Monica Edinger's Blog, page 29
November 23, 2015
Patrick Ness’s A MONSTER CALLS movie teaser trailer
Fingers crossed.
Described thus:
A visually spectacular drama from acclaimed director Juan Antonio Bayona (“The Impossible”), based on the award-winning children’s fantasy novel. 12-year-old Conor (Lewis MacDougall) attempts to deal with his mother’s (Felicity Jones) illness and the bullying of his classmates by escaping into a fantastical world of monsters and fairy tales that explore courage, loss, and faith.
November 17, 2015
Celebrating the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2015
Yesterday I was delighted to be at a very special event honoring the illustrators whose books I helped select, along withMarjorie Ingall and Frank Viva,for theNew York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2015. Way backin September, we spent a day at the Times looking at over 2,000 books before selecting ten for the honor. Unlike otherawards such as the Caldecott where the whole book is considered this one is for artistic merit alone. Here we are at work at thestart of the day. A lot of...
November 16, 2015
Edward Carey’s Iremonger Trilogy
I amsurprised not to see more aboutEdward Carey’s Iremonger Trilogy, the last of which —Lungdon — has just been published. Ifirst learned of it after readingan enthusiastic New York Times review for the first volume, Heap House. (I see now that it got several starred reviews and ended up on many 2014 best of the year.) I got my hands on it right away and then couldn’t wait for the second which came out this spring. Having just finished the final book, I can say that thewhole trilogy is terrif...
November 12, 2015
BYE BYE EBOLA
This says it. Please watch, remember, honor, celebrate, mourn, most of all — don’t forget. More about the video here.
November 8, 2015
A Tantalizing Hint from Philip Pullman
I am going to try to pierce one veil right now. What can you tell us about The Book of Dust?
I will tell you … that I am writing it. OK, I’ll tell you it’s about Lyra—Lyra at a different stage in her life. It’s not a prequel or sequel. It will be a companion novel, if you will, toHis Dark Materials, though that story is finished. As I go, I’m discovering things all the time about Lyra, about daemons, about dust, about the whole universe. It’s exciting for me.
November 6, 2015
Africa, Reading, and Children’s/Teen books by Africans
Two excellent blog posts.
Thus in my early years I consumed African literature in a mostly oral form. Every night my father would tell us stories that his mother had told him in his childhood, stories of the goings on in the animal kingdom, often about Tortoise but other creatures featured. The stories were told in a multimedia format. There was speech and singing and call and response. There was also a popular story-telling TV show that I watched called ‘Tale’s by Moonlight,’ whose stories g...
November 3, 2015
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials to be a BBC Mini-Series
A few weeks back I was in touch with Philip Pullman about something (possibly taking a sabbatical in Oxford if you must know:) and he ended by saying there would soon be some “interesting” news. Well that news is out and it is more than interesting, it is thrilling. The BBC has green-lighted a new mini-series of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, starting with the first one; in the US it is known as The Golden Compass. I’ve long felt that a mini-series was idealfor a screen adaptation, esp...
October 29, 2015
New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2015
Last month I went to a top-secret location to meet with my top-secret collaborators where we did something very top-secret: select this year’s New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books. It has been, as you might imagine, hard to keep such a top-secret, but we did until yesterday when and our choices (and ourselves) were revealed here. Being part of this jury was a longtime dream come true so my thanks to children’s book editor Maria Russo and Pamela Paul editor at the Book Review, for...
October 28, 2015
My Report on the USBBY Conference in NYC
The recent USBBY conference here in NYC was terrific and I enjoyed writing it up for SLJ. You can read my report here.
October 25, 2015
Daleks in Our Books, Oh No!
Lisa and Jen over at Reads for Keeps have just posted “Daleks in the Library: the Sequel” which is very amusing indeed. Having somehow missed the original I went back to see it hereand learned that it was inspired by Katheleen Jenning’s The Dalek Game.Very fun stuff for Doctor Who fans (and probably meaningless for everyone else:).
