Monica Edinger's Blog, page 52

Laurie Halse Anderson on Her New Book, The Impossible Knife of Memory

Laurie Halse Anderson is a familiar name in the world of children’s and young adult literature with a prodigious output ranging from picture books (e.g.The Hair of Zoe Fleefenbacher Goes to School)tohistorical fiction (e.g.Chainsthe first title in herSeeds of America series) and young adult works (e.g.Speak).In her latest, The Impossible Knife of Memory, we meet 17 year-old Hayley Kincaid whose mother died when she was small and who has spent the past five years homeschooling herself while tr...

Samad’s Gourmet Deli and The Heights Bar and Grill

Early yesterday morning a massive fire started across the street from me in a Citibank branch. All day almost 200 firefighters tried to put it out by blasting it with water and foam (my street was covered with the latter — looked sort of like snow), but as of last night it was still smoldering. One firefighter told me that it was in the walls and, the space having become so unstable, they couldn’t get to it. The good news is that since it started a little after 5 AM no one was inside and, oth...

Laura Amy Schlitz, Kadir Nelson, and Bears

The author-artist remembers sitting at the Caldecott-Newbery banquet in 2008 in Anaheim when Laura Amy Schlitz delivered her speech. He remembersher description of a mythical bear, her companion bear-spirit. “She described encountering this bear in the forest and the moonlight ‘poured into the clearing like a giant bowl of milk.’ It was such a powerful image, so visceral that I couldn’t get it out of my head,” he says. He didn’t yet have the idea forBaby Bear, but he says, “that’s the image t...

In the Classroom: Close Reading

I’ve been curious about the attention now being paid to the skill of close reading, something I began doing with my 4th graders decades ago. Judiciously. By that, I mean I only do it enough for the children to see how much pleasure they can take in the experience, but not enough for it to become a chore. Frankly, some of the current suggestions I see for close reading concern me because they seem utilitarian in the extreme and leave out the joy that the experience can be.

Joy? Yes indeed. Many...

One Way Children’s Book Creators Cope With Bad Online Reviews

A bad review can equal a good laugh.

Thinking about this last fall, author Marc Nobleman came up with the idea of “… a variation on a poetry slam at which kidlit/YA authors read aloud their most critical or absurd user reviews (from Amazon or Good Reads) for comic relief/catharsis.” Further inspired by Jimmy Kimmel’s recurring segment of celebrities reading not-so-nice tweets about themselves, Nobleman put out a call for short videos of children’s book creators reading some similarly not-so-n...

Books About Africa

We adults know, of course, that Africa is a continent, not a country. Also that it is diverse, full of real people and places that are varied and distinct. We know of its beauty and of its harshness. And perhaps most of all, we adults are highly aware of its complicated historical relationship with North America. Helping American young people reach a similar understanding of the real Africa is as important as it is challenging. It can be tricky when their toys, visits to zoos and theme parks,...

Kate DiCamillo is the new Ambassador of Young People’s Literature

The latest Ambassador of Young People’s Literature is Kate DiCamillo, a much lauded and beloved writer of books for children. And by children, I mean young people who are definitely and certainly NOT young adults. Given the at-times overwhelming focus on books for young adults it is refreshing to see this appointment, one that validates the bulk of young readers in this country, especially those in the middle as they have been the prime audience for DiCamillo’s books.

The Ambassador is a colla...

Playing with the Past

A few days ago I wrote a post about recent movies that play around with original texts. I was partly inspired after seeing American Hustle and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaugas they are both playing with something from before. I’d been delighted with the cautionary statement at the start of American Hustle that “some of this actually happened” and suggested it might be good to do this more often with movies that fiddle with the past and/or with iconic texts like Tolkien’s (saying at the s...

Africa is My Home: New York Times Podcast

I just discovered this New York Times Book Review podcast in which editors Pamela Paul and Sarah Harrison Smith discuss the paper’s 2013 notable children’s books including mine at 9:51. So cool!

Some of this Actually Happened And/Or Is in the Original Book: Movies Involving Children’s Stories and Their Creators

The making of movies is a tricky thing when it comes to children’s stories. Especially when those children’s stories are deeply rooted in adult viewers’ memories. This season brings two such movies — Saving Mr. Banks and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

“Some of this actually happened.” As far as I know that disclaimer was not provided forSaving Mr. Banks, a movie I haven’t seen yet, but one based on the true story of Mary Poppins‘ author Travers in Hollywood during the creation of the Dis...