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Mrs. Noodlekugel and Four Blind Mice

Mrs. Noodlekugel and Four Blind Mice

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The woman who cuts my hair, Amy, had a particularly hard summer the year her boys had just learned to read. Their school asked that she keep them reading over the summer, but there were only so many Magic Treehouse books she wanted them to read. What other books would be suitable? The minutes flew by in the haircutting chair as I made suggestions and she listened, apparently having a prodigious memory.… more

All Different Now

All Different Now

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Do you know how sometimes your hands hover over a book, wanting to open it, sensing that this will be an important book, and you hesitate, wanting to prolong your interaction? I did that, turning All Different Now this way and that, then examining the title page, the jacket flaps … and finally allowing myself to read the book.… more

Planet Kindergarten

Planet Kindergarten

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Books about getting ready for kindergarten and the first day in that Strange New Land are plentiful, but I can’t recall one that has drawn me into the experience as fully as Planet Kindergarten does. Every aspect of this book, from word choice to story to the detailed and clever drawings, puts this book at the top of my suggestion list for children (and parents) entering that phase of life.… more

The Scraps Book

The Scraps Book: Notes from a Colorful Life

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Sometimes I want to walk right into the pages of a book, know everything the author knows, share their lifetime of experiences, and be able to emulate their creativity. Scraps: Notes from a Colorful Life makes me feel that way. I’ve even enjoyed the feeling and texture of the paper because I want in! For you, your family members, and friends who like to collect, to create, to fiddle with this and that as you make something, this is the book to have.… more

Return of Zita the Spacegirl

The Return of Zita the Spacegirl

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Ben Hatke can’t conceive of, write, and draw these stories fast enough for me — and a host of other fans. Just released, this book follows Zita the Spacegirl (2010) and Legends of Zita the Spacegirl (2012). Doing the math, I know I won’t be reading the next installment until 2016. Whahhh. I’ve read so many stories “in my life and time,” predicted the outcome of television and movie plots with regularity, that it’s a remarkable pleasure when I don’t know what’s coming next.… more

The Crossover

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The Crossover
Kwame Alexander
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt From the moment I began reading this poetry collection, I knew it was a different type of book because the rhythms, the cadence, were infused with energy and awareness. The Crossover is primarily free verse, with a few hiphop, rhythmic poems that change up the action. The narrator, Josh, or Filthy McNasty as his basketball persona is proud to be called, is buoyant, observant, filled with sports metaphors, and adept at wordplay.… more

A Time to Dance

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A Time to Dance
Padma Venkatraman
Nancy Paulsen Books / Penguin Putnam Disclaimer: I’m a fan of Padma Venkatraman’s books. Each one has charmed me. I know I can always expect a reading experience unlike any I’ve had before. Her new book does not disappoint. In A Time to Dance, teenaged Veda has already dedicated her life to dance, much to her mother’s frustration.… more

Gifted: Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac

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Anita Silvey writes, among other things, books that help us find good books. And not only does she help us find more books that we or our children or our students will enjoy, but she tells us the story behind those books. Oh, what fun it is to know that Charles Dickens had to publish A Christmas Carol himself because his publisher didn’t believe in it.… more

Gifted: So, You Want to Be a Chef?

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So, You Want to Be a Chef?
How to Get Started in the World of Culinary Arts
Be What You Want series
J.M. Bedell
Beyond Words/Aladdin, October 2013 Introduction
If your child or teen is often caught watching cooking shows, they’re not alone. In 2010, Melissa Kossler Dutton on ParentDish.com wrote, “Every month, 12 million children ages 2 to 17 watch the Food Network.”… more

Gifted: The Matchbox Diary

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When a young girl visits her great-grandfather for the first time, her imagination swirls with everything she sees in his antique shop. He asks her to pick out her favorite item and he will tell her a story about it. She chooses a cigar box filled with match boxes. As it turns out, this is her great-grandfather’s diary, assembled from items, each stored in a match box, that remind him of a certain part of his life … created when he could neither read nor write.… more

Gifted: Under the North Light

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Under the North Light
The Life and Times of Maud and Miska Petersham
written by Lawrence Webster
foreword by Philip C. Stead and Erin E. Stead
Woodstock Arts, 2012
info@woodstockarts.com
ISBN 978−0−9679268−6−5 My husband, Steve, and I have worked together for the last 25 years. We have been married for 32 years, so it took us seven years to discover that we would enjoy creating and maintaining a business, developing it as our interests and skills grew.… more

Gifted: Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table

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Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table
written by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
illustrated by Eric-Shabazz Larkin
afterword by Will Allen
Readers to Eaters, 2013 Introduction
My second passion in life after books and reading is sustainable agriculture and organic farming. There are a few good books for children on this topic, but I’m always delighted when a new, inspiring true story finds its way to my library.… more

Gifted: Giving Thanks

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Giving Thanks:
Poems, Prayers, and Praise Songs for Thanksgiving
edited and with reflections by Katherine Paterson
illustrations by Pamela Dalton
Handprint Books / Chronicle Books, 2013
ISBN: 978−1−4521−1339−5 The season when we focus on giving thanks will quickly be here. If you are looking for a gift to take to your hosts, to give to your family, or to give to yourself, this book is ideal.… more

Gifted: Spike, Ugliest Dog in the Universe

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Spike, Ugliest Dog in the Universe
Debra Frasier, author and illustrator
Beach Lane Books, October 2013 Ever since I saw my 10-year-old niece pose in front of the television, trying to imitate the supermodels at the end of the runway, my awareness of the beauty culture in this country has been acute. We took her to the Mall of America that weekend and all she wanted was glitter eye shadow.… more

Gifted: Arlo’s ARTrageous Adventure!

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Arlo’s ARTrageous Adventures!
written and illustrated by David LaRochelle
Sterling Children’s Publishing, 2013 If you’re considering gifts for the holiday season … (book #1 in our series of Gifted recommendations) … No matter how uninteresting Arlo’s elderly relative insists on making their trip to the museum with her warnings to be serious and quiet and not to touch anything, Arlo can’t help but find the opposite to be true.… more

Discussing the Books We’ve Loved: Déjà Vu

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As I ready this article for publication, I am sitting in the coffee shop where I first met Heather Vogel Frederick, now a much-admired author of some of my favorite books. I still enjoy getting caught up in a series, accepting the likeable and not-so-likeable characters as my new-found circle of friends, anticipating the treat of staying with the book as I open the pages of the second and third and fourth volumes in the series.… more

Alongside the Books We’ve Loved: Venom and the River

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This week, join me as we continue to look at books that orbit the constellations of children’s series books much-loved by adults: Louisa May Alcott’s books, the Little House books, the Anne of Green Gables books, and Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books. A brand new novel, Venom on the River, is now available from my favorite young adult mystery author, Marsha Qualey.… more

A matter of character

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I enjoy so many types of books, marveling that a writer or comic artist or architect or journalist or cook or explorer thought long and studied hard and wrote and revised and gave countless hours to the creation of their book. After all, how do you count the hours a book’s author spends dreaming, observing, and conversing before the book heads into print production?… more

Encourage them

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If your child loves to draw or paint or sculpt or cut paper for collage, encourage them.

A reading path from Japan to America

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My exploration began when a young man, aged 7, recommended that I read Shipwrecked! the True Adventures of a Japanese Boy (Rhoda Blumberg, HarperCollins, 2001). The title sprang immediately to his mind when I asked him what he’d read lately that was good. Finding a copy, I opened it and began reading, realizing that this was a well-written account of a real-life boy in 1841 who survived a calamity.… more

Writer’s honor

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I’m reading Heather Vogel Frederick’s newest book, Pies & Prejudice (Simon & Schuster), the fourth book in the Mother-Daughter Book Club series. The girls are fourteen in this book. Their book club is reading Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice this year and a number of exciting plot developments make this a page-turner. Near the end of the book, Emma, the girl who has aspirations for becoming a writer, talks with her father, who has just had his first novel published.… more

Fairy Tales Can Come True

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Once upon a time, an author wrote three books about a fourth-grader named Ida May who had friendship troubles. One friend moved away, leaving Ida May feeling unhappy and untrusting. That story is told in My Last Best Friend. An intriguing and adventurous girl moves to town and Ida May is excited about My New Best Friend.… more

Monday Morning Roundup

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A CLN welcome to author Cynthia Cotten, our newest member. Cyndy lives in Virginia. Her books include Rain Play (illus by Javaka Steptoe, Holt), Abbie in Stitches (illus by Beth Peck, FS&G), and Snow Ponies (illus by Jason Cockcroft, Holt). I’m looking forward to the Ramona and Beezus movie due to release on July 23rd.… more

A Writing Tip

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In Leonard Marcus’ interview with author Beverly Cleary, which you’ll find while reading one of this month’s Chapter & Verse Book Club selections, Funny Business: Conversations with Writers of Comedy, she passes along a wonderful tip for prompting kids (and others) to write. Q: In the Ramona books, Beezus worries about not having enough imagination.… more

Everything We Know

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Synchronicity. We mark its occurrence by saying the word out loud, not fully grasping its power but understanding that we are honoring a confluence in our lives. There are three contributors to my confluence: Anita Silvey, Wendell Minor, and Katherine House. Last fall, Anita Silvey’s book Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book (Roaring Brook Press) debuted.… more

Bank Street’s 2010 Choices

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We eagerly await the annual list of books chosen by the Bank Street College of Education as books that work well with children from birth to age 14. Each year, the Children’s Book Committee reviews over 6000 titles each year for accuracy and literary quality and considers their emotional impact on children. It chooses the best 600 books, both fiction and nonfiction, which it lists according to age and category.… more

Monday Morning Round-Up

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From Wendell Minor comes this news (applause, please),Â “Itâ€²s official: the original art from Look to the Stars will be included in the permanent collection of The New Britain Museum of American Art, and the original art from Abraham Lincoln Comes Home will be included in the permanent collection of The Norman Rockwell Museum.… more

2010 Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards

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What a pleasure it is each year to discover which books the Jane Addams Peace Association has chosen to honor. Since 1953, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award annually acknowledges books meeting standards of literary and artistic excellence, published in the U.S., with themes or topics that engage children in thinking about peace, justice, world community, and/or equality of the sexes and all races.… more

Hitting a Home Run

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It’s still April and I’m still feeling crazy about baseball. The first Ron Koertge book I read was Shakespeare Bats Cleanup (published by Candlewick Press in 2006). He tried several tricky writing tasks in that book and I finished it with a sense of admiration for his skill as a writer. Koertge hit a triple. First, he wrote a verse novel that fully engaged my curiosity.… more

Aliens and Nature

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My thanks to Katherine House, who sent word that illustrator John Schoenherr passed away on April 8th at the age of 74. I have admired his work in two fields for many yearsâ€”I am saddened by the loss of this prodigious and pioneering talent. Born in 1935, Mr. Schoenherr (he was known as Jack) grew up in Queens, graduated from Stuyvesant High School, took lessons at the Art Students League of New York, and obtained his BFA from Pratt Institute.… more

Monday Morning Roundup

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Barbara O’Connor’s book How to Steal a Dog is a real children’s favorite. This book about a homeless girl’s plan to save her family by stealing a dog has, to date, been nominated in twenty-one states for a children’s choice award. We’ve recently learned that the book is a winner in three states, receiving the William Allen White Children’s Book Award in Kansas, the Prairie Pasque Award in South Dakota, and the South Carolina Children’s Book Award.… more

Celebrating Earth Day

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How did you celebrate? How about your classroom? Your library? Your family? We went to Joyce Sidman’s publication party for Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors (Houghton Mifflin), illustrated with linoleum block prints by Becky Prange, who lives in Ely, Minnesota, and was trained as a scientific illustrator. When Joyce explained how Becky created the amazing timeline on the endpapers of the book … well, there has to be a fair amount of genius in both the author and illustrator of this book.… more

Baseball Crazy

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Yup. I admit it. I am baseball crazy. I have been since my mom took me to games at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota, to see the newly arrived Minnesota Twins. And this year the Twins have outdoor baseball for the first time since 1982. It’s no wonder “baseball awareness” is heightened at this time of year.… more

Jordan Sonnenblick

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Sometimes it’s about being behind in my reading. I’m finally getting to the level in my reading pile occupied by Jordan Sonnenblick’s Drums, Girls, & Dangerous Pie. In truth, I’ve moved the book down a few times, not feeling strong enough to read a book about leukemia. I’m sure you understandâ€”there are certain times when crying over a book will derail a day.… more

Award winners, award criteria

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… more

Rambling Around

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Oh, how I love the Vintage Kidsâ€™ Books My Kid Loves blog. A feast for the eyes, I enjoy the richness of these illustrations and the memories they stir. Not of my own childhood. I had curiously few books, primarily those that could be purchased at a grocery store or dime store. These are books I remember shelving in the St.… more

Humorist, screenwriter, biographer, magician, novelist

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I’ve just finished reading Sid Fleischman’s new biography, Sir Charlie, Chaplin: the Funniest Man in the World. It’s due to be published in June by Greenwillow Books. I never had the honor of meeting Mr. Fleischman, but through his books, particularly his biographies, I have a sense of the man. His interests were wide, his observations keen, his humor at once gentle and broad, his sense of the world embraced wonders that attracted readers like a magnet.… more


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