Betsy Bird's Blog, page 242

Fusenews: The occasional “unruly pleasure”

I’ve done it again. Delayed my Fusenews too long and now this post is going to overflow with too much good stuff. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

Me stuff for the start. And in fact, there just so much Me Stuff today that I’m just going to cram it all into this little paragraph here and be done with it. To begin, for the very first time my book Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Chidren’s Literature (co-written with Jules Danielson and Peter Sieruta) was cited in an article. Notably, a p...

Review of the Day: The King of Kazoo by Norm Feuti

King of Kazoo
By Norm Feuti
Graphix (an imprint of Scholastic)
$22.99
ISBN: 978-0545770880
Ages 9-12
On shelves July 26th

When I used to run a children’s book club for 9-12 year-olds, I’d regularly let them choose the next book we’d discuss. In time, after some trial and error, I learned that the best way to do this was to offer them three choices and then to have them vote after a stirring booktalk of each title. The alternative was to let them choose the next book we’d read for themse...

Spotted at BEA: Upcoming Goodies

A light smattering of things that caught my eye at BEA.

Here’s the thing about Book Expo America. As conferences go it yields less love amongst librarians than our own, beloved American Library Association conferences. And that just makes sense. BEA is about the business side of books. Booksellers are the primary focus and they’re swell folks.

This year the move to Chicago meant that a lot of the local booksellers were a bit worried about turnout. At an author dinner I attended they mentioned...

Day of Dialog 2016 Recap: Chicago Edition!

Photo credit Laini Taylor

I feel like it’s been a long time since I “reported” on anything. It isn’t just the move to the Chicago area. It’s more that subtly over the years I’ve pulled back from the rote typing that I used to engage in so often. Blame Twitter. Blame aging. Blame my left pinkie finger which, even as I write this, is slowly growing numb.

But when you are at School Library Journal’s Day of Dialog (held in Chicago this time around) and Richard Peck steps up to the podium to give...

The Children’s Literary Salon: Full Video Showcase

As you may or may not know, this past Saturday I conducted a Children’s Literary Salon at my library with panelists Travis Jonker, Mr. Schu, and Colby Sharp. And, as ever, I recorded a live feed of the event. That’s fairly snazzy, but before I post that video here I want to take a moment to thank the City of Evanston. Every Literary Salon I have done has been meticulously recorded by their employees. Then some saintly person somewhere actually edits them. The recordings and sound are loads be...

Walking and Talking with . . . Kate DiCamillo!

Recently I hosted a Literary Salon where an attendee asked at the end whether or not it was true that Kate DiCamillo deleted every draft she wrote, right after finishing it, so that she could rewrite it again. As it turns out, this isn’t exactly the case, but it did lead a lot of us to wonder how Kate writes in general. A secret signal must have been sent through the ether because not three days later I got word from author Steve Sheinkin that he had a new Walking and Talking feature to prese...

Can Adult Authors Be Taught?: Considering the Alternative Celebrity Children’s Book

The title of the New York Times piece is Masters of Prose Warm Up to Children’s Picture Books. Innocuous enough. Inside, the article looks at the current spate of authors who normally write for an adult audience but have recently switched their focus to our youngest readers. Jane Smiley, Sherman Alexie, and Calvin Trillin are spotlighted in particular, though they are hardly the first of their kind. As the writer Alexandra Alter rightly points out, it is far more common for (for lack of a bet...

Review of the Day: Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk

Wolf Hollow
By Lauren Wolk
Dutton Children’s Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-1101994825
Ages 10 and up
On shelves now.

I am not what you might call a very brave reader. This is probably why I primarily consume children’s literature. I might puff myself up with a defense that lists the many fine aspects of this particular type of writing and believe it too, but sometimes when you catch me in a weak moment I might confess that another reason I like reading book...

Interview Time! John Patrick Green in Conversation with Eric Colossal

Who? What? Where? When? Why?

It’s a blog tour, kiddos! A tour of bloggy goodness. More than that, it’s a graphic novel blog tour done to celebrate Children’s Book Week in all its fancypants glory.

The subject of today’s interview is none other than Eric Colossal. Colossal, if the name is new to you, is the author of the danged funny RUTABAGA series. I’m a big fan of those books as they combine two of my favorite things: quests and eating. And in a bit of a twist, I won’t be doing the intervie...

Default: White

Alternate Title: The Call Is Coming From Inside the House

So yesterday at lunchtime I trotted out my neat little stack of periodicals to read while I munched a ham sandwich. I picked up the latest Kirkus (1 May 2016) and there I saw the Vicky Smith article: “Unmaking the White Default”. As many of you may have noticed recently, Kirkus made a significant shift in the way that they review. Normally, a children’s or YA book review will eschew mentioning the ethnicity of a human character unless...