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I usually begin with a video of myself whenever I’ve a chance, but this week I’m preempting my own face because this video is the coolest thing ever.  By the time I left New York Public Library its Rose Reading Room had already been closed for half a year.  Now you get to see the room in a time lapse video looking cooler than ever.  52,000 books are shelved here in two minutes.  Trust me – you won’t be bored.

This month I hosted one of those fun little interviews I do from time to time on my show Ladybird and Friends. This month the interviewee was Mike Grosso of the new feminist middle grade novel I Am Drums.  He’s great.  The book’s great.  We have fun.  But if you really want to skip to the weird part, be sure to also go to about 28:34.

And just to keep it all in the family, my husband’s book The Secrets of Story is out and available for purchase.  To prep you a bit, Matt’s been creating short interesting videos to highlight some of the ideas in the book.  This one’s about objects.  I’m a fan.  Check it:

You’ve heard of book trailers, surely, but audiobook trailers? This one for Adam Gidwitz’s magnificent The Inquisitor’s Tale will make you a believer. Let’s see more of these in the future!

Meanwhile, over at 100 Scope Notes, Travis Jonker swore that if he ever heard of a children’s book creator on television, he’d watch. Then he heard that Oliver Jeffers was on an Irish talk show called The Late Late Show. So what does he do? He tracks down the Irish video link. That’s dedication, people. That’s chutzpah. And we are the beneficiaries:

N.D. Wilson.  He writes middle grade children’s books.  Good ones too.  Books that get a lot of critical attention.  But apparently that’s not enough for Mr. Wilson. Oh no.  He has to go out and actually write and direct a real as real movie.  It’s called The River Thief and it has a limited national release and is on VOD.  Check out the trailer here if you’re curious:

Fun Fact: The creation of this movie, from concept to end of production, was three weeks. That includes the three days it took to write the script. Here’s a behind the scenes on that, if you’re curious.

Next UP: Not safe for work.  Not really.  But anything that takes the “sexy librarian” stereotype and turns it on its head/tongue is fine by me.

And for the off-topic video, I warn you.  This bad lip-reading will get caught in your head.  This is the earworm to rule all earworms.

We’re just hitting it out of the park now.  Fast on the heels of our last Salon with Jeanne Birdsall and N.D. Wilson (info below), this coming Saturday I managed to bring together the three kings of children’s book social media.  Behold!

If you’d like to watch the discussion live, tune in 2:00 CST here.  And if you live in the area, you simply have to come.  Never before have these three been interviewed at the same time by . . . uh . . me.  Or possibly anyone else (note to self: check if this is true).

Curious about Travis Jonker’s picture, by the way?  As I recall it was made for him by video and film director Michel Gondry.  You can read Travis’s piece about it here.  John’s is by Dan Santat.  I’m going to need to ask Colby who did his.

By the way, did you miss our last Salon last Saturday when Jeanne Birdsall and N.D. Wilson spoke on the topic of how their personal belief systems inform their writing?  Good news!  Not only did I record the, quite frankly, killer talk but the sound quality was a lot better than last time.  Here’s the timeline of the video:

• At 0:00 Nate is running a bit late but since it was a live feed I wanted to keep folks watching in the loop.
• At 2:36 Jeanne Birdsall and I have a finger puppet show as we wait for Nate to show up.  I have flashbacks to my sock puppet interview from 8 years ago.
• At 3:30 the talk begins.
• And at 12:45 I tilt the screen back a bit so that it doesn’t look like our heads are all scraping the ceiling.

Enjoy!

Today a co-worker pulled me aside and asked about our next Children’s Literary Salon.  She wanted to know how I was getting such fabulous stars, particularly since the next Salon (a week from this Saturday) will be featuring not just Penderwicks scribe Jeanne Birdsall but author N.D. Wilson to boot.  Add in the topic (a little non-Christian Humanism with your kidlit, anyone?) and you’ve got yourself a slam bang killer talk.  I told her that authors are generous people and Jeanne and Nate particularly so.  As ever, there will be a live feed of the discussion here and this time I’ll try using my own personal laptop so that we don’t have to worry as much about the sound quality.

Here’s more information:

Are you aware of the Cozy Classics board book series? How about the felted board book versions of the original Star Wars movies? The other night I had dinner with Cozy Classics creator Holman Wang and we talked about his process. Turns out, the felted characters are needle felted entirely. A lawyer by trade, Holman learned how to felt through YouTube videos. Now what goes around comes around as you watch this oddly soothing time lapse YouTube video of his process. It’s an old video (as the dates at the end attest) but that doesn’t make it any less neat.

And as for the aforementioned Star Wars books, here’s Holman himself talking about his various techniques:

Also at that dinner, someone in attendance mentioned that Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show had covered A Birthday Cake for George Washington. Come again? Yes, you truly know that a book has left our little orbit when it ends up a discussion topic on a Comedy Central evening show. I wouldn’t exactly call this one workplace appropriate, but I would call it funny. Nice too that while he talks about the book he does not speculate about the creators.

Book trailer time. N.D. Wilson has always created the best book trailers. Remember the one he did for Ashtown Burials? Or Boys of Blur?  Well, the latest premiered on Entertainment Weekly very recently:

Thanks to Aaron Zenz for the link.

So I ask James Kennedy the other day to name his favorite 90-Second Newbery Film Festival co-hosts.  And he rattles off a bunch of names but one that he was particularly impressed by?  Nikki Loftin, author of Nightingale’s Nest.  Don’t believe me?  Then check out this killer opening Nikki and James did together.  That woman has pipes!

Of course, I already had insider knowledge to Nikki’s singing prowess.  Two years ago she created a video for Jules Danielson and myself and . . . well, if you just can’t get through your day without seeing a children’s author belting out classic Rogers & Hammerstein on a roof, then are YOU in luck!

And finally, for our off-topic-but-not-really video, I bring you information from beyond the grave.  We all know Michael Jackson, and many of us know Bob Fosse.  Now see how eerie it is when you put one on top of another.  If The Little Prince movie did nothing else, it gave us this:

• As per usual there are some Wild Things links I’d love to share today.  Lemme see here . . . Well we got a real stunner of a review over at Chapter 16.  That’s some good and gorgeous stuff going down there. Phil Nel called us “Punchy, lively, and carefully researched.”   The blog The Boy Reader gave us some serious love.  And today on our blog tour we’re at There’s a Book.  And then there’s the video at the Wild Things blog.  N.D. Wilson sent us a vid of the true behind-the-scenes story of Boys of Blur.  It’s kicking off our video series “Wild Things: Sneaky Peeks” where authors reveal the stories behind their books.

Aw heck.  I’ll save you some time.  Here’s the video.  This guy is amazing:

Don’t forget to keep checking back on the site for a new author a day!

• It’s one thing to notice a trend.  It’s another entirely to pick up on it, catalog the books that represent it, and post accordingly.  I’d noticed in a vague disjointed way that there was a definite uptick in the number of picture books illustrated with photographs this year.  Trust Travis Jonker to systematically go through and find every last livin’ lovin’ one in his The State of Photography Illustration in 2014 post.  In his comment section I’ve added a couple others I’ve seen.  Be sure to do the same!

• Since I don’t have school age kids yet I’m not in the school loop at the moment.  So it was a BIG shock to me to see the child of a friend of mine having her First Day of Kindergarten picture taken this week.  Really?  In early August?  With that in mind, this may seem a bit late but I care not.  The melodic cadences of Jonathan Auxier can be heard here recommending truly fantastic summer children’s book fare.  The man has fine fabulous taste.

• In other summer news I was pleased as punch to read about the Y’s Summer Learning Loss Prevention Program.  You know summer slide?  Well it’s good to see someone doing something about it.  Check out the info.  Check out the stats.  Check out the folks trying to combat it.

• It’s interesting to read the recent PW article Middle Grade and YA: Where to Draw the Line? which takes the issue from a bookseller P.O.V.  Naturally librarians have been struggling with this issue for years.  I even conducted a panel at NYPL a couple years ago called Middle Grade Fiction: Surviving the YA Onslaught in which MG authors Rebecca Stead, N.D. Wilson (he’s everywhere!), Jeanne Birdsall, and Adam Gidwitz discussed the industry’s attempts to brand them as YA (you can hear the full incredibly painful and scratchy audio of the talk here).  It’s a hot topic.

• This.  This this this this this.  By the way, and completely off-topic, how long until someone writes a YA novel called “This”?  The sequel could be named “That”.  You’re welcome, publishing industry.

• Harry Potter fan art is near and dear to my heart but in a pinch I’m happy to consider Harry Potter official cover art as well.  They just released the new British covers (and high bloody time, sayeth the masses).  They’re rather fabulous, with the sole flaw of never aging Harry.  What poor kid wants to look the same age at 10 as he does at 17?  Maybe it’s a wizard thing.  Here’s one of the new jackets to chew on:

That might be my favorite Dumbledore to date.

• There are whole generations of children’s librarians that went through graduate school reading and learning about educator Kay E. Vandergrift.  I was one of them, so I was quite sad to read of her recent passing.  The PW obit for her is excellent, particularly the part that reads, “Vandergrift was one of the first professors to establish a significant Web presence, spearheading the use of the Internet as a teaching tool. Her website, a self-declared ‘means of sharing ideas and information with all those interested in literature for children and young adults,’ was considered an important resource for those working with children and linked to more than 500 other sites.”  If you need to know your online children’s literary history, the story isn’t complete without Kay.  I always hoped she’d get around to including a blog section, but what she had was impressive in its own right.  Go take a gander.

• I don’t consider myself a chump but there are times when even I get so blinded by a seemingly odd fact on the internet that I eschew common sense and believe it to be correct.  Case in point: The Detroit Tigers Dugout Librarian. Oh, how I wanted this to be true.  Born in Kalamazoo, a town equidistant between Detroit and Chicago, my baseball loyalties have always been torn between the Tigers and the Cubs (clearly I love lost causes).  So the idea of the Tigers having their own librarian . . . well, can you blame me for wanting to believe?  I WANNA BEE-LIEVE!

• Amazon came up with a list of 100 children’s books to read.  Amazon, I’ma gonna let you finish but the NYPL had the best 100 children’s book list of all time!  Which . . . I wrote. . . . so . . . . yeah.  No bias here or anything. *whistles to self*

• I’ve a new pet peeve.  Wanna hear it?  Of course you do!  I just get a bit peeved when popular sites create these lists of children’s books and do absolutely no research whatsoever so that every book mentioned is something they themselves read as children.  That’s why it’s notable when you see something like the remarkable Buzzfeed list 25 Contemporary Picture Books to Help Parents, Teachers, and Kids Talk About Diversity.  They don’t lie!  There are September 2014 releases here as well as a couple things that are at least 10 years old.  It’s a nice mix, really, and a great selection of books.  Thanks to Alexandria LaFaye for the link.

• So they’re called iPhone wallpapers?  I never knew that.  Neil Gaiman’s made a score of them based on his children’s books.

• Daily Image:

Maybe it’s just me but after seeing the literary benches cropping up in England I can’t help but think they make a LOT of sense.  More so than painting a statue of a cow or a Peanuts character (can you tell I lived in Minneapolis once?).  Here are two beautiful examples:

Wind the in the Willows

Alice Through the Looking Glass

Thanks to Stephanie Whelan for the link!

Boys of Blur
By N.D. Wilson
Random House Books for Young Readers
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-449-81673-8
Ages 9-12
On shelves April 8th.

I like a kid’s book with ambition. It’s all well and good to write one about magic candy shops or goofy uncles or simpering unicorns or what have you. The world is big and there’s room for every possible conceivable type of book for our children you can imagine. But then you have the children’s book authors that aim higher. Let’s say one wants to write about zombies. Well, that’s easy enough. Zombies battling kids is pretty straightforward stuff. But imagine the chutzpah it would take to take that seemingly innocuous little element and then to add in, oh I dunno, BEOWULF. N.D. Wilson is one of those guys I’ve been watching for a very long time. The kind of guy who started off his career by combining a contemporary tale of underground survival with The Odyssey (Leepike Ridge). In his latest novel, Boys of Blur Wilson steps everything up a notch. You’ve got your aforementioned zombies as well as a paean to small town football, an economy based on sugar cane harvesting, spousal abuse, and rabbit runs. It sounds like a dare, honestly. “I dare you to combine these seemingly disparate elements into a contemporary classic”. The end result is a book that shoots high, misses on occasion, but ultimately comes across as a smart and action packed tale of redemption.

There is muck, then sugarcane, then swamps, then Taper. The town of Taper, to be precise, where 12-year-old Charlie Reynolds has come with his mother, stepfather, and little sister to witness the burial of the local high school football coach. It’s a town filled with secrets and relatives he never knew he had, like homeschooled Sugar, his distant cousin, with whom he shares an instant bond. Together, the two discover a wild man of the swamps accompanied by two panthers and a sword. The reason for the sword becomes infinitely clear when Charlie becomes aware of The Gren. A zombie-like hoard bent on the town’s obliteration (and then THE WORLD!), it’s up to one young boy to seek out the source of the corruption and take her (yes, her) down.

I had to actually look up my Beowulf after reading this. The reason? The opening. Wilson doesn’t go in for the old rules that state that you should begin your book with some kind of gripping slam-bang action scene. His first page? It reads like an ode. Like a minstrel has stepped out of the wings to give praise to the gods and to set the scene for you. Only in this case it’s just the narrator telling you what’s what. “When the sugarcane’s burning and the rabbits are running, look for the boys who are quicker than flame.” Read that line aloud for a second. Just taste and savor what it’s saying. It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Like you’ve read it somewhere else before (particularly that “look for the” part). Then there’s that last line. “Out here in the flats, when the sugarcane’s burning and the rabbits are running, there can be only quick. There’s quick, and there’s dead.” So I looked up the beginning of Beowulf just to see if, by any chance, Wilson had cribbed some of this from his source material. Not as such. The original text is a bit more concerned with great tribal kings past, and all that jazz. That doesn’t make Wilson’s book any less compelling, though. There’s a rhythm to the opening that sucks you in immediately. It’s not afraid to be beautiful. It begs to be heard from a tongue.

And while I’m on the topic of beautiful language, Wilson sure knows how to turn a phrase. If he has any ultimately defining characteristic as a writer it is his complete and utter lack of fear regarding descriptions. He delves into them. Swims deep into them. Can you blame him? Though a resident of Idaho, here he evokes a Florida that puts Carl Hiaasen to shame. Examples of some of his particularly good lines:

“As for the church bell, it crashed through the floorboards and settled into the soft ground below. It’s still down there, under the patched floor, ringing silence in the muck.”

“Charlie looked at the sky, held up by nothing more than the column of smoke he’d noticed during the service.”

“Charlie stopped at the end, beside a boy with a baby face on a body the size and shape of someone’s front door.”

And I’m particularly fond of this line about new siblings: “When Molly had come, she had turned Charlie into a brother, adding deep loves and loyalties to who he was without asking his permission first.”

The book moves at a rapid clip, but not at the expense of the characters. For one thing, it’s nice not to have to read about a passive hero. From early in the book, we know certain things about Charlie that are to serve him well in the future. As the story says, thanks to experiences with his abusive father, “he could bottle fear. He’d been doing it his whole life.” This gives Wilson’s hero a learned skill that will aid him in the rest of the story. And when there are choices to be made, he makes them. He isn’t some child being taken from place to place. He decides what he should and should not do in any given moment and acts. Sometimes it’s the right choice and sometimes it’s wrong, but it is at least HIS choice each time.

The sugarcane fields themselves are explained a bit late in the narrative. On page 64 or so we finally get an explanation about why the boys are running through burning fields to catch rabbits. For a moment I was reminded of Cynthia Kadohata’s attempts to explain threshing in her otherwise scintillating book The Thing About Luck. Wilson has the advantage of having an outsider in his tale, so it’s perfectly all right for Charlie to ask why the only way to successfully harvest cane is to burn it, “Fastest way to strip the leaves . . . Stalks is so wet, they don’t burn.” Mind you, this could have worked a little earlier in the story, since much of the book requires us to take on faith why the rabbit runs occur.

It’s also an unapologetically masculine story as well. All about swords and fighting and football and dangerous runs into burning sugarcane fields. The football is particularly fascinating. In an age when concussions are becoming big news and people are beginning to turn against the nation’s most violent sport, it’s unique, to say the least, to read a middle grade book where small town football is a way of life. Small town football almost NEVER makes it into books for kids, partly because baseball makes for a better narrative by its very definition. Football’s more difficult to explain. Its terms and turns of phrase haven’t made it into the language of the cultural zeitgeist to the same extent. For an author to not only acknowledge its existence but also give it a thumbs up is almost unheard of. Yet Boys of Blur could not exist without football. Charlie’s father went pro, as did his stepfather. The book begins by burying a coach, and there are long seated animosities in the town behind old high school football rivals. For many small towns, life without football would be untenable. And Boys of Blur acknowledges that to a certain extent.

The women that do appear are few and far between, but they are there. One should take care to note that it’s Wilson’s source material that lacking in the ladies (except for the big bad, of course). And he did go out of his way to add a couple additional females to the line-up. It’s not as if Charlie himself doesn’t notice the lack of ladies as well anyway. At one point he ponders the Gren and wonders why there aren’t any girls. The possible explanation he’s given is that much as a selfish man is envious of his sons, so would a selfish woman find her own daughters to be competition. Take that as you may. We veer close to Caliban country here, but Wilson already has one classic text to draw from. Shakespeare can wait.

Charlie’s mother would be one other example of a woman introduced to this story that gets a fair amount of page time. On paper you’d assume she was just a victim, a woman who continues to fear her ex-husband. But in reality, Wilson gives her much more credit. She’s the woman who dared to get out of an untenable situation for the sake of her child. A woman who managed to find another husband who wasn’t a carbon copy of the first and who has done everything in her power to protect her children in the wake of her ex-husband’s threats. And most interesting, Wilson will keep cutting back to her in the narrative. He doesn’t have to. There’s a reason most children’s fantasy novels star orphans. Include the parents and there’s a lot of emotional baggage to attend to. But Wilson’s never liked the notion of orphans much, so when his story cuts back to Natalie Mack and what she’s up to it’s a choice you go along with. In Wilson’s books parents aren’t enemies but allies. It goes against the grain of the usual narratives, wakes you up, and makes for better books.

Where do heroes find their courage and resolve? In previous books Wilson had already gone underground and into deep dark places. In Boys of Blur he explores the dual worlds of cane and swamp alike. Most epic narratives of the children’s fantasy sort are long, bloated affairs. They feel like they can’t tell their tales in anything less than 300 pages, and even then they end up being the first in a series. Wilson’s slick, sleek editing puts the bloat to shame. Clocking in at a handsome 208 pages it’s not going to be understood by every child reader. It doesn’t try for that either. Really, it can only be read by the right reader. The one that’s outgrown Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. The one who isn’t scared off by The Golden Compass and who will inform the librarian that they can’t possibly impress him or her because they’ve read “everything”. This is a book to stretch the muscles in that child’s brains. To make them appreciate the language of a tale as much as the action. And yes, there are big smelly zombies that go about killing people so win-win, right? Some may say the book ends too quickly. Some will wonder why there isn’t a sequel. But many will be impressed by what Wilson’s willing to shoot for here. Like the boys in the cane, this book speeds out of the gate, quick on its feet, willing to skip and hop and jump as fast as possible to get you where you need to go. If you’ve read too much of the same old, same old, this is one children’s book that’s like no other you know out there. Gripping.

On shelves now.

Source: Galley sent from author for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• Zombie Baseball Beatdown by Paolo Bacigalupi – Lots of similarities, actually. Particularly when it comes to beating down zombies in cane fields / corn fields.

• Beowulf by Gareth Hinds – Undoubtedly the best version of Beowulf for kids out there, this is Hinds’ masterpiece and is not to be missed.

• The House of Dies Drear by Virginia Hamilton – Bear with me here. It makes sense. In both books you’ve mysterious African-American men hiding a secret of the past, scaring the local kids. I draw my connections where I can.

First Line: “When the sugarcane’s burning and the rabbits are running, look for the boys who are quicker than flame.”

Other Blog Reviews:

• Random Musings of a Bibliophile
• Librarian of Snark
• Pages Unbound
• Books and Movies
• Good Books, Good Wine
• Fiction State of Mind

Misc: Read some of the book yourself to get a taste.

Videos:
Remember, if you will, that Wilson both shot and narrated the following book trailer. One of the best of the year, too:

Time to up the bar. Years ago N.D. Wilson made what has to be the most ambitious book trailer created by an author I ever did see (it was for The Ashtown Burials and if you missed it you can watch it here and see what I mean). Now, after copious Florida research trips where he shot this footage, Wilson returns. Think the narrator on this is Morgan Freeman? Think again. It’s Wilson himself and this is a beautiful glimpse of the book. Tell me you don’t want to read it right now now now.

Finally, the off-topic video was going to be that Christopher Walken supercut of him dancing in all his films.  Unfortunately it looks like it’s been removed.  So instead, I’ll just give you a video that will lead you to waste your ENTIRE DAY.  Do you know Postmodern Jukebox?  If not, do NOT click on that link or you’ll be listening to clever recuts of popular songs all the ding dang day long.  Fitting that I show their video of 2013′s hits then:

Just sorta makes me happy.  I’m working on a theory that the tambourine players is a being from another world.

Shout-out to my buddy Haddon Kime.  The man wrote the music and lyrics for a new musical version of The Snow Queen now playing at the San Jose Repertory Theatre with dreams of Broadway.  Years ago he created the opening music and words for my now long dead podcast.  It’s great seeing his star on the rise.  This past Christmas we discussed various children’s versions of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, including this year’s by Bagram Ibatoulline (which he hadn’t seen) and Breadcrumbs (which he thinks is brilliant).  This is a tiny look at the production but I do love that in this Steampunky SQ the little robber girl gets to sing a punk rock song.  Awesome.  She has always been my favorite character anyway.

Small children standing on chairs.  If book trailers need anything more than this, I don’t want to hear about it.  Here we have fantastic MG author N.D. Wilson’s daughter reading his self-published (and, if I hear correctly, soon to be professionally published) picture book Hello, Ninja.

Of course I can’t link to a video by N.D. Wilson without thinking of that AMAZING one he created years ago for the first Ashtown Burials book.  I was reminded of that video when I saw this recent one for Cragbridge Hall: The Inventor’s Secret by Chad Morris.  Many of us only DREAM of having a trailer of this caliber for our own titles:

With the advent of Saving Mr. Banks, some of you may be curious about the real P.L. Travers.  Fortunately it looks as if the documentary P.L. Travers: The Real Mary Poppins is available through YouTube.  Here’s the first part:

And for today’s off-topic video, special thanks to Gregory K for this one. It looks like the world’s most ambitious flashmob. It’s not. The amount of attention paid to facial hair should have given that much away.

Loved the live chicken.

We begin this week with something extraordinary.  A book trailer that looks like a movie trailer (no real surprises there) but that includes so many specific details to its book that you’re half inclined to think that the movie version already exists.  Super 8’s actor Joel Courtney stars in trailer for The Dragon’s Tooth by ND Wilson.  What’s funny about it is that its locations are eerily perfect, the scenes amazing, and yet it has one aspect that makes me sad.  You see, the hero of this book and his sister are dark skinned.  Yet here you can see that they’re pretty darn white.  To be fair this is entirely due to the fact that Mr. Courtney is friends with Mr. Wilson’s kids and that’s how he got the part.  Still . . . sigh.  Ditto the fact that an elderly woman from the book now appears to be 45.  Perhaps elderly actresses are difficult to find sometimes?  But aside from all that this is a remarkable piece of work.  Maybe the best movie-like book trailer I’ve ever seen.  Little wonder since it was directed by the author himself!  If that whole writing books thing doesn’t work out, I can see a second career ready and waiting. Thanks to Heather Wilson for the link.

Along similar lines is this trailer for Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone.  When you’ve been following an author since day one, there’s an instinct to claim them.  I loved Ms. Taylor when she wrote her Faeries of Dreamdark books back in the day.  Now she’s hugely popular and I feel very possessive of her.  With a whopping 50,000+ views (holy moses!) this next video is not as sophisticated as Wilson’s, but it has its own ineffable charm, no?

A very different kind of book trailer involves the recent winner of The Society of Illustrator’s Original Art gold medal.  I daresay that this is the first time in my own recollection that a nonfiction title has won the award (and from National Geographic at that!).  And I can think of no better way to see the art than this little video right here:

Gorgeous. Thanks to Jules Danielson for the link!

If I hadn’t begun with all those book trailers I probably would have begun with this glimpse of the staged production of How to Train Your Dragon in Australia.  Because when it comes to stage puppetry, you ain’t never NEVER seen nuthin’ like this: