Monica Edinger's Blog, page 7

Appreciating Teachers

Yesterday was Teacher Appreciation Day in the United States. I’m going to be blunt here — as a teacher in her fifth decade in the classroom, I find the celebration simplistic and annoying. In this country, teachers are generally not appreciated, but hectored at, scolded, disrespected, and generally seen as problematic in endless ways. I wrote yesterday on facebook:

On this Teacher Appreciation Day, I’d like to wish that teacher colleagues receive respect (not scorn) every week of the year not...

Children’s Africana Book Awards 2018

Congratulations to all!

Nigeria Atinuke
Angela Brooksbank, illus. Candlewick South Africa
Kathryn  Erskine
Charly Palmer, illus Farrar, Strauss, Giroux

Ghana

 

      Portia Dery Toby Newsome, illus...

Georges Méliès Celebrated in a 360 Google Doodle

I was too lazy to find my cardboard viewer and download the app, but it looks pretty good this way too.

Here’s Méliès original Trip to the Moon

And here is the Georges Méliès tribute scene (The recreated films start at 3:16.) from Scorsese’s film Hugo, based on Brian Selznick’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret. For a very cool slide show of the opening images in the book click here.

 

The Refreshing Arbuthnot Lecture and Weekend of Naomi Shihab Nye

This past Saturday was the glorious culmination of the work and appreciation of many people — Naomi Shihab Nye’s Arbuthnot lecture at Western Washington University.  The 2018 Arbuthnot Committee, of which I am a member, began operating way back in early 2016, looking far and wide for the best person possible to deliver this distinguished lecture. Our decision made we had to keep it under wraps until Midwinter 2017 when it was announced to a gratifyingly enthusiastic response. The next task fo...

Teaser for Kate DiCamillo’s forthcoming Louisiana’s Way Home

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Out in October, Louisiana’s Way Home hones in on one of the three Rancheros from Raymie Nightingale. Having been fortunate enough to receive an advance reader’s copy along with some peanuts and an O’Henry bar, I dropped into Louisiana’s story penned in DeCamillo’s unmistakable prose and was unable to stop until I was done. Thanks, Candlewick PR folks, for the sustenance as I craved them as soon as they were mentioned. As the book isn’t out for a while all I’m going to say is that it is

Melan...

Elizabeth Partridge’s Boots on the Ground: America’s War in Vietnam

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“This indispensable volume brings a wise and humane lens to a confused and brutal conflict.”

Please check out my starred Horn Book review of this outstanding book.

Watch Hamilton at the 2018 Olivier Awards in London.

In Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’ve posted this over the years in honor of Dr. King and do so again today:

Born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1922, my father Lewis J. Edinger, who passed away in 2008, fled with his mother to America at the age of fourteen; his father chose to stay, hoping to ride things out, but was deported and killed. Years later, as a newly minted PhD, my father took whatever jobs he could find; one of those was in Montgomery, Alabama at the time of the bus boycott where, among other things, he met Martin Lu...

The American author Jacqueline Woodson is the laureate of Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award 2018

Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award

Jacqueline Woodson is an American author, born in 1963 and residing in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of more than thirty books, including novels, poetry and picture books. She writes primarily for young teens, but also for children and adults. One of her most lauded books is the award winning autobiographical Brown Girl Dreaming (2014).

The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA) is the world’s largest award for children’s and young adult literature....

Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Journey of Little Charlie

I am on the record as being a huge fan of Curtis’s Buxton books –from Elijah of Buxton (was on the Newbery Committee that gave it an honor) to Madman of Piney Woods (my starred Horn Book review). This one is as terrific as the others.

While the other two books featured black male protagonists in this one Curtis is featuring a young white male, the child of poor white pre-Civil War sharecroppers. After horrific events that leave him without family, Little Charlie Bobo (actually a twelve-year-o...