It is WAY too late in the day for me to be only starting a Fusenews post now. All right, guys. Looks like we’re gonna have to do today double quick time. Sorry, but I’ve a ticking time bomb in the other room (sometimes also known as “my daughter”) and I gotsta gets to bed before midnight. Here we go!
- February means only one thing. The Brown Bookshelf has resumed their 28 Days Later campaign. So stop complaining about the fact that black writers and illustrators aren’t better acknowledged and actually read all about them! This is your required reading of the month. And no, I’m not joking.
- Some sad Obit news. Diane Wolkstein, storyteller and picture book/folktale author passed away after heart surgery in Taiwan.
- Happier news. My mom, the published poet, gets interviewed by Foreword Magazine. Note the copious Little Women references.
- The happiest news of all. This will, if you are anything like me, make your day. Delightful doesn’t even begin to describe it. Thanks to Robin Springberg Parry for the link.
- Were you aware that there was an offensive Flat Stanley book out there? Nor I. And yet . . .
- Hat tip to the ShelfTalker folks for actually putting together the top starred books of 2012. Mind you, only YA titles can get seven stars because (I think) they include VOYA. Ah well.
- My new favorite thing? Jon Klassen fan art. Like this one from Nancy Vo. Cute.
- Meet Eerdmans, my new best friend. Look what they put on their books for the last ALA Midwinter.
Thanks to Travis Jonker for the heads up!
- Hey! Public school librarians and public library librarians! Want money? The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation is giving away grants. Free money! Take it, people, take it!
- The Battle of the (Kids’) Book Contenders are announced and nigh. I’m a little bit late with that info. Ah well.
- One of my children’s librarians has been getting twenty different kinds of attention because she circulated an American Girl doll. Now try and picture how many donations she now has to deal with. Yup.
- An interesting use of the term “whittle”. As in, “I think I’m going to whittle off all the toes on my feet”. Except more drastic, less cosmetic.
- Travis Jonker and the very fun idea to create a Children’s Literature casting call. I’d counter that Josh Radnor is more Jarrett Krosoczka (though I may be just a bit confused since Jarrett was actually in the background of an episode of How I Met Your Mother in the past), Lisa Loeb is more Erin E. Stead, Neal Patrick Harris as either Mac Barnett or Adam Gidwitz, Stanley Tucci as Arthur A. Levine, and maybe Jeffrey Wright as Kadir Nelson, except that Kadir is better looking. Hm. This will bear additional thought.
Fair play to The College of Creative Design. I do like this new ad campaign of theirs.
Thanks to The Infomancer for the link.
The Accidental Adventures of India McAllister
By Charlotte Agnell
middle grade
(151 pp with some b/w illustration)
I won the advance arc for this book on Sarah Laurence's website and eagerly awaited its arrival. My youngest daughter is a serious Junie B. Jones, Judy Moody, Flat Stanley, Geronimo Stilton, you-name-the-series-she'll-read-it kind of kid. I wondered if India would fit the bill.
She more than lived up to my expectations. One of my pet peeves with series books these days is the flatness to the characters. This is not to say they don't have their own quirks, but rather, that they all seem to come from the same amorphous, fictitious middle America neighborhood. It's a great marketing ploy, but gets a little boring after a while, at least for me.
Which is what drew me into this book immediately. India is a adopted from China. Her parents are divorced. Her dad is gay and in a relationship with another man. Her mom is a self-sufficient artist (that really sealed the deal). India lives in a real place, Wolfgang, Maine. It is not middle America. It is a little town with a forest where you can get lost! There is so much texture to this story and its characters. The adventures India has are regular kid adventures. She has a boy who is her friend but not her boyfriend, Colby. He has a crush on a girl India cannot stand. India and Colby sleep out in a field to watch for UFOs. India spends time with her elderly neighbor next door. And all around these adventures is the enticing flavors of real setting, modern day family, and real life.
Go India!
Add to that the gentle illustrations with which Agnell enlivens the pages, and it's a winning combination. I cannot wait to read more.
For more adventurous tales, hop over to our fearless leader,
Barrie Summy's blog!
On a tangentially related note, I got to see the inside illustrations for my upcoming picture book, ROPE 'EM, that comes out in March 2011 with Kane Miller. Gorgeous (
author swoons).I'm in love!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(with apologies to Armistead Maupin)
Business first:
Copperfield Books in Petaluma tonight at 7!
And then. I hook back up with Cassandra Clare and we'll appear in Cincinnati Friday and Saturday.
Then Cassie and I will meet Elizabeth Scott in NYC Sunday, and Cassie and I will do a final library event on Monday.
Tour details here.
In other very important news, I have acquired a friend.
It was in the wee hours of Sunday night that I had a hankering for the world's most perfect food: peanut butter. I was delighted to have a Walgreen's across from the hotel, so I scouted around and to my delight, I found a jar of creamy JIF, my favorite. Bought it and back in my hotel room, I opened it up.
It smelled delicious.
And then.
I realized I didn't have anything in the room with which to eat it. And so I did what all teen authors would do: I tweeted about it.
Meanwhile, I had called room service for ice, and when it arrived, there it was.
A spoon.
Yay!
All was good in the world.
The next morning, as I packed up for my school visits, I realized that if I left the spoon in the room, housekeeping would take it. And then I would have tragedy in my life once again.
Well, so, I borrowed the spoon, and it traveled with me to school. Of course I tweeted and someone asked me what I'd named her (because she is obviously female).
"Miss Spoobin."
That's what I said. And that is her name.
After that, I got another spoon with room service, and then another and another. I began to hoard them. I have a slight problem, I know.
Can you tell which one is Miss Spoobin? She glows just slightly, of course.
On my travels, I realized just how lonely I was getting because I began showing Miss Spoobin to my new friends. We took photos.
Have you ever heard of the Flat Stanley Project?
This is kind of like that. My friend Daniel sent me his Flat Stanley a few years ago. We took him to pan for gold.
I digress.
Here are some places Miss Spoobin has been, besides the peanut butter jar.
Deer Valley High School:
With radio station host Jim Foster:
Lunch with my friends (who brought me wonderful little individual cups of my fave pb so I can carry them in my purse):
At Clayton Books:
Capuchino High School with Books, Inc. and the You Say Read, We Say Party Book Club:
To my friends in Cincinnati and NYC who want a photo with Miss Spoobin, well, I don't have an answer for you yet as to whether she will be accompanying me. I am not a thief (not anymore, anyway), so I will find the manager of the hotel and ask if I might purchase Miss Spoobin.
Wish me luck.
UPDATE:
Hotel manager David just said I can keep Miss Spoobin! Yay, I love David!
The story of Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown came out in the early 1960s and according to an article about the delightful world of Flat Stanley, it vanished from libraries and bookstores for a brief time, banned because adults thought children would find the idea of the bulletin board falling and flattening Stanley too disturbing for children.
Now, in his 40s, Flat Stanley lives on with the Flat Stanley Project, an ongoing international literacy campaign launched in 1995 by Canadian schoolteacher, Dale Hubert, who taught third-grade in London, Ontario. According to Wikipedia, the Flat Stanley Project is meant to facilitate letter-writing by schoolchildren to each other as they document what Flat Stanley has done with them. Dale Hubert received the Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2001 for the Flat Stanley Project."
Standing: Mara, Bridget, Rachel, Flat Stanley, J.D., Kitty.
Seated: Alison, Elissa, Martha
Tabletop: Will and Mister
Taye Diggs isn’t quite good looking enough, either, but he’s another possibliity.
Betsy,
I am very sad that Dr. Zetta Elliott feels the need to move away from the world of children’s literature but understand her reasons all too well. Perhaps what we need more than a “read these books” campaign is a “buy these books” push. I want to adapt the Room of One’s Own bookstore (Madison, WI) campaign to challenge readers of your blog and elsewhere to pledge to buy two more books this year that are written by people of color than were purchased last year.
On a completely different note, I hear that there may be a mother daughter signing in Kalamazoo in April! Don’t completely fill up your schedule until we have a chance to chat! Cheers!
You should do more posts late in the day and in a hurry as this one is pretty darned good. Lots of good links and the “If someone offers you art school, just say ‘No’ ” ads are hillarious.
Me, too, Ed. Maybe we can add a twist to the challenge of buying two more books by people of color… what if we also asked for our money back on one with racist images?
Flat Stanley at Mount Rushmore (Betsy linked to my critique) is one option. So are the LITTLE HOUSE books. Yesterday, Ebony Thomas pointing me to an illustration of Pa in blackface in LITTLE TOWN ON THE PRAIRIE. I added that illustration to my post about Pa remembering how, as a kid, he’d imagine himself hunting Indians (http://goo.gl/oXb3f). Every time I think about that idea being in a children’s book, I’m blown away.
Some years ago, I asked people on child_lit and elsewhere to tell me of another children’s book in which a character expressed that idea (hunting Indians or any people) and the only title anyone could remember was a short story sometimes read in high school English classes.
So—what if we bought two books and returned two others at the same time? Or bought two books and deselected two and wrote to the publisher letting them know we were deselecting the two books and why… Or bought two books and blogged about two we were pledging not to use anymore with children (saving them, perhaps, for use in a high school Social Justice class or the like)…
One thing I learned in my Collection Development class is that by deselecting (weeding) books from a library shelf, there is room for new books. We need room for new books—not just on the shelf—but in our hearts and minds, too. We’ll need to be willing to admit that some books gotta go!
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