Betsy Bird's Blog, page 195

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown

What do making sushi and reading Margaret Wise Brown’s second most popular picture book have in common? We’re doing both in one night on the old podcast Fuse 8 n’ Kate! We’re trying to do a couple more ladies than we’ve done in the past. We talk about whether or not this book has Fellini aspects to it, Bunny Protective Services (the BPS), and a furthering of Kate’s ghost grandma theory (which I kind of love but don’t tell her).  Extra Bonus: You get to hear my cute little bunny voice, which I...

Fake Children’s Books: What the Books We Make Up Say About Us

If you missed the recent 100 Scope Notes post I Will Not Retreat to a Book Cave to Eat Taco Bell then you are in for a treat. I agree with everything he has to say about this weirdly out-of-touch librarian, but one part of the Taco Bell commercial in which she appears struck me as particularly interesting. It’s this:

If you’re having difficulty seeing, the book is apparently called Kanine Crash (shouldn’t it be “Kanine Krash”?) by “Eugene Chang”. Now what we have here is yet another case of...

Board Books 2018: What We’ve Got Here Is an Oddly Strong Year

As you may recall I put out the announcement in March that during April I’d be asking people to send in Top 10 Board Book lists, ranked in order of preference (#1 being your favorite and #10 being your least favorite). I was gratified to see a nice long list of submissions. The poll officially closed on April 30th, but what’s a few days between friends, eh? Tell you what, I’ll reopen it just for today. Send me your Top Ten Board Books by the end of today (Wednesday, May 2nd) to the email addr...

Sensitivity Readers, Cultural Considerations, and Legends of the Lost Causes

I’ve never really commented on the recent news articles and discussions about sensitivity readers and their work with children’s books. I suppose that’s just because they make a fair amount of sense to me. If you’re writing about someone unlike yourself, you should be told up front what you are and are not doing wrong with the portrayal. Just seems logical. So, when the middle grade novel Legends of the Lost Causes by Brad McLelland and Louis Sylvester came out I didn’t think too much about i...

Review of the Day: My Hair Is a Garden by Cozbi A. Cabrera

My Hair Is a Garden
By Cozbi A. Cabrera
Albert Whitman & Co.
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-8075-0923-4
Ages 4-7
On shelves now

It is very limiting to get your supplemental education solely through children’s books when you’re an adult. Continuing education, in whatever form it takes, should be pursued through a variety of sources. Yet for many of us in the children’s literature industry, your reading time might be relegated to books for kids due to your work. In many ways, this is fine. I’ve proba...

Cover Reveal: Finchosaurus by Gail Donovan

Folks, I’ve been doing this whole blogging thing for a long time. And now that I’ve just turned 40, I give myself permission to start acting in a true “kids today” and “get off my lawn” manner.  I also get to dip deep into nostalgia, given half a chance. Now almost ten years ago I read a really fun little chapter book going by the name of In Memory of Gorfman T Frog by Gail Donovan. I liked it so much, in fact, that I helped get it on New York Public Library’s annual 100 Books for Reading and...

Book Trailer Reveal: Heartbeat by Evan Turk

Someday in the future, children’s literary scholars will specialize in fields like Historical Children’s Book Trailers. They will sift through a century or two’s worth of trailers, marking the significant changes, the highs, and the lows. And when they come to the late teens of this century, I hope that they’ll pause a moment and take into consideration this trailer from Evan Turk. I’m no specialist, but I can see that Mr. Turk is utilizing a couple key book trailer elements to an extraordina...

Review of the Day – The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler by John Hendrix

The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoefer and the Plot to Kill Hitler
By John Hendrix
Amulet Books (an imprint of Abrams)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2838-9
Ages 10 and up
On shelves September 4th

In this life, it can be difficult to find absolutes. Absolute good. Absolute evil. Absolute good in the face of absolute evil. For many of us, the world can be a gray and murky place, where the sheer complexity of each individual human does away with those archaic, grandiose declarations of what is and...

Discovered in the Archives: An Interview with Russell Hoban (2010)

When blogs were new and hip and happening, there was a push for everybody to have one. Librarians, publishers, authors, artists, you name it. So in the early part of the 21st century a slew of publisher blogs came into being. Sometimes these came from individual imprints. Sometimes small publishers. Sometimes from the big houses themselves. Over the years I’ve watched them rise and fall with great interest. Scholastic’s On Our Minds blog has enjoyed a unique longevity, as opposed to blogs lik...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst

After promising Kate that we’d do a book by a lady, I had to determine the best possible choice. My idea was to look on my old Top 100 Picture Books Poll and see who the top women on there were. #1? Margaret Wise Brown. #2 was Judith Viorst and this book. You know, you never know which books are going to provide you with a plethora of information. This book? Kate had to edit every “um” and “uh” out of the recording to winnow our yammering down to a mere 45 minutes.

Listen to the whole show he...