Childrens Books

TANYA'S OLD T-SHIRT I live in a bucket shoved under a stair.They call me a dust rag!I don't think it's fair. I'm still the same size as when I was new.I didn't shrink--it was Tanya who GREW.Alice Schertle is a veteran author whose way with a rhyme have lightened up many a folktale re-telling and fractured fairy tale. Here she turns her skills to versatile verses which explore the relationship between clothing and those who wear it. No garb, from footwear to headgear escapes her scrutiny.We are the jammies that Joshua wears,not jammies for elephants going upstairs.Hippopotamus can't get us over his head.We're JOSHUA'S jammies. We're going to bed.Swimsuits, bike helmets, hats, galoshes, Halloween disguises--all get Schertle's discriminating attention, the article of costume often reflecting the personality of the wearer, as in this little show-off, proud of her big-girl underwear, in "Emily's Undies."We're Emily's undies,with laces and bows,Emily shows uswherever she goes.Likewise, in "Bertie's Shoelaces," the laid-back Bertie's lack of up-tight (or even tied) sneakers are reflected by his shoelaces, who lazily say as they drag along the ground...We're hang loose laces and we don't do bows!Suitingly illustrated with Petra Mathers' artwork that fits the text like a glove, Schertle's updated Button Up!: Wrinkled Rhymes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) is all dressed up in a spiffy new paperback edition, and is a real bargain, all-star glad-rags for the reviewers and readers, as cozy and welcome as the subject of her poem "Hand-me-down Sweatshirt."I'm a hand-me-down sweatshirtwith a zipper and hood.I'm everyone's favoriteand still looking good.

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art Announces 2013 Carle Honors Honorees   Eighth annual awards fête the individuals and organizations that provide creative vision and long-term dedication to the world of picture books   (Amherst, MA –May 20, 2013) The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is pleased to announce the 2013 Carle Honors honorees to be celebrated at Guastavino’s in New York City on Thursday, September 26, 2013. The eighth annual benefit will pay tribute to the talented people who have made the picture book such a vibrant and impactful art form in America. This year, the Carle Honors will honor the following selection of distinguished luminaries in four categories:   Artist: Chris Van Allsburg In the Artist category, The Carle will recognize Chris Van Allsburg, the groundbreaking artist and author and winner of two Caldecott Medals for Jumanji and The Polar Express.   Angel: Lynda Johnson Robb and Carol Rasco In the Angel category, The Carle will recognize Lynda Johnson Robb and Carol Rasco for their tireless advocacy for children’s literacy. Robb is Reading Is Fundamental’s Founding Board Member and Chairman Emeritus, and Rasco its President & CEO.   Mentor: Phyllis Fogelman Baker In the Mentor category, The Carle will recognize Phyllis Fogelman Baker, an influential editor and publisher dedicated to bringing fresh voices and exceptional books to children.   Bridge: Barbara Bader In the Bridge category, The Carle will recognize Barbara Bader, author of the seminal scholarly book, American Picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to The Beast Within. The Carle Honors celebrates individuals and organizations that bring creative vision and long-term dedication to picture books and the many ways they open children’s minds to art and literacy. The awards are selected each year by a committee chaired by children’s literature historian and critic Leonard S. Marcus, who was central to the founding of the Honors. The committee recognizes four distinct awards: Artist, for lifelong innovation in the field; Angel, whose generous financial support is crucial to making picture book art exhibitions, education programs, and related projects a reality; Mentor, editors, designers, and educators who champion the art form; and Bridge, individuals who have found inspired ways to bring the art of the picture book to larger audiences through work in other fields. The Carle Honors is a critical fundraiser for the The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, helping to support the Museum’s mission of inspiring of love of art and reading through picture books. For ticket and sponsorship information, including the ability to sponsor an educator to attend the gala, please contact Rebecca Miller Goggins, Director of Development at 413-658-1118 or rebeccag@carlemuseum.org.   About The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art: The mission for The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, a non-profit organization in Amherst, MA, is to inspire a love of art and reading. The only full-scale museum of its kind in the United States, The Carle collects, preserves, presents, and celebrates picture books and picture book illustrations from around the world. In addition to underscoring the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of picture books and their art form, The Carle offers educational programs that provide a foundation for arts integration and literacy. Eric and Barbara Carle founded the Museum in November 2002. Eric Carle is the renowned author and illustrator of more than 70 books, including the 1969 classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Since opening, the 40,000-foot facility has served more than half a million visitors, including 30,000 schoolchildren. Its extensive resources include a collection of more than 10,000 picture book illustrations, three art galleries, an art studio, a theater, picture book and scholarly libraries, and educational programs for families, scholars, educators, and schoolchildren. Educational offerings incl

Normanday #77: Zzzzzzzzzzzz. Write for three minutes about… …the weirdest place you ever fell asleep. Email what you wrote to woof at bright dot net by the end of the day May 26 (put “Norman Never Snores” in the subject line). I’ll post as many of my favorite entries as I want next Monday. Include your first name (or, even better, use a pen name) and age (unless you’re tortoise-old). If you’re a published children’s or young adult writer, include a biography to be posted with your entry. Here is the single entry from last week when I asked you to write for three minutes about… …the zoo. Tren Rewy Steb My favorite part about going to the zoo wasn’t the polar bears, monkeys, or even the seals. It was the underground tunnel we had to go through from the parking lot to the zoo. It ran under the highway. Even with the baby strollers and toddlers all around, being in the tunnel felt like an adventure. Because there was no traffic, I was allowed to run ahead of my parents. It was like being in a cave. The sound of my feet hitting the smooth floor echoed against the walls. The tunnel seemed to go on for miles. After looking at all the animals, we got to go through the tunnel again, on the way back to the car. I ran, freer than the caged tigers.

  I know it's a losing battle, keeping the place in some kind of tidy shape, and it's certainly not all the fault of my kids. The books, lord the books. But sometimes I am just in a GET IT ALL OUT OF HERE mood, and such is the mood that descended tonight. I haven't had the time to read hardly anything lately, so as we picked up books and shelved them or put them in the Back to the Library bag, I got Milo (11) and Ezra (nearly 10) to talk about the books they've read.     Ezra: Battle Bunny is the result of a ten year old who just watched a whole lot of apocalypse movies making his mark on a cute little Birthday Bunny tale. It's terrifically funny - there's a picture on Battle Bunny's wall that shows a bunny mama leaning over a bunny baby and the ten-year-old added the words "Drink your poison." NB: The overstimulated ten-year-olds actually responsible for Battle Bunny are Jon Scieszka and Mac Barnett, with illustrations by Matthew Myers...    Mac and Jon attempting to read Battle Bunny as a duet at the Gaithersburg Book Festival this weekend.   I will have a WHOLE LOT to say about Battle Bunny as its publication date approaches. It is... sharp. Daring. Extendable. It is either going to spawn a whole new product line/curriculum/dessert topping or it is going to be denied! Castigated! Denounced, even. Capsized, defenestrated, castrated! (That's not going to happen. Everybody loves Jon and Mac too much. Even if people do not approve of the formal mechanism that makes this book SO FRICKIN GREAT, nobody's going to get castrated.)   Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong by Prudence Shen, illustrations by the great and mighty Faith Erin Hicks Milo: This graphic novel is ok. The cheerleaders are trying to get new uniforms and the robotics team are trying to get to the national robotics competition. Since they're competing for the same funds, the student council has to decide. So they both field a candidate for student council, and come up with all kinds of crazy campaign strategies. After neither gets the funding, they team up to get the money they both need by winning the Robot Rumble - a fight to the death between robots.     The 13-Story Treehouse by Andy Griffiths, illustrations by Terry Denton Ezra: An author and an illustrator who have great senses of humor, an epic treehouse with 13 stories, a marshmallow machine, a lemonade fountain, and a whole bunch of faulty sea monkeys make up a really awesome book. Terry and Andy (which are also the names of the author and the illustrator) are two kids who live in this fantastic treehouse, and then they have adventures with like a giant gorilla and a sea monster pretending to be a mermaid and a cat that gets painted yellow. So, like, supernatural, but not like werewolves supernatural. NB: Attention must be paid, as my friend Anna points out, to the intricate, marvelous drawing of the treehouse on this book's endpapers. I fully expect kids to be inspired to start drawing their dream treehouses - as Anna did when she was a kid and as I and my friends did when we were, uh, about 27.     Milo: On the Day I Died by Candace Fleming is several different stories from Beyond the Grave. Most of the stories aren't scary at all, but one of them would give you nightmares, and the last few are a little bit scary. Every single one of the stories is about a teen who died, and it's told by the kid who died. Some of the stories are kind of stereotype stories, like 'this is a monster story,' 'this is about an insane asylum.' Others are very fun - not funny, but fun.   Some books that were in these piles are old favorites. My kids read kind of a lot of new books, but they do not neglect that middle-grade trait of reading the same five books over and over again. Ezra has been re-reading Bone and Runaways and I

Last summer when I was attempting to sell my house, my vacuum cleaner broke. It happened right before an open house, so not only did I have to deal with my sudden lack of vacuum cleaning power, but the incident also filled the downstairs with that melting-plastic scent that smells exactly the opposite of Buy This House. I was outraged, of course, even though it was pretty clear that the 20-year-old Panasonic upright that was mostly held together with duct tape and electrical tape (from all those times I vacuumed the power cord) should have been retired before it started emitting smoke. Per usual, Tammy and Ron saved me. It turned out that they had a Dyson vacuum cleaner in their basement that they hated and weren’t using. My favorite electronics are the ones I don’t have to buy, so I adopted the Dyson, and we’ve been living happily together ever since. Except when it comes time to empty the Dyson. Dyson vacuum cleaners, as you perhaps know, are bagless, and every time I have to empty the thing, it’s like I’ve never done it before. There are a LOT of buttons on the vacuum, and I approach this task as I do so many tasks–by hitting a lot of buttons until what I want to happen starts happening. Did you ever watch the Transformers cartoon when you were a kid? Remember how the Transformers would transform themselves, and it would make that weird scratchy-record sound while they were transforming? (Here’s an example.) That’s basically how it goes with the Dyson. When you hit the right button on the Dyson, suddenly a bunch of parts all start moving and then there’s the vacuum vomiting out all the dirt and cat hair and whatnot you’ve been vacuuming up for the past month or two. If you’re wise, you’ve put a trash bag under the vacuum to deal this this. If you’re me, you leave the trash bag off to the side, so that your cat comes and lies down on it to quietly mock you while you make a huge mess of the hallway. After I cleaned all that up, I went out for a walk, and that was nice.

One week after outwitting three Deadly Desperados, P.K. Pinkerton sets up shop on B Street as a private investigator. In many respects, P.K. has the makings of a great sleuth: a keen sense of hearing and smell, the ability to track animals as silently as an Indian (P.K. is part Lakota), a photographic memory for anything in writing. Unfortunately, P.K. also has a Thorn–the inability to read people’s expressions–which can lead to trouble, especially in a brawling town of vice and sin such as Virginia City. And then there the Foibles and Eccentricities. P.K. gets the Mulligrubs and has a penchant for collecting things. These days, it’s tobacco stubs. Business is slow because people are reluctant to hire a twelve year old detective, so it’s quite fitting that the first person to come to P.K. for help is a child. This particular child, Martha, was chambermaid to the late Short Sally, a reformed Nymph of the Night. More importantly, Martha witnessed Sally’s murder, but she is frightened away before she can give P.K. more details beyond a description of the murderer: tall & slim & blond with a billy goat beard. As it turns out, plenty of people in Virginia City fit this description. So is the killer Absalom Smith, aspiring actor and pun enthusiast, C. V. Anthony, Virginia City’s newest Methodist pastor, Ludwig Hamm, ardent admirer of the late Miss Sally, or someone P.K. has completely overlooked? Our young protagonist is still honing the craft of sleuthing and has a tendency to reveal very important Clews to bystanders (that Thorn is to blame!) who may or may not be trustworthy, leading to hilariously dicey situations, red herrings, and not a little gunfire. Fortunately, P.K. also has allies in familiar faces like Sam Clemens and Poker Face Jace, who imparts some very good advice: before a person is about to do something big or dangerous, they usually take a deep breath in. (So mind the nostrils!) Despite a murderer on the loose, the stakes don’t feel as high nor the danger as real as they did in the first Pinkerton book, but Petrified Man is a fun Western romp all the same. PK’s straightforward way of narrating (I love the way he Capitalizes Certain Things) and interacting with other characters–especially with the lawyer, coroner, and newspaper man–is as funny as ever. Plus, we learn something surprising about P.K. that is, in my opinion, more intriguing than the case our determined detective is working on. I’m sure P.K. wouldn’t see what all the fuss is about, but I’m very impressed author Caroline Lawrence managed to fool this reader for so long. Very slick, indeed!

Book: Itch: The Explosive Adventures of an Element HunterAuthor: Simon Mayo (@SimonMayo)Pages: 432Age Range: 12 and up Itch is a young adult thriller featuring an unusual hero. Itchingham Lofte (aka Itch) is a total science geek. His passion is collecting elements from the periodic table. When a fellow collector shares a very unusual rock with Itch, Itch soon finds himself, and his family, in grave danger. Itch is in many ways a classic YA thriller. There are chases. There are over-the-top bad guys. There is a need for the hero to be brave. But there is also science. Instead of using conventional weapons, Itch turns to the elements when he's in a tight corner. He gets excited about watching a sample analyzed in a lab. He burns off his eyebrows in the first chapter, in a mishap with phosphorus. His sister Chloe and best friend/cousin Jack (short for Jacqueline) are more regular (and more mainstream popular) than Itch, but the hero's journey here belongs to the science geek.  Itch, written by an English radio presenter, is set mostly in Cornwall. There's definitely a British feel to the book. Take this little exchange, from Chapter 1: ""Hello, Itchingham," said his mother. "Still no eyebrows, then." There should be a law against parents using sarcasm, thought Itch as he poured his cereal." (Page 13) I don't know about you, but I hear Itch's Mom with an English accent there.  In addition to the details about the elements, there is quite a bit of information included in Itch about copper mining. And, just to keep things interesting, a bit about surfing. Who knew that surfing was a major pastime in Cornwall? Not me. But all of this is quite refreshing, together making Itch stand out from the pack.  I did find the start of the book a bit slow, but the action picks up after a bit, and the end of the book is both fast-paced and high-stakes. Not realistic, perhaps, but definitely high-stakes.  A sequel will be published in 2014. As Mayo left a couple of threads cunningly unresolved, I (and many others) will be waiting eagerly to find out what's next for Itch. With its green and black cover and blurb from Anthony Horowitz, Itch's target teen boy demographic is fairly clear. But I think that anyone who enjoys thrillers with teen protagonists could appreciate Itch. And I think that teachers and librarians will be happy to see a book that not only doesn't avoid but actually embraces science. Not science fiction, not high tech, but pure science. Rather refreshing that (despite the arsine gas accident and associated vomiting). Itch is well worth a look.  Publisher: Splinter (@SterlingKids)Publication Date: April 2, 2013Source of Book: Review copy from the publisher FTC Required Disclosure: This site is an Amazon affiliate, and purchases made through Amazon links (including linked book covers) may result in my receiving a small commission (at no additional cost to you). © 2013 by Jennifer Robinson of Jen Robinson's Book Page. All rights reserved. You can also follow me @JensBookPage or at my Growing Bookworms page on Facebook. 

I grew up with Star Trek, so I know my way around a bit. I can tell you that my favorite captain is Jean-Luc Picard and that I’d rather die than have to sit through Deep Space Nine. That being said, I’m not so well versed in Star Trek that I took issue with J. J. Abrams’s revisions of Trek history. The movie is an exciting watch from the very beginning, when Kirk and McCoy are running for their lives from aliens, trying to give Spock time to jump into an active volcano to neutralize it, thereby saving the entire planet. There are jokes and knowing glances between the beloved captain and his first officer. And then it gets darker. (I guess Into Darkness is a little on the nose.) Enter John Harrison, a placid killer who manages to blow up one of the Star Fleet’s secret bases right in the middle of London. Before we proceed, note that there is a major spoiler below! If you don’t want to know what happens, skip to the end for a list of great sci-fi and space stories. Of course, John Harrison is an enemy of our own making. Woken by the head of Star Fleet, he is actually 1960s-era Kirk’s greatest enemy (say it with me now) “KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!” The story weaves in and out of twists and fights, and honestly I don’t think I stopped gasping until the very end. If you’re riding that sci-fi high and don’t know where to turn to next, check out some of these great titles available from Book Clubs right now! Cinder in TAB May Skyship Academy: The Pearl Wars in TAB May The Comet’s Curse in TAB June Cowboys & Aliens Graphic Novel in TAB June

Hungarian illustrator Eszter Schalle makes charming digital illustrations......and check out her Etsy shop here...

The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr Lucy Beck-Moreau was considered one of the top concert pianists.  Now at age 16, she has abruptly left the concert circuit and doesn’t play the piano at all.  Instead she is attending school just like any other teenager, doing homework, and listening to her younger brother Gus practice his piano pieces.  When Gus’ aging piano teacher dies, she is replaced by Will, a young teacher who was once himself a child pianist and recommends plenty of time away from the piano for Gus, including once forbidden video games and TV.  As Will balances out Gus’ life, Lucy is drawn to him.  Will is older and sophisticated and interested in Lucy herself as both a pianist and a person.  This is the story of Lucy’s triumph over grief and loss and her struggle to play music on her own terms and for her own reasons. Zarr has beautifully captured a family of wealth and talent without lingering overlong on those details.  It is Lucy who is the center of the novel, which is told in third person but specifically from Lucy’s view.  This gives the book a necessary distance so that readers can view Lucy from a small space and recognize the mistakes that she is making and repeating.  Lucy is a wonder of a flawed protagonist, filled with talent yet drawn into destructive situations of her own making, one feels an affinity to her and yet pushed away as well. It is this strength of the central character that lifts this novel above others covering similar subjects.  The writing here is strong and clear, and the story flows with a natural feel that allows Lucy to veer dangerously close to disasters that make the reading that much more exciting.  Along the way, a dysfunctional family is on display, showing readers how Lucy came to be the way that she is, and also showing hope for what is possible. A true mix of hope, music and tenacity, this book is beautifully composed and harmonious with lingering crescendos.  Appropriate for ages 14-17. Reviewed from library copy. Filed under: Book Reviews, Teen Tagged: families, music, pianists, self esteem