Betsy Bird's Blog, page 31

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Wemberly Worried by Kevin Henkes

All around the U.S. kids are beginning to go back to school. With that in mind, Kate asked me to come up with a back-to-school book I hadn’t done before. Now you might think that the only first day of school book the great Kevin Henkes created was Chrysanthemum (which we did back in 2021). Not so! Here we find another. Kate says the cover is what you get if you mix Maus with Clockwork Orange (though I think it looks more like Maus meets Vertigo). We talk about the panic attacks that are sure...

Review of the Day: Go Forth and Tell by Breanna J. McDaniel, ill. April Harrison

Go Forth and Tell: The Life of Augusta Baker, Librarian and Master Storyteller
By Breanna J. McDaniel
Illustrated by April Harrison
Dial Books for Young Readers (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
$18.99
ISBN: 9780593324202
Ages 4-7
On shelves now

Let���s talk a bit about what happens when picture book biographies preach to the choir. I am talking, of course, about that phenomenon of featuring heroic librarians in children���s books. We see this in fictional picture books all the time where there...

Huda F Approved This Interview: A Talk with Producer Iris McElroy and Huda Fahmy About Creating Audiobooks from Comics!

Audiobooks, particularly those of the electronic variety, are at an all-time high in terms of popularity these day, and who can be surprised? Whether you have a Hoopla or Overdrive account with your library or are a fool and waste money with Audible (am I biased? very well then, I am biased), access to them has never been easier and the quality has never been higher. Of course, not all books have a chance to become audiobooks, and that’s a real pity. Perhaps that will all change when our AI over...

Telling the Truth About What It Means to Be Human (Or Lizard): A Q& A with Patrick Ness on Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody

I cannot overstate how excited I am about the book we’ll be discussing today.

Now about two weeks ago I had the delight and privilege of sitting in a parade on a float beside artist David Small. In the course of our conversation the topic turned to the current state of children’s publishing today. This allowed me to launch into one of my soapbox speeches. It has always been my belief that one of the delights that comes with the sheer number of books coming out each season is the fact that som...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: The Color Kittens by Margaret Wise Brown, ill. Alice & Martin Provensen

Our Margaret Wise Brown output on this podcast has, until now, been a bit on the scanty side. Sure, we did Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny but beyond that we’ve sort of left her out in the cold. All that changes today with this, our third MWB and what may be our very first Provensen deep dive. In light of the new life injected into Little Golden Books as of late, (thanks in large part to a very big pop princess) we tackle one of these very books ourselves. In this podcast, we discuss the ty...

Publisher Spotlight Preview: Fall/Winter 2024 – Lantana, Little Island, and Marble Press

Thanks to Publisher Spotlight���s own Ellen Myrick, we���re continuing to give you a brief peek into some of the books slated for release in the coming months. You can find the first of these round-ups of small publishers here, the second here, the third here, and the fourth here. This next batch includes a slew you certainly aren’t familiar with. That is to say, not yet:

Freedom Braids by Monique Duncan, ill. Oboh Moses

ISBN: 9781915244802

Publication Date: September 10, 2024

...

Review of the Day: The Wrong Way Home by Kate O’Shaughnessy

The Wrong Way Home
By Kate O���Shaughnessy
Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
$17.99
ISBN: 9780593650738
Ages 9-12
On shelves now.

Nuance and complexity in books for kids can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, our children deserve only the best possible literature. We must fill them with stories full of three-dimensional characters. We should give them difficult and complicated situations, sometimes without easy answers. We have to be willing to show them (in developmentally approp...

Artist and Art Director In Conversation: Nancy Vo and Michael Solomon Discuss Process, “Pastness”, and Palette

Behold:

Now that I have your attention, I am delighted today to introduce two guests to this site. Nancy Vo, the author/illustrator of aforementioned Boobies, is coming out with the finale of her Crow Stories trilogy today, August 6th. The book is called The Runaway, out from Groundwood Books, and is, as SLJ called it, “a deeply felt story that will provide rich opportunities for children to extend the storytelling and perhaps tell their own survival stories.” Previous picture books in thi...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Abuela by Arthur Dorros, ill. Elisa Kleven

How the HECK have we done 327 episodes of this podcast and we haven’t yet done this book? Released in 1991, I can’t help but note that this story, of people flying above New York City, happened to come out the same year that a fellow people flying above New York City picture book came out: Tar Beach. Something about the early 90s just made people want to fly away, I guess. Today we tackle Abuela by Arthur Dorros, a book that has remained popular after all these years. Does it deserve the acc...

Unexpected Jolts of Children’s Literature

It’s that time again. Time to discuss cases in which the world of adult literature and the world of children’s books intersect in all new and interesting ways. Today I’ve a special treat for you though. A video that just blew me away, and with the release of that… downright interesting Harold and the Purple Crayon film? Well, it couldn’t be better timed, that’s all.

Check this out:

I mean, that is how you do a book trailer, people. I think that it may be fair to say that Oxford Univ...