Kathryn Lasky's Blog, page 7
January 18, 2021
A nice review from Kirkus
Poetic, accessible text combines with intricate, appealing illustrations to portray Williamina Stevens Fleming (1857-1911), talented astronomer, resilient and highly intelligent individual, and the first woman given an official title (curator of astronomical photographs) at Harvard University. Her early years are gracefully depicted (her exposure to the magic of chemistry and light via her photographer father; her job teaching at age 14 after his death; how she left Dundee, Scotland, in order to marry and move to Cambridge, Massachusetts), leading up to her husband’s disappearance and her path to astronomy. Alone and expecting a child, she secured a job as a maid in the home of the director of the Harvard College Observatory, where she asked questions, absorbed information, and was eventually hired to study and calculate the colors produced by stars and recorded by the observatory. Her discoveries and her love of astronomy rise to the surface and will inspire an interest in young readers and listeners while the struggles and inequities she faced—raising a child alone, subsisting on low wages, not being allowed to use a telescope out of spurious concern for her health—show the difficulties she dealt with as a woman of the time and how she paved the way for others. Swaney’s delicate cartoons depict Fleming in Edwardian garb, a White woman amid an almost all-White cast.
Both an intriguing introduction to astronomy and an involving tale of a strong woman who overcame adversity.
She Caught the Light is published
Ever since Williamina “Mina” Stevens Fleming was little, she was curious—always in awe of her father’s photography and how he would catch the light to make an image. Mina’s childhood fascination with light inspired her own life’s work. Mina became an astronomer in a time when women were discouraged from even looking through a telescope. But despite these limitations, Mina believed that the universe, with its billions of stars, was a riddle—and she was going to be the one to help crack it. And she did! Mina created a map of the universe that paved the way for astronomers and has been used for more than a century.
“Both an intriguing introduction to astronomy and an involving tale of a strong woman who overcame adversity.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A compelling story and a fine addition to STEM studies.” —School Library Journal
“This picture book biography illuminates how [Williamina’s] work chipped away at sexist barriers of the late 19th century.” —Publishers Weekly
October 30, 2020
I was interviewed by the Lexington newspaper
I talk about how I work, and the Cary Lecture I will be giving on Nov 7.
October 26, 2020
Scholastic’s 100th anniversary
100th Anniversary of Scholastic tribute
There is a country in my head that would not be there if I didn’t read. I read because I am. I am because I read. The Kathryn Lasky that exists now is because of reading. But I was co-parented by two wonderful people—Hortense and Marven Lasky and by books—thousands upon thousands of books. The words I have read run like a stream through my mind. Where would I be without Scout Finch, Mary Lennox, Holden Caulfield, Scarlett O’Hara, Dorothy and oh dear, The Tin Woodman? For as the Tin Woodman in the Wizard of Oz said to the Scarecrow who desperately wanted brains, that he would rather take a heart “for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.”
I am happy –but yes—sometimes sad because I read. But without stories I would be incomplete. My world would be colorless. My capacity for empathy stillborn. Books helped make me. And now I make books. I have come full circle in this universe of words.
Kathryn Lasky
September 28, 2020
My new novel Faceless is coming in June
Over the centuries, a small clan of spies called the Tabula Rasa
has worked ceaselessly to fight oppression. They can pass unseen
through enemy lines and “become” other people without being
recognized. They are, essentially, faceless.
Alice and Louise Winfield are sisters and spies in the Tabula
Rasa. They’re growing up in wartime England, where the threat of
Nazi occupation is ever near. But Louise wants to live an ordinary
life and leaves the agency. Now, as Alice faces her most dangerous
assignment yet, she fears the threat of discovery, but, worst of all,
she fears losing her own sister.
June 22, 2020
Guardians of Ga’hoole a TV Series?
With hearts sublime and a rich lore, Guardians of Ga'Hoole would make a great TV show -- if given the chance.
In the early 2000s, Scholastic Publishing started releasing Kathryn Lasky The Guardians of Ga’Hoole books. The series, which has fifteen core books, follows a brave band of owls who with hearts sublime take flight to fight evil and defend the weak. In 2010, production company Animal Logic and director Zack Snyder released The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, a movie based on the books that received the same criticism many movies based on books receive: the books were better.
There’s no denying Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole is a beautiful movie. Every shot is gorgeous, and thanks to Animal Logic, the characters all look realistic and believable while still retaining a range of expressiveness not found in nature. The vistas are breathtaking, and the visual effects are spectacular. Legend of the Guardians doesn't look ten years old, and the visuals still stand up compared to the big blockbusters of today.
Where Legend of the Guardians suffers is in the story. To someone new to the series, the story is very straightforward: Soren is a young owl kidnapped by evil owls after he falls from his nest. He escapes, and with his newfound friends finds the good owls of Ga'Hoole. The good guys prevail, defeat the evil and save the day. While this seems very straightforward, it's also a severely truncated version of the story.
Some changes make sense for the movie, and there's a lot that gets condensed into exposition. However, the Legend of the Guardians spans the first six books in the series, and in trying to cover so much ends up missing a lot of the nuance involved. Important arcs and character developments that hit hard in the books are completely omitted in the movie, while others are severely condensed.
There are also some changes that don't make as much sense. Despite romance not really being a focus of the books, Legend of the Guardians contains a love triangle, which is an odd narrative choice. There are also character changes, as Twilight is coarser in the books, while Jatt and Jutt are more menacing. Some major characters in Guardians of Ga'Hoole, like Zan, Streak and Hortense -- are nowhere to be seen in the movie, while the bats, who are minor characters in the first book and not mentioned again, play a bigger role.
To be fair to the film, Legend of the Guardians had a 97-minute runtime, which means fitting six books into such a small amount of time was always going to cause problems. Those issues are only exacerbated by the fact fans of the books can't help but notice issues like those mentioned above.
That's why Guardians of Ga'Hoole needs to be a TV series.
The market for TV has never been stronger, with not only cable but a multitude of streaming services looking for new series to hook audiences. With fifteen books in its main story, Guardians of Ga’Hoole can easily support a couple of seasons of great TV. And in doing so, the TV series can give the book series the time it deserves to flesh out the events, places and characters.
And this series can go very, very dark. In the first book alone, owls are brainwashed, murdered and tortured. Zan, one of the bald eagles, cannot speak due to her tongue being ripped out during a battle with the owls of St. Aegolius Academy for Orphaned Owls (St. Aggie's). Twilight is orphaned and living on his own at a very young age, while Digger’s little brother Flick is ripped in half and eaten by Jatt and Jutt. The action only gets darker from there, as the series delves into wars and politics and at times even magic. The second arc of the original series alone introduces hagsfiends, strange crosses between owls and crows that can make other birds freeze and fall out of the sky via a yellow glow from their eyes, and firesight, the ability to see the future and other important events through flames.
Not to mention the mystery of the Others, who are strange creatures long since extinct that left structures and media that baffle the animals that find them. Readers would recognize these Others as people, and are left wondering just what happened that made them all vanish. In the main storyline, at least, this is never addressed, and even during the time of Hoole ages before the main story, Others are a distant memory.
Having the books made into a TV series also lets viewers properly linger on the quiet time and enjoy the worldbuilding. Book One is spent almost entirely in St. Aggie’s. Over the course of that book, Soren and Gylfie, two young owlets, learn the ins and outs of St. Aggie’s to better report its horrors to the outside world, from moon-blinking owlets to having vampire bats drain the older owls of blood to tamp down the temptation to fly. Book Two, conversely, is spent learning how the Great Tree and the Guardians work, from the chaws to the rybs (teachers) to flying through forest fires for the hottest of coals. The vast Northern Kingdoms and their history of war is explored deeply in Book Six, while several books are dedicated to the Beyond, a land of fire and volcanoes where the Ember of Hoole resides. A TV show, like a book series, can linger in these places easily.
The Guardians of Ga’Hoole series also offers a very promising structure that TV shows seem to be leaning into now: a definitive beginning, middle and end with the promise of sequels and spinoffs, should it prove popular enough. The days of never-ending series that continue season after season seem to be fading into the past, while modern television seems to favor shows that hit fast and hard and give a satisfying ending.Guardians of Ga’Hoole offers the sort of sweeping format and hard battles that long-running shows like Game of Thrones presents, but still has the quiet character moments that other popular series offer. And with 2D animation making a comeback, Guardians of Ga’Hoole has its pick of animation formats to sample from.
While a Guardians of Ga’Hoole series would be nice, the movie’s poor performance at the box office might keep this from becoming a reality. Still, if an adaptation of Guardians of Ga'Hoole should ever fly again, it should do so on TV, where the story can be done justice.
Dr. Kelsey Dickson
June 8, 2020
The Burning Queen is available in paperback June 9
The meanest queen meets her match in Rose.
May 1, 2020
I just read aloud the story of my father surviving the 1918 flu epidemic
My dad was only 11 years old when he left home alone and skiied to a logging camp to escape the deadly flu of 1918.
April 21, 2020
Earth Day and The Great Melting
On the day my newest book Bears of the Ice: The Den of Forever Frost was published, the Washington Post ran a headline that read: “The world has barely a decade to avoid disaster. We need to combat climate change — now.”When I first began working on this fantasy series nine years ago, making notes for a story about polar bears threatened by a deadly flood, I never anticipated that global warming would accelerate with such alarming speed.
Bears of the Ice is a blend of fact and fiction; I love taking real animal behaviors and adding a fantastical spin. The fact that owls fly silently inspired the owl armies of Ga’Hoole. The fascinatingly complex wolf hierarchies provided the basis for Wolves of the Beyond. With this new series, the setting came first—I was fascinated by polar bears’ isolation and their dependence on the rapidly vanishing sea ice.
Bears of the Ice follows cubs Stellan and Jytte on a dangerous journey to rescue their mother who’s been imprisoned at the sinister Ice Clock, the headquarters of the Grand Patek whose dangerous influence is spreading throughout the bear kingdom.
The setting for these book is the high Arctic, or the Nunquivik as I call it. To create this imaginary land I went to the real polar bear habitat—specifically, Churchill, Manitoba in Canada. My husband and I traveled across the tundra in a large bus called a Tundra Rover and then flew out over the sea ice of Hudson Bay in a helicopter. We went in early November when the polar bears were just setting out on the ice. I saw their land dens and their ice refuges amidst the jumbled blocks of ice where mother bears would huddle with their cubs. I was fascinated by the ice itself that was sculpted by the wind and sea and rears into fabulous configurations.
Yet the beauty was tempered by a sense of unease as our guides explained how global warming has led to the shrinking of the sea ice mass. The statistics are sobering: the sea ice has diminished by millions of square milesin just a few years. The sea ice is where polar bears hunt for seals, forcing the bears to swim vast distances to find food. By the year 2050 the population of polar bears will have diminished by a third. In 2008, just a few years before our trip, polar bears were added to the endangered species list.
Humans rarely play a role in my fantasy series. Like Wolves of the Beyond and Guardians of Ga’Hoole, Bears of the Ice takes place in a post-human world thousands of years from now. I did not set out to write a tirade on global warming. But as I began my research on polar bears, I realized I would be remiss if I didn’t incorporate the greatest threat facing this species. The “Great Melting” that threatens my characters is fantastical but it’s also a metaphor for what is happening now. There is so much power in fantasy and sometimes we need fantasy not to escape reality but to find it.
Teachers and parents if you are interested in learning more about global warming and endangered species here are some links
https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card
https://gifts.worldwildlife.org/gift-...
July 15 was Arctic Ice day. If you want to learn more here is a link to an amazing video.
The Great Melting
On October 9th, the day my newest book Bears of the Ice: The Den of Forever Frost was published, the Washington Post ran a headline that read: “The world has barely a decade to avoid disaster. We need to combat climate change — now.”When I first began working on this fantasy series nine years ago, making notes for a story about polar bears threatened by a deadly flood, I never anticipated that global warming would accelerate with such alarming speed.
Bears of the Ice is a blend of fact and fiction; I love taking real animal behaviors and adding a fantastical spin. The fact that owls fly silently inspired the owl armies of Ga’Hoole. The fascinatingly complex wolf hierarchies provided the basis for Wolves of the Beyond. With this new series, the setting came first—I was fascinated by polar bears’ isolation and their dependence on the rapidly vanishing sea ice.
Bears of the Ice follows cubs Stellan and Jytte on a dangerous journey to rescue their mother who’s been imprisoned at the sinister Ice Clock, the headquarters of the Grand Patek whose dangerous influence is spreading throughout the bear kingdom.
The setting for these book is the high Arctic, or the Nunquivikas I call it. To create this imaginary land I went to the real polar bear habitat—specifically, Churchill, Manitoba in Canada. My husband and I traveled across the tundra in a large bus called a Tundra Rover and then flew out over the sea ice of Hudson Bay in a helicopter. We went in early November when the polar bears were just setting out on the ice. I saw their land dens and their ice refuges amidst the jumbled blocks of ice where mother bears would huddle with their cubs. I was fascinated by the ice itself that was sculpted by the wind and sea and rears into fabulous configurations.
Yet the beauty was tempered by a sense of unease as our guides explained how global warming has led to the shrinking of the sea ice mass. The statistics are sobering: the sea ice has diminished by millions of square milesin just a few years. The sea ice is where polar bears hunt for seals, forcing the bears to swim vast distances to find food. By the year 2050 the population of polar bears will have diminished by a third. In 2008, just a few years before our trip, polar bears were added to the endangered species list.
Humans rarely play a role in my fantasy series. Like Wolves of the Beyond and Guardians of Ga’Hoole, Bears of the Ice takes place in a post-human world thousands of years from now. I did not set out to write a tirade on global warming. But as I began my research on polar bears, I realized I would be remiss if I didn’t incorporate the greatest threat facing this species. The “Great Melting” that threatens my characters is fantastical but it’s also a metaphor for what is happening now. There is so much power in fantasy and sometimes we need fantasy not to escape reality but to find it.
Teachers and parents if you are interested in learning more about global warming and endangered species here are some links
https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card
https://gifts.worldwildlife.org/gift-...
July 15 is Arctic Ice day. If you want to learn more here is a link to an amazing video.
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