How to use this Page

Sweet little Friday is upon us.  Let us celebrate the rapid approach of the weekend with ridiculousness.  And that particular item I have in spades.

First off, I’m so pleased and proud and delighted to inform you that my husband of the Cockeyed Caravan blog has written a book.  And what a book!  Published by Writer’s Digest, it’s called The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers.  I like to call it Save the Cat meets Joseph Campbell.  Best of all, we’re going to have a lovely release party for it on Friday, November 4th at 6:30 at the Bookends and Beginnings bookstore in Evanston, IL and YOU ARE ALL INVITED!!  I’ll even bake something.  Not sure what.  Something.  All information can be found here.

Now that’s a good title.  From Publisher’s Weekly: Trenton Lee Stewart Accidentally Starts a Mystery on Goodreads.  Don’t you hate it when that happens?  But this is actually a very sweet tale (and not a bad idea for someone to think up).  Check it out.

Horn Book has a new parenting blog, did you see?  Called Family Reading, they’ve so far had posts on newborns who hate to read, reading on the spectrum (Ferdinand the Bull as on the spectrum makes quite a bit of sense, when you think about it), and crafts inspired by picture books.  Beware that last link, though.  Its author’s kinda crazy.

The site Atlas Obscura has a new book out, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped updating their site or anything.  As proof, you simply have to read their recent post, A Guide to the Real-Life Homes of the Heroes of Children’s Literature.  It’s cool.  I was worried from the description that it would be all-white-kids, all-the-time, and that’s definitely the bulk of it.  But Kindred, Tar Beach, The House on Mango Street, and a couple others make it on there.  It also gets a bit loosey goosey with the term “children’s literature”.  Holden Caulfield?  Maybe not so much.  Thanks to Matt for the link.

The Good News: Folio Magazine nominated this blog for an Eddie Digital Award.  Woohoo!  Yay, team!

The Weird News: I’m nominated in the “Column / Blog – Government / Public Sector / Education” category (not too weird) alongside fellow nominees Everyday EMS of EMS1.com, PoliceOne.com – Be Advised…  of PoliceOne.com, and strategy+business specifically the piece “Why China’s Stock Market Crisis Spread” of PwC Strategy& LLC (significantly peculiar).

Hey, folks.  Today the film The Great Gilly Hopkins will open in select theaters and on demand.  Don’t know if there’s a theater showing it near you?  Then here’s a handy dandy chart where you can see if it’s anywhere near you.  Behold:

Good stuff.

Daily Image:

Neat! Travis Jonker discovered this site where you can Brickify (turn into LEGOs) any image. He had a fun post where you could guess his brickified covers. I decided to do my own books out of curiosity.  The results:

Is it bad to say that I kinda like some of these more?  Thanks to 100 Scope Notes for the link.

#63 The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson (1978)
32 points

The first book that I ever bought for myself. It blew my mind. – Stacy Dillon

Many people count Bridge to Terabithia as their favorite Paterson novel; while it’s definitely a book that I admire, The Great Gilly Hopkins is one that I’ve returned to several times. The ending may be heartbreaking, but a pat ending would have ruined the truth of the story. – Jennifer Schultz

Sometimes I’ll challenge the kids in the bookgroup I run with a difficult question.  “Name me a children’s book where you don’t like the hero right from the start.”  I tried this on them the other day as we were discussing The Secret Garden and they came up with a couple good suggestions, including this book.  “Gilly’s racist!” one of them pointed out.  I agreed with them that she was at first.  A racist protagonist in a children’s book takes a particularly skilled writer.  One that knows where the story is going.  So it is that Katherine Paterson, our past Ambassador of Young People’s Literature, makes an appearance on this Top 100 list at last.

The description from Katherine Paterson’s website reads: “At eleven, Gilly is nobody’s real kid. If only she could find her beautiful mother, Courtney, and live with her instead of in the ugly foster home where she had just been placed! How could she, the great Gilly Hopkins, known throughout the country for her brilliance and unmanageability, be expected to tolerate Maime Trotter, the fat, nearly illiterate widow who is now her guardian? Or for that matter, the freaky seven year old boy and the shrunken blind black man who are also considered part of the bizarre ‘family’? Even cool Ms. Harris. Her teacher, is a shock to her.”

There is a sadness in the creation.  In American Writers for Children Since 1960: Fiction, Paterson says that her book was “a confession of sin.”   She refers to the fact that she once took in some Cambodian children, who were placed in her home for only two months. Paterson felt that she had been “regarding two human beings as Kleenex, disposable,” so that she decided “to think, what must it be like for those thousands … of children … who find themselves rated disposable?”  Her website says the same thing, but in a different way. “I wrote Gilly after I’d been a foster mother for a couple of months and didn’t feel as though I’d been such a great one, so I tried to imagine how it might be to be a foster child. How would I feel if I thought the rest of the world thought of me as disposable?”

Of course, having a complex female protagonist like Gilly has its downside.  Unsurprisingly the book was ranked #20 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books for 1990-2000.  Again, I’d love to see a similar list made up for 2000-2010.  Gilly challenges have been far and few between in the last ten years, I’d wager.

Said American Writers for Children Since 1960: Fiction of the book, “The Great Gilly Hopkins is Paterson’s funniest book, but heartbreak is never far beneath the humor. Though the novel’s major thesis may be, in Gilly’s words, that ‘the world is woefully short on frog smoochers,’ its ending is characteristically hopeful.”

It won the only 1979 Newbery Honor, beaten in that particular year by Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game<