Betsy Bird's Blog, page 150
February 19, 2020
Review of the Day: Stand Up, Yumi Chung! by Jessica Kim
Stand Up, Yumi Chung!
By Jessica Kim
Kokila (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
$16.99
ISBN: 9780-525-55497-4
Ages 9-12
On shelves March 17th
Remember the funny girls. No one else seems to. Living as we do in an age when every other book published is an inspiring group biography, our children are currently steeped in the very serious nature of what makes a woman great. And being funny, quite frankly, isn’t something that tends to make the cut. Humorists have a purpose on this planet, but you’re...
February 18, 2020
Press Release Fun: Children’s Books Written by Well-known Authors of Adult Books at the Grolier Club
A little-known and unexpected aspect of 20th century literature is the delightful discovery that some well-known authors also wrote one or more children’s books. This unusual literary theme is explored in the exhibition They Also Wrote Children’s Books, on view in the Grolier Club’s second floor gallery from March 4 through May 2, 2020.
Grolier Club member John Blaney has been collecting modern first editions for over 40 years by such distinguished authors as Maya Angelou, William Faulkner,...
February 17, 2020
A Most Beautiful Reveal of The Most Beautiful Thing: Cover Reveal and Interview with Kao Kalia Yang
One of the nicer perks of writing a book is that on occasion your publisher might send you somewhere. It might be a conference. It might be a bookstore. It might be a book festival in Minnesota in mid-October in the middle of an inexplicable snowstorm. I mean. For example.
This past October I found myself using my Santa hat for warmth rather than as a mere accessory as I participated in the Twin Cities Book Festival’s featured youth programs. A whole host of authors and illustrators were...
February 16, 2020
Cover Reveal: The Campaign by Leila Sales
Happy, President’s Day! Seems to me today is a holiday filled with mixed emotions. And since this is an election year at that, I think the best possible plan of action is to swerve our attention away from national politics and towards (what else?) middle grade novels.
If the name “Leila Sales” rings any bells, it may be because this clever author started her career as an editor at Viking. In fact, she was one of my editors on my funny female middle grade anthology Funny Girl, even submitting...
Fuse 8 n’ Kate: The Day the Babies Crawled Away With Special Guest Star Aaron Reynolds!!
Generally speaking Kate and I prefer dead people. Dead authors. Dead illustrators. But boy howdy do we like it when we have them come on as guests, so put a hash mark in the “Live” column. Back on October 30, 2017 I made Kate read Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds. With this episode, Aaron comes on the show, marking this as the first time a creator of a book we’ve covered has made a guest appearance. We asked him what book he’d like to do with us and he suggested this Peggy Rathmann classic....
February 13, 2020
Review of the Day: Overground Railroad by Lesa Cline-Ransome and James Ransome
Overground Railroad
By Lesa Cline-Ransome
Illustrated by James Ransome
Holiday House
$18.99
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3873-0
Ages 4-7
On shelves now
The standard joke amongst children’s librarians is that we learn most of our American history through children’s books. But of course the unspoken suggestion there is that this is history we never learned in school. Now I don’t care how amazing your education was in the 1980s. Pretty much I can guarantee that unless you were part of the slightest sliver of...
February 12, 2020
Feminism and Representation in Fables: An Interview and Cover Reveal with Natalie Portman
It’s just the darndest thing.
Say, do you happen to remember when I published a book with Jules Danielson and Peter Sieruta a couple years ago called Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature? Do you recall that in that book we spent an entire chapter dedicated to celebrity picture books? I think our primary concern at the time was that publishers were spending inordinate amounts of money to promote books that were, to be frank, ill-planned, poorly written, and given about as...
February 11, 2020
Sydney Taylor Blog Tour: Talking With Andrew Maraniss About Games of Deception
If you tuned in to the ALA Youth Media Awards this year you probably noticed that there were a LOT of different prizes on display. New ones, old ones, famous ones, and obscure. One, the Sydney Taylor Book Award, dates back to 1968 and is given out each year “to outstandingbooksfor children and teens that authentically portray the Jewish experience.” Yet unlike the award awards out there, the Sydney Taylor committee created a new feature of this award, one that they use to alert the world to...
February 10, 2020
Putting the Big Bang In Its Place: Guest Post by Marissa Moss
The other day publisher and author Marissa Moss of Creston Books sent me an interesting query. We all know that the bar has risen for nonfiction authors and even, to a certain extent, illustrators of children’s books. But what is the role of the publisher in all this? Particularly when we’re talking about a small independent publisher and not one of the big guys? That was the subject of the story Marissa told me and I was just so darned interested in what she had to say that I asked her write...
February 9, 2020
Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb
With the full and present knowledge that monkeys in children’s literature are problematic to the extreme, Kate and I tackle a book that involves a kind of animal that is professed to be a monkey but is, in fact, an ape, much like the problematic-in-his-own-way Curious George (seen on a previous podcast). When I was a new mom, I used today’s book endlessly with my kids. Yet it was only recently that I realized that I knew next to nothing about either Mr. Perkins or Mr. Gurney. Kate gets to do...
