Betsy Bird's Blog, page 215
July 25, 2017
Review of the Day: Let’s Clap, Jump, Sing & Shout; Dance, Spin & Turn It Out! by Patricia C. McKissack, ill. Brian Pinkney
Let’s Clap, Jump, Sing & Shout; Dance, Spin & Turn It Out! Games, Songs & Stories from an African American Childhood
By Patricia McKissack
Illustrated by Brian Pinkney
Schwartz & Wade (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
$24.99
ISBN: 978-0-375-87088-0
All ages
On shelves now.
Would you like to know the last film Orson Welles ever appeared in? It was Transformers: The Movie from 1986. The great Raul Julia? His last film was the video game adaptation Street Fighter in 1994. Random facts....
July 23, 2017
New Fuse 8 n’ Kate Episode: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
Oh. We churning them out now. We’ve got a rhythm. We’ve got a beat. And now we’re going to start rip-roaring through our books. This week’s podcast episode (found here or on iTunes under “Kate n’ Fuse 8″) was a good one too. I decided to finally crack one of the Top Ten books that showed up in my Top 100 Picture Books Poll in the hopes of luring Kate into a conflict. I think The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle is a perfect 10 of a picture book. Does she agree? All that I can say for c...
July 22, 2017
Video Sunday: Smooth Brains
Over at Read-Aloud Revival they hosted two of my favorite people in conversation. Honestly if you could just give Jeanne Birdsall and N.D. Wilson their own talk show, I would be first in line to be in the studio audience. Here’s how they described this talk at Anderson’s Bookshops:
Jeanne and N.D. are good friends, and in this interview held at Anderson Bookshop in Illinois, they talk about:
why their books are more alike than you might think the author who inspires both of their books what...
July 19, 2017
Where Are All the Black Boys? A 2017 Assessment and Comparison
Recently I had a chance to see an upcoming jacket for a 2018 middle grade novel. Check it out:
If the name “Varian Johnson” is ringing a bell, it may be because of this cover a couple years ago:
His 2018 book, The Parker Inheritance, is billed as having distinct similarities to The Westing Game (and if your mouth suddenly started to salivate after hearing that, I can’t even blame you). The Great Greene Heist, of course, is more in the vein of Ocean’s 11. And what do these two books have in...
July 17, 2017
The Refugee Children’s Books of 2017 and an Ode to The Arrival
Sometimes people turn to children’s literature in an attempt to ignore the goings on in the world today. But books for kids don’t exist in bubbles. A person could spend their entire life examining the many ways in which the world of adults seeps into books for kids. Why is this? Sometimes it’s unconscious. Sometimes it’s didactic. And sometimes it’s simply a response to reality.
The Syrian refugee crisis has been responsible for a true uptick in the number of refugee-related picture books com...
July 16, 2017
New Fuse 8 n’ Kate Episode: In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
New episode, new episode, new episode, alert, alert!
It’s been a little while but we’ve a new episode up and running. I’m so pleased to say that my podcast Fuse 8 n’ Kate which I do with my sister went in a distinctly Sendakian direction. We delve deep into the oddities of the book, some of the more peculiar theories that surround it, and also the many things people have said about it over the years. I may go off on a rant against librarian-bashing in the course of things. Does this book d...
July 12, 2017
Math Books for Kids: The Truth is Out There
On Monday I gave two talks at the 2017 NerdCamp conference held in Parma, MI. This would be the second time I spoke at the conference and my talks probably couldn’t have been more diametrically opposed. The first was one of those slam dunk panels you hope for. I had the chance of moderating a talk with Erica Perl, Shannon Hale, and Donna Gephart about funny women writing for kids. Attending in the audience were folks like Juana Medina, fellow Funny Girl contributor Kelly DiPucchio, James Ken...
July 10, 2017
Review of the Day: Orphan Island by Laurel Snyder
Orphan Island
Laurel Snyder
Walden Pond Press (an imprint of Harper Collins)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-06-244343-4
Ages 9-12
On shelves now
*spoiler alert on the whole darn review, basically*
I spend more time than I’d like thinking about what makes a person and how that person is an entirely new creation at different stages of life. Are you the same person that you were as a kid? If you’ve changed then does that make you someone new? Because my job consists of reading books for children, I li...
Cover Reveal: Tiny and the Big Dig by Sherri Duskey Rinker, ill. Matt Myers
When I moved to Evanston, Illinois I had a whole new landscape of authors and illustrators to explore. It is often said that more authors and illustrators of children’s books live in NYC (specifically Brooklyn) than anywhere else in the country. I have little doubt that this is probably true, but take a gander at enough bookflaps and biographic summaries and you’ll be quick to realize that we live in a great big country with creative types lurking pretty much everywhere. Case in point, She...
July 8, 2017
Video Sunday: “Butters. Plural.”
I just love the Evanston Public Library crew. Our librarians are uniquely talented souls. For example, each year they produce a new stop animation summer reading video. This year they got a bit ambitious and upped their game to a stop animation Rube Goldberg summer reading video.
In other news, I thought this next video tied in well with the first. Again, it’s stop animation, only this time it’s for a Kickstarter that sounds really neat.
Someday I shall sit down and write a long paper on t...
