Betsy Bird's Blog, page 137

But If I Can’t Harangue in Person, How Will They Know I’m Right?: Book Committees in a Pandemic Age

The most beautiful sight to my eyes, each and every year, is this room:

Look at it. Beautiful books for children crammed into every nook and cranny. This is what the final meeting of my 101 Great Books for Kids committee is supposed to look like. Over the year my intrepid library workers have read every single children’s book published in 2020 that they can get their hands onto. They meet monthly, debate, defend, and put their thoughts on a shared Google Doc. Then, in mid-October,...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: The Farmer and the Clown by Marla Frazee

Just to catch the rest of you up, Kate is not a huge fan of clowns. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement. She HATES clowns. Naturally that meant that I had to find a classic clown book for her birthday. I’m nursing a theory that they don’t exist, though, so I decided to get the next best thing. Marla Frazee’s The Farmer and the Clown won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Picture Book category. That’s enough potential classic status for me! But trust Kate to find a way to turn this sweet litt...

Review of the Day: I Talk Like a River by Jordan Scott, ill. Sydney Smith

I Talk Like a River
By Jordan Scott
Illustrated by Sydney Smith
Neal Porter Books (an imprint of Holiday House)
$18.99
ISBN: 9780823445592
Ages 4-7
On shelves September 1st

James Earl Jones stuttered. Marilyn Monroe stuttered. Joe Biden, Tim Gunn, Samuel L. Jackson, Kendrick Lamar, Nicole Kidman, the list goes on and on and on. Children’s books about stuttering? Thin on the ground. When you’re a children’s librarian, every interaction on the reader’s advisory desk can feel like a game of trivia. A...

Celebrities Don’t Draw: Kvetching About Credit

What is wrong with the following picture?

If you said, “Gee, I had no idea that Jimmy Fallon was an artist as well as a late night talk show host,” that would be a forgivable misunderstanding. Folks, it is time to launch a couple darts at everyone’s favorite problematic picture book authors: Celebrities that don’t really know what they’re doing. The celebrity picture book has a long and storied history, and has appeared in a variety of awful ways over the years. Yet it wasn’t until recent...

Surprise! It’s Activist!: Children’s Entertainment Increasingly Takes a Stand

I hereby declare today’s post the spiritual antithesis of my post Surprise! It’s Racist! posted lo these many years ago (was it really six?!). That old piece (which I now think I would write in a mighty different fashion today) talked about the experience of encountering blatant racism (rather than the everyday kind) in children’s literature. With that in mind, let’s take that idea and turn it entirely on its head. What is the opposite of the appearance of racism? That would have to be the appea...

Review of the Day: Drawing on Walls by Matthew Burgess, ill. Josh Cochran

Drawing On Walls: A Story of Keith Haring
By Matthew Burgess
Illustrated by Josh Cochran
Enchanted Lion Books
$18.95
ISBN: 978-1-59270-267-1
Ages 6-10
On shelves now

There lives, within me, a horrible child. A real little monster. A useful little monster, actually, since it guides my reads on children’s books. Except that this interior devil child has a real thing with picture biographies. Put simply, it doesn’t care for them. Now I, mature 42-year-old librarian me, love picture book biographies a...

The Pot Boileth Over: An Interview with Daniel Nayeri

This . . .

. . . is a slab of brisket. Don’t drool too much. As you read this it has already been consumed by author Daniel Nayeri as he travels around the country doing his best to promote his new middle grade novel/memoir Everything Sad Is Untrue. That brisket is just the latest in a long line of delicious foodstuffs Daniel keeps track of on his Instagram account.

Now if Daniel’s name, or the title of his book, sound familiar, you may recall that I premiered the book cover alongside...

Daniel Nayeri Interview

This . . .

. . . is a slab of brisket. Don’t drool too much. As you read this it has already been consumed by author Daniel Nayeri as he travels around the country doing his best to promote his new middle grade novel/memoir Everything Sad Is Untrue. That brisket is just the latest in a long line of delicious foodstuffs Daniel keeps track of on his Instagram account.

Now if Daniel’s name, or the title of his book, sound familiar, you may recall that I premiered the book cover alongside...

Library Preview: Little Bee Books (Fall 2020/Spring 2021)

Perhaps there are advantages to spending a goodly portion of my days sitting on my tochus at home. If the librarian will not go to the publisher preview, the preview shall come to the librarian. I already had the pleasure of summing up the books produced by a wide range of small publishers back in May of this year. Now it is time to add to my list with someone I missed: Little Bee.

In January of 2019 Publisher’s Weekly ran the following article: Little Bee Acquired by Founding Execs. It ...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae, ill. Guy Parker-Rees

I wanted to do a little something different with today’s selection for my podcast. Today’s book has been on Publisher Weekly’s top selling picture book list for 240+ weeks. Even so, it is not a household name here in America by any stretch of the imagination. I’d been seeing its name on these bestseller lists for years so finally I decided to bite the bullet and hand the title over to Kate. Kate, for her part, comes up with all kinds of interesting observations. She speculates as to whether ...