Monica Edinger's Blog, page 120

Random House Summer Preview

Random House jumped into the virtual preview arena last week and the archive of the event is available here.  While not as slick as Scholastic's recent one it is nonetheless very informative.  There are some audio problems at the beginning (but this is, mind you, their first attempt at this), but you can just click through the pages in the upper right box to see the whole thing. Congratulations, Random House!  So who is next?

Not Your Usual Earth Day Fare

Elizabite.

In the Classroom: Blogging about Jacqueline Wilson

Often when we have a special event in the school I suggest to my students that they blog about it.  And to get them to think about audience I tell them that if their posts are worthy I will write a post here, link to their posts, and encourage all of you to go visit and comment.

So here I am doing so about the posts they did about the remarkable Jacqueline Wilson who recently visited our school.  I personally first came across her years ago in England. I brought some of her books back for my s...

Exquisite Corpse Episode 16: Tastefully Done Body Parts

"Oh," thought Nancy, "sometimes the world is too ridiculous to be born."

And why would Nancy think this? Read Kate DiCamillo's addition to this shaggy dog tale to find out.

Congratulations, Betsy Partridge!

Betsy's Marching for Freedom, winner of SLJ's 2010 Battle of the Kids' Books, has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Young Adult Catagory.  Bravo!

Gene Luen Yang's Prime Baby

I moved from the Midwest to a New York City suburb when I was in high school and in addition to learning that my in-University City-fashionable mini-skirts were dowdy as hell in Dobbs Ferry, I was dismayed to discover that the major newspaper of the area DID NOT HAVE A FUNNY PAGE.  The daily paper still doesn't, but for a brief and lovely time the weekend Magazine did contain a serial comic by a bunch of wonderful graphic novelists.  One of my favorites of these was Gene Luen Yang's Prime...

Revisiting: Don Wood's Into the Volcano

Like so many others I'm taken by the almost science-fictional aspect of the current cloud created by the Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption.  That is, how the well-oiled machinery of contemporary travel in Europe has been forced to a near-halt by Mother Nature.  And it also made me think of Don Wood's wonderful graphic novel of a few years back, Into the Volcano.  Here's what I wrote after first reading it.

Wow. Don Wood's Into the Volcano is one powerhouse of a graphic novel that you won't...

Aging-Up Characters

This probably isn't so new*, but it seems to be fairly pervasive just now. This being the aging-up of characters in movie adaptions of kids' books presumably to snag a bigger audience.  The book Percy Jackson is in middle school whereas the movie Percy is in high school. Same thing with Harriet Welch.  And now it looks that way with Beezus as she too has been bumped up to teen status in the forthcoming Beezus and Ramona.  Are there others you can think of?

*  Just remembered teen Judy Garland ...

Teaching With Blogs: Top Ten Children's Books

Earlier this week I told my class about the Top 100 Children's Book Poll and how my votes counted.  I then wrote a post (over at my class blog) with my top ten list (and how I fared in the final voting) and an invitation for them to create their own lists.  It is a fun assignments for avid readers. Here are some of their results:

RG's top choice is  The Hobbit "….because it's amazing, has a story behind it and great characters." Go here to see the rest of his list.SB chose Hugo Cabret for...

The Boxcar Children Vampires

Well, not exactly.  But having explored Little Vampire Women ("Christmas won't be Christmas without any corpses," grumbled Jo, lying on the rung.) I figured anything is possible.  So when I saw Abigail Goben's mention of a vampire Boxcar Children book (in this post by Betsy Bird) I had to see to believe.

So, yep, here's #120 by must-be-a-vampire-to-still-be-writing Gertrude Chandler Warner.

The publisher's synopsis:

The Aldens meet Mr. Hudson, a local author who is best known for his novel...