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The Tiara on the Terrace, by Kristen Kittschier, is a clever novel, perfect for fans of Pseudonymous Bosch and Gordon Korman and a companion to The Wig in the Window.

Well sir, it’s a heckuva week.  Book stuff is happening out the wazoo, but for a moment I’d like to concentrate on what else is going on in the wider children’s literary world.  What say we Fusenews it up a bit, eh?

• Of course there’s no way to begin today without a hat tip to the late, great E.L. Konigsburg.  The only person, I believe, to win both a Newbery Award and a Newbery Honor in their debut year.  Top THAT one, folks!  The New York Times pays tribute to one of our luminaries.  We had managed to do pretty well in 2013 without losing one of our lights.  Couldn’t last forever.  Godspeed, Elaine.

• Speaking of deaths, I missed mentioning my sadness upon hearing of Roger Ebert’s passing. Jezebel put out a rather nice compilation of Roger Ebert’s Twenty Best Reviews.  I wonder if folks ever do that for children’s book critics.  Hm.  In any case, amongst the reviews was this one for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  It’s rather brilliant.  See for yourself.

• New Blog Alert: Now I would like to brag about my system’s children’s librarians.  They are uniquely talented individuals.  Smart as all get out.  One that I’ve always been particularly impressed with is Stephanie Whelan, a woman I trust more than anyone else when it comes to finding the best in children’s (not YA) science fiction and fantasy fare.  Now Stephanie has conjured up one doozy of a blog on that very topic.  It’s called Views From the Tesseract (nice, right?) and it looks at a lot of science fiction and fantasy specifically with side views of topics in the field.  You’ll find posts with subjects like A Matter of Taste: Preferring One Genre Over Another, Five Fantasy Pet Peeves, and the fascinating delve into the world of Tom Swift in The Swift Proposal.  Stephanie also has access to galleys so be sure to check out her early reviews for books like William Alexander’s Ghoulish Song and Sidekicked by John David Anderson (which I’m reading right now on her recommendation).

• Turns out that the Mental Floss piece 11 Book Sequels You Probably Didn’t Know Existed spends an inordinate amount of time looking at children’s books.  Check it out for mentions of the 101 Dalmatians sequel (missed that one), the E.T. sequel The Book of the Green Planet (which, if memory serves, was illustrated long ago by David Wiesner and is the only book he no longer owns the art of), and more.

• Nice blogger mentions this week.  Thanks to Sara O’Leary for mentioning my new website and to Jen Robinson’s for the nice review of Giant Dance Party.  I appreciate it, guys!  Plus Jen is the first review I’ve read that draws a connection between my book and the Hunger Games series.  Few can say so much.

Speaking of reviews, I owe Travis Jonker a debt of gratitude for reviewing Marguerite Abouet’s Akissi.  I read that book in the original French a year or two ago and was completely uncertain if it would ever see the light of day here in the States due to a final story that, quite frankly, DEFIES anything I’ve seen in children’s literature before.  The kind of thing that makes Captain Underpants look tame.  You have been warned.  Great book, by the way.  Let’s not lose sight of that.

• Not too long ago I spoke to a group of 6th graders at Bank Street College’s school about contemporary book jackets and how they’re marketed to kids.  Only a portion of my talk was dedicated to race or gender.  Fortunately, the kids have been thinking long and hard about it.  Allie Bruce has posted twice about a covers project the kids have participated in.  Be sure to check out race and then gender when you have a chance.  Food for thought.

• For a certain kind of person, the title of this website alone will cause a flutter and palpitation of the heart: The Last Unicorn Screening Tour (featuring Peter S. Beagle and fans everywhere).  You know who you are.  Big time thanks to Marci for the link.

• Newsflash: Americans Still Love Libraries.  Comes with its own infographic, so you know it’s true.  Thanks to Lese Dunton for the link.

• What do Pinkalicious, A Ball for Daisy, and Square Cat all have in common?  Read ‘em to your kids and you’ll be teaching them that consumerism is king.  So sayeth a 196-page thesis called “Cultivating Little Consumers: How Picture Books Influence Materialism in Children”, as reported by The Guardian.  And they might have gotten away with the premise to if they just hadn’t brought up I Want My Hat Back.  Dude.  Back away from the Klassen.  Thanks to Zoe Toft (Playing By the Book) for the link.

• You may have heard that Simon & Schuster finally announced that it will start making e-books available to all three New York City public library systems.  The press certainly picked up on the story and many articles have been generated.  Curious?  Then read these pieces in Mashable, The NY Daily News, MediaBistro (Galleycat and Fishbowl NYC), Publishers Weekly, Fast Company and The Associated Press.

• Okay.  I’m just gonna go out on a limb here and say it.  Marjorie Ingall has created, without a doubt the most impressive children’s book footwear post of all time.  Honest-to-god, if you don’t bow down before her for that English Roses shoe, you have no soul.

• Required Reading of the Day: There are few authorial blogs out there even half as interesting as Nathan Hale’s.  And when the guy gets a fact wrong in one of his books, he’ll do anything to set it right.  Even if it means going to Kansas.  Here’s how he put it:

We made a HUGE historical error, and we are going to fix it! We are going to learn why Kansas wasn’t a Confederate state–why it was a “Free State,” and how it happened. We are also going to visit Kansas on an official apology and correction trip. When we are finished, all Hazardous Tales readers will know how to correct their own copy of Big Bad Ironclad! Stay tuned!

You can see the official ceremony here, but be sure to read all the blog posts he drew to explain precisely why Kansas was a free state anyway. You can see Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, and Part Six.

• Daily Image:

It’s not the holiday gift giving season, but if you know a librarian in need of a unique gift, I have your number.

Awesomesauce.  Thanks to Marchek for the link.

Author E.L. Konigsburg has passed away. She wrote the beloved kid’s book, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

Her bookshelf also included A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver and The View From Saturday. In an interview, she once said “You have to experience kindness in order to be kind,” explaining why she believed in practicing random acts of kindness. She also outlined her writing career:

I was the first one in my family to go away to college. I came from a small town where there was no guidance in the high school at all. It was a mill town, and I never knew anyone who made their living from the arts. When you did go away to college, you went away to be something – an engineer, or a teacher, or a chemist. I never knew anyone who went away to be an artist until I was in college. When I was in college at Carnegie Mellon, I wanted to be a chemist. So I became one. I worked in a laboratory and went to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. Then I taught science at a private girls school. I had three children and waited until all three were in school before I started writing. When my third child went away to school, I started to write in the mornings. I’ve already mentioned that I want to write something that reflects their growing up, because when I was growing up the books I read never reflected me.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

#7 From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967)
183 points

A brother and sister run away to Metropolitan Museum of art in New York City. Is it plausible? Dude, you’re missing the point. For kids, this 1968 Newbery Medal winner is escapist fiction at its best. – Travis Jonker

I listened to this book on audiobook cassette every night for weeks in the fourth grade. I was too shy to run away to a museum, so I lived vicariously through Claudia and Jamie. Add in an art mystery? I was obsessed! This was also the first I learned the sad truth about movie adaptations. The made for TV movie came out a few years after I read the book and it failed miserably to meet my 13-year-old expectations. I cried so much after the movie aired and consoled myself in the book once again because the book was of course much better. – Sarah (Green Bean Teen Queen)

When I had the kids read this book as part of my library bookgroup I told them all about automats.  They were enthralled.  Now my library is opening an exhibit that will feature a real automat in the center of the exhibit space.   I’m oddly excited about this.

The synopsis from the book itself reads, “Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away . . . so she decided to run not from somewhere but to somewhere – somewhere large, warm, comfortable, and beautiful.  And that was how Claudia and her brother, Jamie, ended up living in the Metropolitan Museum of Art – and right in the middle of a mystery that made headlines.”

Origins.  According to Perry Nodelman in American Writers for Children Since 1960: Fiction, “Konigsburg has said the book originated at a family picnic in Yellowstone National Park, during which her children complained about everything they could think of: ‘I realized that if my children ever left home, they would never revert to barbarism. They would carry with them all the fussiness and tidiness of suburban life. Where could they go…? Maybe they could find some way to live with caution and compulsiveness and still satisfy their need for adventure’.”  I love that quote.  It sort of allows the entire book to make sense to me.

Anita Silvey in 100 Best Books for Children adds in some other pertinent details.  “In 1965 she read in the New York Times about the purchase of a statue by the Metropolitan Museum of Art – The Lady with the Primroses, possibly the work of Leonardo da Vinci.”  The characters of Claudia and Jamie were also based on her own kids.

In terms of the book, Nodelman quotes John Rowe Townsend who says, “The fact that Mrs. Frankweiler narrates the whole story, which she herself does not enter until near the end, seems to me to be a major flaw.”  Nodelman adds, “indeed, the biggest question about this novel is why Mrs. Frankweiler is in it at all. But it is Mrs. Frankweiler’s presence in the book that allows it to be more than lightweight.”

Pop Quiz, Hotshots: What do the E. and the L. in E.L. Konigsburg’s name stand for?  You have until the end of this post to answer correctly.  Tick… tick… tick…

When asked in an interview in the February 1986 edition of Language Arts how she crafts her stories, Ms. Konigsburg had this to say: “Somewhere in the course of writing the characters take over and oft

    About seven years ago, I went on one of the best field trips I've ever chaperoned as a teacher.  At the time, I was teaching sixth grade, and the sixth grade team took the whole grade (about 75 kids) to Chicago for three days.  It was an amazing experience, and not just because that particular class was particularly awesome. We visited wonderful sites, really cool neighborhoods, and one of the best museums in the country, The Art Institute of Chicago.  I had been there a few times before, and I created a scavenger hunt type of activity for the kids to do, where they perused the museum, looking for giant Warhols and Monet landscapes and stained glass by Chagall. But there was one place where they all gathered and nobody wanted to leave: the Thorne Rooms, sixty-eight perfectly scaled and furnished models of rooms from across the ages and across the world.  If you have never seen the Thorne Rooms, they are almost impossible to describe accurately and completely.  They are meticulously recreated rooms, precisely detailed down to the wallpaper and the drawer pulls.  Visit them at the AIC website for a taste.  The students were fascinated by these little rooms!  Their jaws dropped, their eyes widened, and they thrilled in every detail.  It was pretty magical.

    So I was very excited when I saw Marianne Malone's The Sixty-Eight Rooms on the shelf at the bookstore. Malone is, according to the jacket flap, an artist and former art teacher, and in her author's note at the end of the book, she writes that she visited the Thorne Rooms often as a child.  She must have harbored dreams about the rooms for many years before whipping up this charming little adventure.

    According to sixth grader Ruthie Stewart, life is dull, dull, dull. She has no privacy in her family's cramped Chicago apartment, no interesting background like her classmates at the Oakton School, and no excitement or adventure in her life. That's why she's thankful for her best friend Jack, a boy with a vivacious personality and little fear of anything.

    But things do liven up for Ruthie when she enters Gallery 11 at The Art Institute of Chicago and, for the first time, views the Thorne Rooms.  Ruthie is awed and amazed by the glass box displays she sees, each one a perfectly recreated tableau of a room from sometime in American or European history.  When Ruthie wonders aloud how the rooms have been installed, Jack runs off to find out. On the bus ride back to school, Jack shows Ruthie a key that he found in the dim corridor behind the room displays. Jack thinks it will make an excellent addition to his key collection, but Ruthie wants to go back to the museum to find out more about the key's origin.

    All the adventure that Ruthie wanted awaits her in Gallery 11.  The key, in Ruthie's hands, shrinks her and Jack down to the perfect size to explore the Thorne Rooms.  And while inside the miniature rooms, they find that they have traveled to each room's time period!  In just one night, they must unravel the mysteries that they face: How does the key work and why does it only work when Ruthie holds it?

If you've never seen one of my Mini-review features, here's the synopsis: Reviews are of books that have already been reviewed about a million times by other bloggers and/or titles that I just feel don't need the full synopsis and in-depth reviews as other books I've read throughout the month. Enjoy!
 


Gone by Lisa McMann

Whole lot of buzz about this third title in the Wake trilogy. I enjoyed it and felt that it wrapped the whole series up nicely, though I did miss the whole "undercover cop" aspect that was in the previous two books. I think that added a hard edge to a rather dream-focused plot.

I think McMann creates believable characters, even if their stories are fantasy. Definitely a hard talent to achieve, but it shows in her writing.

Overall rating: 4 out of 5


Gone
Lisa McMann
224 pages
Young Adult
Simon Pulse
9781416979180
February 2010
Review copy received from publisher

The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent (audio)

This was the first audiobook that I listened to this month and I enjoyed both the reader,  Mare Winningham, and the plot. I really liked the main character being a child, telling the story of her family's witch trials from her innocent eyes, and the morphing of her feelings toward her doomed mother felt incredibly realistic.

I will say that the story is dark, depressing, and understandably sad, so if you're looking for something hoped-filled, The Heretic's Daughter is not for you. Listening to it, there were some moments I found my mind drifting away, but overall, the reader, the reading, and the overall story were very good.

Overall rating: 4 out of 5

The Heretic's Daughter
Kathleen Kent
Audio Book
Hachette Audio
9781600248238
October 2009
Borrowed from my local library

The View From Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg (audio)

Yeah, yeah...one of the last librarians on earth to read this book (and I listened to it), but because of the Fill in the Gaps Challenge, I finally got to it. Do I think it was worthy of a Newbery Medal? Maybe. I didn't