Betsy Bird's Blog, page 54

On Quiet Protagonists: A Guest Post from Jack Cheng

Today’s guest post comes to us with a topic near and dear to my own heart. To know me now, you might not realize that I was a supremely quiet kid. Never raised my hand. Spoke next to never in school. But what kinds of kids did I prefer to read about in my books? Did I incline towards the quiet kids like myself or was I more attracted to the brassier, bolder heroes? I think it was a little bit of both, but I hadn’t seriously sat down and considered the question until I read this piece that author...

Review of the Day: Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith, ill. Boulet

Bea Wolf
By Zach Weinersmith
Art by Boulet
First Second (an imprint of Macmillan)
$19.99
ISBN: 978-1-250-77629-7
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

Okay then. I guess we’re going to do this, and it’s not going to be short.

Let me just front end this entire review with a succinct statement for those of you enamored of brevity: I adore this book. Mind, if you’re a fan of brevity, this is probably not the book for you. Who this book actually is for is going to be the crux of our little talk here today, and ...

Outreach, Innovation, and Interviews! Meet Wimee in All His Myriad Forms

My 9-year-old son likes to ask me tough questions. “If you could be rich and famous for something stupid or do something amazing and smart but never be remembered for it, which would you want?” Or more recently, “If you hadn’t become a librarian, what else would have wanted to do?”

The truth? Puppeteer. Honestly. My Instagram feed is just a slew of them, and I regret nothing. But why choose? What if library outreach and puppeteering and, oh I dunno, maybe live videos and apps and books and a...

Apply for the Bechtel Fellowship, You Clever Librarians Out There!

You’ve got a lot on your plate, but this offer sounds so heavenly that I just had to pass it along. From ALSC:

Now is the time to get lost in a good book (or a few thousand of them)!

Applications for the Bechtel Fellowship are now being accepted. 

The Louise Seaman Bechtel Fellowship provides a grant up to $7,500 to a qualified children’s librarian to spend up to four weeks reading and studying at the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature of the George A. Smathers Lib...

Review of the Day: The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh

The Lost Year
By Katherine Marsh
Roaring Brook (an imprint of Macmillan)
$17.99
ISBN: 9781250313607
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

By and large, it sucks to live through history. For every Apollo moon landing you get ten Challengers. For every March on Washington you get reasons for why that march had to happen in the first place. Our kids know this. Heck, our kids probably know this better, as a group, than most kids throughout history. After all, only a few of the youngest of them will have already f...

The Quadruple Collaboration: Nikki Grimes and Brian Pinkney Discuss Jerry Pinkney and A Walk in the Woods

Let’s start at the beginning. This is going to require a little bit of context.

Step back in time to late 2019. It was at that time that after forty or so years of friendship, New York Times bestselling author Nikki Grimes and Caldecott Award-winning illustrator Jerry Pinkney decided that they should do a book together. They never had before, as strange as that sounds, and so they began to brainstorm some ideas for their first collaboration. This is how their publisher explained to me what ha...

The Bridge: Featuring Eva Lindström and Jon Klassen in Conversation

One of my favorite parts of this job is talking to picture book creators about their art. But you know what’s even better than that? Talking to picture book creators about other picture book creators. Particularly when they’re in conversation with someone that they particularly admire.

If Eva Lindström isn’t a household name in America then that is no fault of hers. After all, she was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2022, has been nominated once for the Hans Christian Ander...

Newbery/Caldecott 2024: Fall Prediction Edition

Oh, we’re down to the wire now. By this point a lot of the review journals at least have received the last of the 2023 publications. I always feel particularly bad for books, specifically longer books, with October publication dates. Year end lists are pretty much submitting their selections right now, which means a lot of those delightful late-in-the-year releases won’t have even been read.

It also means that sites like Heavy Medals is roaring into gear. Be sure to check out their recen...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: The Tenth Good Thing About Barney by Judith Viorst, ill. Erik Blegvad

It seemed only fitting to me that since last week’s podcast episode dealt so directly with the beginnings of life, why not focus on the end this time around? I’ll tell you this much, though. If you’d informed me, prior to this recording, that a 1971 picture book would be one of the best books I ever encountered on death, I would not have believed you. But I probably should have realized something was up when I saw that The Tenth Good Thing About Barney was by Judith Viorst. Today we deep div...

Review of the Day: Big by Vashti Harrison

Big
By Vashti Harrison
Little, Brown and Company
$19.99
ISBN: 978-0-316-35322-9
Ages 3-6
On shelves now

When I was a kid and there was a problem with something I watched or read, half the time I ignored it and the other half I probably didn’t even notice it. And when I look at kids today, one of the reasons I’m so delighted by this new generation is that they are unafraid to call out problematic content when they see it. Still, it is also interesting to see what does and does not get their attent...