp.
10/15      978-1-4197-1823-6     $14.95

Prolific pop-up book creator Carter turns his attention to the seasons. Brief, sometimes lyrical texts (“Snowflakes fall from the sky, covering the sleepy earth in white”; “Who flits and flutters from flower to flower?”) are accompanied by fairly spare background illustrations that let the impressive central pop-ups shine. Captions help identify key flora and fauna.

Dinoblock
by Christopher Franceschelli; illus. by Peskimo
Abrams Appleseed     96 pp.
6/15     978-1-4197-1674-4     $16.95

Franceschelli follows Alphablock and Countablock with this dinosaur-themed entry. Chunky die-cut pages (which are cut to follow the outlines of the creatures) play a sort of guessing game with viewers: “I have a neck like a goose…” (page turn) “I am a coelophysis.” Useful pronunciation (“SEE-low-FYE-sis”) and clear illustrations of smiling dinos, along with two child guides, enhance the already great kid appeal.

My First Comics series

I’m Grumpy
by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm
Random     20 pp.
1/16     978-0-553-53344-6     $7.99

I’m Sunny!
by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm
Random     20 pp.
1/16     978-0-553-53346-0      $7.99

“Panels!” “Word Balloons!” “Sound Effects!” “Reading pictures is the first step toward reading words!” is this series’ motto. The Holm siblings (creators of the Babymouse series and others) introduce young children to comics in these books about a happy sun (Sunny!) and a grouchy cloud (Grumpy). The stories are very simple, entertaining, and easy to follow, with clear emotions nicely reinforced by the cartoony illustrations.

Hello, World! Series

Solar System
by Jill McDonald
Doubleday      24 pp.
3/16     978-0-553-52103-0     $7.99

Weather
by Jill McDonald
Doubleday     24 pp.
3/16      978-0-553-52101-6     $7.99

These early science volumes give very brief but engaging overviews of their topics. Solar System starts with the moon and sun, then talks about each planet (plus dwarf planet Pluto), with one main fact per planet and another detail in smaller font. Weather asks a simple leading question to help identify each season (“Is snow falling?”), then presents clothing and activities for each one. In both books, eye-pleasing collages in bright colors with simple shapes illustrate the concepts.

Hamsters on the Go!
by Kass Reich
Orca   24 pp.
3/16   978-1-4598-1016-7   $9.95

Up Hamster Down Hamster
by Kass Reich
Orca     24 pp.
9/15     978-1-4598-1013-6     $9.95

Up Hamster takes a group of energetic hamsters through a day of opposites-learning in rhyme (“Fast hamster / Slow hamster / Yes hamster / No hamster”). On the Go finds the crew testing various modes of transportation (“Hamsters in a car / Hamsters on a boat / Hamsters on a Moon rover / Hamsters on a float”). The rectangular little critters are so funny and expressive, with just their dot-eyes and straight-lined or oblong mouths, it may make listeners start clambering for a cute-rodent pet.

The post Board Book Roundup: Winter 2016 Edition appeared first on The Horn Book.

April 12, 2016 marks the one hundredth birthday of children’s literature icon Beverly Cleary. To celebrate, the March/April 2016 issue of The Horn Book Magazine includes a series of tributes to the author and her work written by children’s book authors, illustrators, editors, and librarians whose lives and work were touched by Ms. Cleary.

Beth McIntyre, Madison County (WI) Public librarian, shows off her Ramona Quimby Q tattoo.

Each week leading to The Big Day we’ll post an article or two about Cleary’s life and work. To start things off, here is Julie Roach, from the Cambridge (MA) Public Library talking about “Ramona in the 21st-Century Library” — including bonus Ramona-inspired tattoo!

Happy 100th Birthday, Beverly Cleary! For more, click the tag Beverly Cleary at 100 and read the March/April 2016 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Happy 100th Birthday, Beverly Cleary! appeared first on The Horn Book.

“‘Oh, did people write that in those days, too?’ Beezus was surprised, because she had thought this was something very new to write in an autograph album…” (Beezus and Ramona)

Sometimes a book becomes quickly dated, and sometimes it easily crosses decades or generations. Beezus finds this is also true for autograph albums, and she makes an important parallel discovery that brings her much hope for the future: her mother and beloved aunt grew up to be close, though they fought as children as intensely as she and Ramona do. (Aunt Beatrice ruined Mother’s autograph album by signing every page!) It is okay not to love one’s little sister all the time. These days, autograph albums may be out of fashion, but the theme of sibling rivalry never goes out of style.

Beverly Cleary published Beezus and Ramona sixty-one years ago. At the Cambridge Public Library in Massachusetts, where I manage youth services and oversee youth collection development, I checked in on Ramona in the twenty-first century.

The city of Cambridge has a diverse population that truly supports and uses its public libraries. The Children’s Room in particular is a fantastic community gathering space where kids from all backgrounds come alone or with friends or family to read and make discoveries. For the past decade, our Children’s Room book circulation has grown significantly every year, and almost fifty percent of the total number of items goes out every month. We strive to have something for each reader, with multiple copies of the books that “everyone” is reading. We want all children to find books with characters and situations they can relate to and recognize as well as books with characters and situations unlike those they know. As much as possible, we want readers to be able to find both the book they came in for (even if it is very popular) along with the one they did not know they wanted.

How does Ramona fare in such an environment?

Each of our six branches owns copies of Beverly Cleary’s books, and the Main Library owns extra copies of each — ten copies of the most popular titles — and audio editions and some versions in other languages. Beverly Cleary’s books all circulate multiple times a year, with Ramona’s titles going out more than the others. The Ramona audiobooks, engagingly performed by Stockard Channing, circulate even better than the printed books. Twenty-first-century characters who are often compared to Ramona — such as Sara Pennypacker’s Clementine, Lenore Look’s Alvin Ho, and Megan McDonald’s Judy Moody and Stink — are in high demand at our library, but over the past year the print versions of Ramona held ten to twenty percent higher circulation figures than those other series.

Cleary shelves at the Cambridge Public Library. Photo: Lolly Robinson.

Numbers can only tell so much, so I asked the parent/child book group I facilitate what they think. This group consists of about twenty people, ten kids between the ages of seven and ten and usually their ten grownups (although we can and do have kids who join solo). The group includes boys and girls from different schools and a wide range of backgrounds, and everyone — child and adult — reads and participates. Their varied takes on the books we read consistently blow my mind, and they are quite practiced at telling me how they really feel about what they are reading.

I let everyone know about the article I was writing and casually asked, “Have any of you ever read the Ramona books?”

All hands shot up and enthusiastic chatter erupted around the table.

When I asked if they remembered how they first discovered the Ramona books, I got an interesting assortment of answers. One girl’s mom read them to her. Another found out about them from a school friend.

One boy said, “My librarian at school gave me that book about Ralph. The mouse? And then I found the Ramona books next to it on the shelf. And I really liked those.”

While I was taking in this response, absorbing what insight it might offer about assumptions, shelf order, and readers’ advisory, another girl brought me back to the present in a pitying tone:

“There was the movie, you know…” [2010’s Ramona and Beezus]

Right.

“Well,” I told them, “Beverly Cleary, who wrote the Ramona books, is celebrating a big birthday this year. She’s going to be one hundred years old…”

Gasp.

“Is she still alive?!”

“Is she coming here!?!”

“Let’s have her come here!!!”

“She is very much alive! But she wrote the Ramona books a long time ago. I read them when I was your age. The first one was written in 1955…[dramatic pause] Do they seem old-fashioned to you?”

Silence and thinking and looking around at each other.

“Some things a little bit. But not the way she fights with her sister!” declared a boy, which inspired a lot of vocal solidarity from around the table.

“Ramona is funny,” smiled another girl.

The mom who had read the books aloud to her daughter interjected an important point: “Some of the details in the first ones are a bit dated now. But they were written over such a long period of time…The last ones weren’t written all that long ago.”

Though Ramona only ages about six years in those eight books, the series itself spans forty-four years, from 1955 to 1999.

“Are we going to read Ramona next?” another boy wanted to know.

Inspired by their enthusiasm, I re-read the series myself. I have often revisited my old friend Ramona, whom I first met when I was in second grade, thanks to my own school librarian. The Quimby family taught me, an only child like Beverly Cleary, the nuances of a sibling dynamic better than a graduate-level psychology class could. Even now, I continue to make new connections and discoveries when reading these books.

Through all these years, nothing much has changed about being little and not having much control. The issues Cleary addresses in her books are ones our children still deal with, and they can be scary and isolating. What if my family is keeping a secret from me? What if my family doesn’t have enough money? What if my dad loses his job? What if I don’t like my sibling? What if there is a new baby coming? What if my parents get divorced? What if my teacher doesn’t understand me? What if I do something cruel? What if someone does something cruel to me?

Beth McIntyre, former Cambridge Public librarian (now Madison County Poblic librarian, Wisconsin), shows off her Ramona Quimby Q tattoo. Photo: Beth McIntyre.

The plot points and details are honest and not sanitized for anyone’s benefit. Be it 1975 or 2016, sometimes a kid really does need to blow off steam by singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” in its entirety as loudly as possible for all the neighbors to hear.

When Cleary’s characters experience fear, love, jealousy, boredom, anger, or worry, we all recognize those emotions. She brings them sharply into focus. They are emotions we have felt and will keep feeling, but maybe up until that moment, we thought we were the only ones. What a relief to share the burden. What a relief to find that even if things don’t turn out as planned, there is hope and probably a really good laugh to be had as well.

Why, thought Beezus, Aunt Beatrice used to be every bit as awful as Ramona. And yet look how nice she is now. Beezus could scarcely believe it. And now Mother and Aunt Beatrice, who had quarreled when they were girls, loved each other and thought the things they had done were funny! They actually laughed about it. Well, maybe when she was grown-up she would think it was funny that Ramona had put eggshells in one birthday cake and baked her rubber doll with another. Maybe she wouldn’t think Ramona was so exasperating, after all. Maybe that was just the way things were with sisters. (Beezus and Ramona)

Maybe, Beezus. Maybe.

Happy birthday, Beverly Cleary! We love you in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You have brought us so much laughter and confidence — as we have grown both as readers and as humans. You have made our many troubles easier to bear. You have connected us, generation to generation, family to family, by showing us what we have in common as people.

We hope you have the best birthday cake — free of eggshells and baked-in rubber dolls.

We all want autograph albums.

We want you to sign every page.

From the March/April 2016 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. Happy 100th Birthday, Beverly Cleary! For more, click the tag Beverly Cleary at 100.

The post Ramona in the 21st-Century Library appeared first on The Horn Book.

Carla Hayden

I am over the moon about President Obama’s nomination of Carla D. Hayden to the position of Librarian of Congress. Carla and I were buddies back in Chicago–we met when she was YA coordinator at CPL and I interviewed her for a paper I was writing for library school, and later I worked for her as a storyteller when she ran the library at the Museum of Science and Industry. (I remember both of us being extremely annoyed that the Museum required children to pay extra to come to story hour.) And we are both proudly Zena’s kids.

There’s a lot of celebration about the facts that Carla will be the first female, first African American, and first actual librarian to become appointed to the post. But, aside from the most important point that she has been a smart, tested, and proven library advocate and leader for the past forty years, HOW GREAT IS IT that a YOUTH SERVICES LIBRARIAN will be running the place?

The post She’ll be swell, she’ll be great! appeared first on The Horn Book.

One-of-a-kind British writer Peter Dickinson died in December at age eighty-eight. His work cannot be easily categorized: a prolific author, he wrote everything from adult detective novels to speculative YA science fiction to heart-stopping adventures to intriguing almost-fantasies. The protagonists in his work for children range from an American-missionary boy who finds himself trekking through Tibet during the Boxer Rebellion (Tulku) to a blind teen who finds himself swept up in a plot by environmental terrorists to hijack a North Sea oil rig (Annerton Pit) to a human girl who finds herself transplanted into a chimp’s body (Eva). His books were wholly original, brimming with ideas, often concerned with the nature of religion and/or what makes us human — and also unfailingly compelling and masterfully plotted. Yet he did not consider himself an artist, but a craftsman: “I have a function, like the village cobbler, and that is to tell stories.”

Peter Dickinson’s 1993 Horn Book Magazine article “Masks“

Horn Book Magazine reviews of select titles by Peter Dickinson

“A Defense of Rubbish” by Peter Dickinson

The post Peter Dickinson, 1927-2015 appeared first on The Horn Book.

moderator Roger Sutton with panelists Cathie Mercier, Nancy Werlin, and Charlotte Taylor

What makes a book award-worthy? Who decides, and how? These questions were the focus of “Winners, Losers, and Something in Between: An Inside Look at Book Awards,” a panel sponsored by Children’s Books Boston that met at Simmons College on Tuesday.

The panelists and moderator had years of experience choosing book award winners among them. The moderator, our own Roger Sutton, and panelist Cathie Mercier, Director of the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons, have both served on committees for a number of long-running book awards, including plenty of American Library Association Youth Media awards. Panelist and author Nancy Werlin has served as a judge for the National Book Award and the Edgar Awards, and has been a finalist for both those awards and a winner of the Edgar. Panelist Charlotte Taylor is a blogger and longtime judge of the Cybils Awards.

Committee composition was a hot topic, with various types of diversity coming up again and again — gender and ethnic diversity, but also diversity of professional experience. Are the judges librarians? Booksellers? Authors? Bloggers? Do they have opportunities to share books with kids? Do those kids come from different backgrounds? Do they have a variety of genre preferences, and can they get past their preferences? And how big is the committee? Will it be dominated by one or two strong personalities? (Or not-so-obviously-strong personalities — as Nancy put it, quiet committee members in the back of the room are just as capable of digging in their heels as anyone else.)

Another big question was how the books get into the committee members’ hands. In most cases, publishers submit books for consideration, sometimes with a submission fee, sometimes without. ALA award judges are expected to read beyond what’s sent to them; National Book Award committees can “call in” a book from a publisher (and if the publisher is a small one, the submission fee is waived). The Cybils, an award judged by book bloggers, has a completely different process: anyone can nominate a book for the first round of judging, in which one group chooses a shortlist that’s handed off to a second round of judges.

Clearly, there’s a lot of work involved in being on an award committee. Cathie emphasized the importance of preparation before meetings, since time is short and there are so many books to discuss. When she chaired the Sibert committee, she insisted that committee members write annotations of the books they were supporting. (I’ll bet she did, thought all the Simmons alums in the room.) “You have to be able to see what people are thinking,” she explained.

The perspectives of the panelists varied most widely on the question of what makes an award-worthy book, and how one decides. While ALSC awards use terms like “most distinguished” in their criteria, the Cybils emphasize “kid appeal,” a term Charlotte admitted is subjective, since the adult judges bring their own biases. Cathie expressed that she feels “really, really inept at determining what kid appeal is,” but Charlotte said that the Cybils rely on the experience of the judges, many of whom work with kids.

All in all, the discussion was lively as advertised. And if you enjoy lively CBB events, join us for the liveliest of the year: Wicked Boston Children’s Book Trivia Challenge, hosted by Jack Gantos, at M. J. O’Connor’s on June 13.

The post “Winners, Losers, and Something in Between” awards panel recap appeared first on The Horn Book.

The post A Second Look: The Long Life of a Mockingbird appeared first on The Horn Book.

Complete with bush walks and a vegemite sandwich, Johnny Foolish is an Australian tale worthy of a read—too right!