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by Satoshi Kitamura Candlewick 2007 I can't really say what it is about Kitamura's illustration style that makes me like it so much, but I do. Whether it's The Comic Adventures of Boots or Me and My Cat it's a world unto itself between cartoon and watercolor illustration, a controlled playfulness that's as expressive as it is equally fun. Stone Age Boy is another world altogether, literally.

Lucky Bird, indeed, and some lucky bird out there is going to own their very own copy of Bird on a snowflake! Yes, today I have the great fortune of presenting Jeremy Tankard's snowflake for Robert's Snow, made even more special by the fact that Jeremy generously donated his time to answer some questions and provide artwork from his sketchbook! To see any of the illustrations in a larger (or

Mark Williams is the author of the DANGER BOY (Candlewick) books, a time-travel series that chronicles the adventures of Eli Sands and his friends. The newest title, DANGER BOY CITY OF RUINS, is set in Ancient Jerusalem. Through Eli’s adventures, readers are taken on an exciting action-packed ride that will thrill kids (and adults) ages 9 and up.

Mark is my SCBWI colleague, and I am thrilled he was willing to share thoughts and insights about his work. Aside from authoring highly acclaimed books, Mark is a columnists for a Hollywood trade paper, and his work has appeared in numerous publications. He is also a Judaic studies teacher at Leo Baeck Temple in West Los Angeles. Most importantly, Mark is the proud dad of two boys who were the inpiration for the Danger Boy books.

In your latest book, DANGER BOY:CITY OF RUINS, Eli travels back in time to Ancient Jerusalem. What inspired you to choose this setting?
Multiple, overlapping reasons: I'm Jewish (well, a lively mix, between mom and dad, of both Jewish and Celtic traditions!), I was sitting in my Sunday school classroom one morning after teaching about the prophets Jeremiah and Huldah, and thinking about ideas for future "Danger Boy" books, but mostly thinking about how rigid adult belief structures, and old inescapable grief, lead to "cities of ruin" for our children. That, plus the fact that particular region was again keeping the world dancing on the edge of the abyss.

How extensive was your research?
Did I get to go to Israel? No. I asked a lot of the Israelis I teach with questions about how the weather feels at certain times of year, what the "air" is like, etc. That and a lot of Internet, a lot of reading, etc.

When writing a time travel story, how concerned must an author be about accuracy?
Being as accurate as you can is the payoff for the stuff you make up -- especially when the "real" history is more incredible than the "storytelling" parts, which is usually the case. And it's also relative -- I had to be really accurate in my "Lewis & Clark book" (DB #3: Trail of Bones), since they all kept journals!
As for Jeremiah and Huldah -- there are no records, outside Tanakh, of family names, any kind of life outside their described mythic roles. Which made it simultaneously easier and harder because they are already large, mythic, etc.

Do you have any advice for authors who are interested in writing time travel stories?
Emphasize the history, over the quantum science. As fascinating and great as the quantum science is. In other words, what's the reason your characters are time traveling in the first place? Where are they going?
Of course, if you have them traveling *ahead,* to a still unchartered future, forget I said anything.

Why did you start writing children's books?
I'd been writing comics and videogame scripts (in the early Jurassic era of the medium), and then became a dad. As I revisited early/mid-90's picture books, there seemed to be a renaissance similar to what comics went through in the 80's! But nothing new appeared to be happening in series fiction, for when readers "graduated" from picture books (never mind that I still like a good Chris van Allsburg offering...)

So I thought, "what if you had a series that was interconnected, somewhat dark, where people aged and came and went -- like in life?" Apparently, I was looking for psychic real estate in the suburbs of J.K. Rowling's zeitgeist, but hadn't heard of Harry Potter when I sat down to start "Danger Boy" (the title coming from my then toddler -- now a teenager -- as he ran up and down the halls one night proclaiming himself, yes, a "Danger Boy!")

However, the year I was shopping chapters and proposals around, the adventures of a certain young British wizard at boarding school took off, and other editors and houses thought, "hey! yeah! darkish interconnected series!" So -- thanks, J.K.!

What are you working on now?
I' m revising the last contracted "Danger Boy" book, "Fortune's Fool," about Shakespeare, Marlowe, the Elizabethans, and their fondness for political intrigue, rendition, torture, etc. (Plus, you know, I get to write about "King Lear.")

And then there's the post "Danger Boy" stuff -- a YA set in Jamaica, a mystery series, still nascent, and, well, another stand-alone, set in the SoCal desert, involving, well, the cosmos again, kinda.

Plus, I'd love to get back into graphic novel writing, and have some feelers out.

What is the best thing about being a children's writer?
It's just such a fun thing to be! I get to write stories about baseball and dinosaurs and Shakespeare and Marlowe and Sacajawea and the secrets of Alexandria, and it's my job!

Well, of course, I have to take on some other jobs, too -- did I mention I teach writing classes?

What is the hardest part about being a writer?
You actually have to sit down and write.

What do you like to read?
I love reading new work by my various colleagues. On a recent panel with Lisa Yee, Kerry Madden, Amy Koss, Cecil Castellucci and Sally Nemeth, I likened the LA YA scene with late 60's rock (well, you know, I couldn't resist) -- i.e., everyone "hearing" each other's work, learning from it, pushing past what's been done, everyone helping amp up everyone's chops, etc.

I read news all the time, online, still read comics, been rereading some Kesey and trying to make new sense of "Sometimes a Great Notion," and lately, on a mini-Cormac McCarthy tear.

Do you have hobbies besides writing?
Watching baseball. Taking long walks, preferably, in wild or semi-wild areas(a.k.a. hiking) whenever possible.

Thanks, Mark! It was a pleasure blog chatting with you. See you in the "future!"

If you would like to know more about Mark,or the adventures of Eli Sands in the DANGER BOY series, check out www.dangerboy.com

by Susan Fletcher illustrated by Kimberly Bulcken Root Candlewick 2007 I was hooked from the word "dadblamed." There's more, of course. I mean, how often do you run across picture books about Civil War cows? And this cow's a beaut. She follows her owner as he enlists, she follows him onto the railroad car taking his regiment into battle, getting in the way and giving milk as she goes. She

Adventures in Burrwood Forest
by John Lechner
Candlewick 2007

We are not amused.

This comic masquerading as a graphic novel for the emerging reader set has nothing going for it. There's no real character development attempted, no plot to speak of, and in the end has too many similarities with Smurfs for my comfort. Seriously, a land of burrs living in the forest with one token girl burr and an old papa burr. True, there is no Gargamel character, but that wouldn't have made this better.

The oddest thing is that Lechner clearly has skills as an artist, because his backgrounds are wonderful, but the main characters are little more than jagged circles, a tiny doodle any kid could have created. The comic originated online apparently and Lechner's personal connection with illustrator Peter Reynolds may hold the key as to how this landed in Candlewick's lap.

Why is this in hardcover?

Why is this at all?

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz. Illustrated by Robert Byrd. Candlewick Press. $19.99.

Allow me to make something perfectly clear. There are, living amongst you, one or two sad souls for whom the name “Laura Amy Schlitz” does not mean anything. This is a state of affairs that does none of us any good. You see, Ms. Schlitz is an author whose time has come. In 2006 she managed to simultaneously produce an epic gothic/realistic/historical/faux-ghost story in the tradition of “The Secret Garden” or “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase”, while also churning out a truly amusing and interesting bit of non-fiction on the side. You have an assignment. If you have not read A Drowned Maiden’s Hair or The Hero Schliemann do so. You'll be better for it. That done, you may turn your sights onto a book that combines the two things Schlitz does so very well: Research and historical fiction.

Maybe once a month a parent will walk up to my reference desk and ask me where they can find a nice selection of plays for children. Usually I’ll direct them to Plays the periodical or wave them towards the 800s, but by and large there’s not a lot of quality drama material for kids out there. Nothing that would give them all some great parts, that is. Schlitz acknowledges this fact right from the start in her book. Says the Foreward, “It really isn’t possible to write a play with seventeen equally important characters in it. If you read Shakespeare, you’ll notice that he never managed it – there are always a few characters that have little to say or do.” So what was Schlitz to do when a group of students at the school (where she tends the library) all let her know in no uncertain terms that they wanted big starring roles? She just had to write them a book. In “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!,” Schlitz gives us a whopping twenty-three parts, each one the monologue of a kid who would have lived in a Medieval village. There’s Edgar the falconer’s son plotting to keep his bird out of the grasp of its real owner, Simon the knight’s son. There’s Taggot who moons over the lord’s nephew, Constance the pilgrim, and Nelly the sniggler. Any book with a sniggler is bound to be good. Each part tells its story in the first person so that by the end you have seen twenty-three lives perfectly realized for the child audience and actor.

I expected to learn something from this book. What I didn’t expect was to be touched. What you need to remember here, even as your eye falls on footnotes giving the definition of “Prime” or the importance of dying “unshriven”, is that Schlitz is a masterful writer. These monologues aren’t rote lists of facts for kids to memorize. They’re powerful stories, and none of them have easy answers. Maybe the characters' lives will end well. Many times they will not. What is important is that Schlitz is at least giving these people a chance to be heard. And as a child takes on a character, they’ll start to think about what happened to them in the future. What’ll happen to Jack, the boy everyone assumes is a half-wit? Or Barbary the mudslinger’s mom? What are we to make of that brief moment of grace between a Jew and a Christian merchant’s daughter? It's like parsing the words of twenty-three narrators, some of whom you could easily categorize as "unreliable".

Aside from the innate drama here, Schlitz also gets in some lovely writing. For example, Mogg, the villein’s daughter, talks of how her mother fools the lord and finds a way for the family to keep their cow, Paradise. The lord comes and Schlitz writes, “So. He took the best of the pigs – I’d have chosen the same, in his place. We curtsied. Mother kissed his hand, and we watched him ride off, and waited till dark, to take back Paradise.” Well played, that. Parts of this book are touching one moment and funny the next. As always, the application of humor to any title, when done successfully, ups the value of the book. Here Schlitz brings a wry, almost gallows humor to a time that was harsh and cruel with the rare snatches of great beauty here and there. Even the footnotes, bane of the easily bored, are of interest. For example, there’s a moment when we learn of the peculiar fact that the patron saint of tanners was Saint Bartholomew, because he was flayed. “The logic of this is macabre, but not unique,” says the author. She gives a couple examples of similar cases closing with, “We won’t even talk about what happened to Saint Erasmus – it’s too disgusting.” Saint literature is about to go way up in circulation, I suspect.

I don't pretend to know why illustrator Robert Byrd chose the style that he did. It's possible, and really I'm just spitballing here, that he was drawing inspiration from the illustrated Bibles created by monks during this time period. No stranger to illustrating Schlitz's words (as he did for the aforementioned Schliemann), each section Byrd creates is accompanied by an image of the speaker of the monologue in the uppermost part of the page. Using delicate pen-and-inks, Byrd works in details in minutia, coming across as a kind of cohesive dot-free Peter Sis. Most amusing is the map he has drawn at the beginning of the book. It displays "A Medieval Manor" in 1255 England. Every character appears here, according to where they would have lived on a typical manor during that time. The map really clarifies beautifully how people lived during that era and, in addition to its accuracy, is fun in terms of figuring out where all the characters are located ala "Where's Waldo?".

Getting people excited about this book is going to be difficult. The hard part is going to consist of promoting it properly to the right people. "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!," doesn’t fall neatly into a single category. It’s historical, but it’s also a drama. There are facts galore but they are couched between a series of fictional monologues. Footnotes explain the odd phrases and out-of-date terms. Non-fiction two page spreads break up the monologues and offer a little factual background on things like “The Crusades” or the status of Jews during Medieval England. A lot of hand-selling is going to have to go down here, so it's best to start now. Read it. Love it. Talk it up like mad.

As one librarian I briefly allowed to see this book (I’m very protective) said to me, “It really sucks you in!” It does at that. When you hit Pask’s section and the first line is “I don’t know when I ran away,” it’s hard not to read on. With the dual practical purpose of serving as an accompaniment to those children learning about Medieval life AND providing those hungry for the limelight for a chance to shine in the sun, this title stands unique. But wait! How fare the facts? Well the Bibliography is not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR pages long. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. I’m no Medieval scholar but nothing I read struck me as false here. The writing is good, the facts even better, and the whole kerschmozzle a necessary purchase (to say the least). I may not know how to catalog this puppy in my library, but I do know that if breaking new ground in non-fiction ever deserved attention, it was now. A title to buy from an author to watch.

On shelves July 10th.

Notes on the Cover: As I said before, the book is going to be hard to market and maybe the actual title title here is to blame. I’m all for the “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!,” bit, but why couldn’t they have changed “Voices From a Medieval Village” to “Monologues From a Medieval Village”? Are they hoping to lure in the non-fiction crowd rather than the people seeking plays? I don’t know if that’s a great idea. Non-fiction seekers doing units on Medieval life will take a glance at the contents and perhaps pass it by, thinking that it’s fiction. Let us see what it is that we can do to avoid this. I like the picture here, but the subtitle could have used a guiding hand.