Betsy Bird's Blog, page 107

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson, ill. Axel Scheffler

Poor Kate. All she wanted was a halfway spooky picture book. Instead I give her a book from Team Gruffalo. This week’s choice of book for the Halloween season has appeared year after year on the Bestseller Lists here in America. It’s a book that features a kind of Mr. Gumpy’s Outing meets There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly energy on its pages. Never read it? Never fear! We’ve done it for you and found some tidbits worth discussing.

Listen to the whole show here on Soundcloud...

Review of the Day: Chunky by Yehudi Mercado

Chunky
By Yehudi Mercado
Katherine Tegen Books (an imprint of Harper Collins)
$21.99
ISBN: 9780062972798
On shelves now

“So what do you remember about the plot of Chunky?” I asked my seven-year-old. We’d read the book together at bedtime a couple months ago. I always like to pair novels with comics (we’re doing Charlotte’s Web and Manu right now) and Chunky had proven to be an ideal bedtime GN. My son considered the question then said readily, “The part where he cuts off part of his finger.” I b...

Interview for the Year 2022: Bryan Collier Discusses Music Is a Rainbow

You know, I usually start these interviews with some kind of note about why I’ve chosen such-and-such an author or illustrator for this particular kind of highlight. But c’mon, people. It’s friggin’ Bryan Collier. Are you going to tell me that I need to come up with a reason to explain why he’s here. IT’S BRYAN COLLIER! The name speaks for itself!!!

This is also now the point in the post where I’d tell you about his upcoming book, and usually I do that by copying and pasting the publisher cop...

Talking Glorious Battle Strategies with the Barb the Last Bezerker Team

Kids today. They don’t know how good they have it. Man, when I was a wee tot our only strong female characters were Princess Leia and She-Ra. I mean, maybe Sarah Connor or Ripley, but that was only if you snuck adult movies on the sly. These days you can’t swing an axe without hitting dozens of strong, fantastic female characters. Don’t think I’m complaining! I’m not! I’m just saying kids don’t appreciate what they have.

Take Barb the Bezerker for instance. What you’ve got here is all the hea...

Happy Book Birthday, Long Road to the Circus (now with crafts!)

Oh, frabjous day! It’s finally here! Today, I am pleased as PUNCH to inform you of the release of my debut novel LONG ROAD TO THE CIRCUS! It’s been a long time coming and just a delight to behold in the . . . pulp? Pulp is like the book version of flesh, right? Yeah. Yeah, we’ll go with that.

Today I’d like to encapsulate all the places this book has cropped up so far and will crop up. And I am beginning, as is my wont, with bribery. Specifically, the bribery of children’s librarians,...

Hello, Star. A Talk With Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic

It isn’t enough that today’s my book birthday. I want to talk about other books as well! Books like the newest picture book to come via Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic. She’s a longtime fan of my podcast Fuse 8 n’ Kate and I’m a longtime fan of her books, like The End of Something Wonderful, which is possibly my favorite dead pet book out there. Her latest, Hello, Star, is best described by the publisher this way:

Stunningly illustrated by #1 New York Times bestselling artist Vashti Harrison, Hello...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate #200!: The Cat in the Hat Comes Back by Dr. Seuss

“Oh no! We don’t have a fish to protect us now!”

We did it! We managed to reach freakin’ two HUNDRED episodes of Fuse 8 n’ Kate!! To celebrate, Kate and I did a live recording of our show. Want to see it? Thanks to the power of Vimeo, now you can!

Don’t worry. We don’t shy away from the controversy surrounding Seuss and his cat in this episode. We also get to bandy about sentences like, “The chain of signification is interminable and, being interminable, indeterminate.” In the end, w...

Review of the Day: Much Ado About Baseball by Rajani LaRocca

Much Ado About Baseball
By Rajani LaRocca
Yellow Jacket (an imprint of Little Bee Books)
$17.99
ISBN: 9781499811018
On shelves now

Writing for children is hard and that’s a fact. It’s why countless writers, every single year, rely on the tried and true method of literary tropes. It’s much easier to conjure up clever wordplay for young readers when you’ve a stable of tried and true characterizations to pull from. There’s the bully trope. The annoying little sibling trope. There’s the negligent pa...

Mr. Watson’s Chickens: A Highly Illustrated Back and Forth Interview Between Jarrett Dapier and Andrea Tsurumi

It is standard operating practice to include, with every chicken-related post, an obligatory cartoon.

Not really. But wouldn’t it be a good idea?

Folks, there are lots of ways to promote your new book when it’s just coming out. You can make book trailers or hold huge release parties or celebrate its “book birthday” with balloons. Heck, you could do all three of those things at the same time, and none of that would hold a candle to the remarkable cacophony of chaos found in Jarrett Dapi...

Evicted: An Interview on a Timely Topic with Alice Faye Duncan

Plug the word “Eviction” into your favorite news source right now and all at once it lights up like a Christmas tree. Evictions are on a lot of minds right now. In some places in America right now, moratoriums on evictions are being lifted, while in others they stay firmly in place. In the course of the pandemic, a bright light has been shone on a wide variety of problems with our society. Housing has been no exception to this.

So thinking, this January we’ll be seeing a book that is no...