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Earlier this year, Macmillan established a partnership with Scribd. Initially, the publishing house agreed to allow subscribers to access more than 1,000 eBooks.

Today, the two companies have announced that an additional 1,000 Macmillan titles will be made available at the Scribd library. According to the blog post announcement, 300 of these new additions are children’s books.

The newly added books represent a wide range of genres such as fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Readers can now enjoy works by Tom Wolfe, Hilary Mantel, and Madeline L’Engle through this eBook subscription service.

Some exciting new books for kids are premiering tomorrow, October 2nd.

Madeline L'Engle's 1962 Newbery Award winning, A WRINKLE IN TIME, is being revisited as a graphic novel.

SON by Lois Lowry is the fourth book in her futuristic world that began with THE GIVER, another Newbery winner, and continued with GATHERING BLUE and MESSENGER.

Both these new stories are fantasies. I told you last week about just having finished ADVENT by James Treadwell. That fantasy reminded me of a classic fantasy series by Susan Cooper, THE DARK IS RISING. You should check it out.

All of the above reads have been for YA readers, but another fun fantasy series is THE CHRONICLES OF PRYDAIN by Lloyd Alexander. It's not new, but middle grade readers should enjoy it. Lots of adventure, plus some laughs.

When You Reach Me
Rebecca Stead

middle grade

I thought twice about reviewing this book. It's always hard when a piece wins an award to write a review about it. The prejudice that goes along with an award as weighty as the Newbery is that the book is phenomenal.


Only, I had some serious issues with it.

Of course, making such a statement requires serious justification, and let me say that I think the premise--time travel--and the writing are phenomenal. They are what kept me reading.

However, I had some serious problems with the fact that Stead rested her story so significantly on L'Engle's, A Wrinkle in Time. A professor of mine in grad school told us--as a way of more or less taking the burden off our shoulders of coming up with new ideas for term papers and later, our own research--that we should build upon the ideas already out there (upon the shoulders of giants), not think we have to come up with brand new ones. So, I'm all for building upon the idea of time travel that L'Engle entertained in A Wrinkle in Time, which also happens to be one of my all time favorite books.

What I had trouble with in Stead's piece was that she built the whole book around L'Engle's when she didn't really have to. She set the book in the 1970s, made the main character obsessed with L'Engle's book, kept referring to it and debating the time travel issue as L'Engle explained it in her piece. I'm not sure why. Stead took L'Engle's idea and reshaped, built onto it, like many many writers do, and made it something clever and new. So why the need to incorporate A Wrinkle in Time into the very thread of When You Reach Me? The end result was distracting and placed Stead's groundbreaking thoughts and concepts in the very long, very gigantic shadow of L'Engle's own work.

In the end, if you are looking for amazingly good stylistic writing with strong characters, this piece has them. A new idea on time travel? The book has that too. If only it didn't have such a long shadow interwoven within its very fabric.

For more amazing reads, see Barrie Summy's blog this week!