So of course I’d heard of Octavian Nothing. But it was just one of those books (two volumes, actually, but really one book, in my mind) that I’d never gotten around to reading. But I’ve been catching up on John Green’s archives after going crazy for his Looking for Alaska, and I took what he [...]

I bought Looking for Alaska at a recent book festival because it had a nice shiny round gold Printz Award sticker on the cover that gleamed up at me invitingly from the rows of books on the table. At the cash register, two college-aged cashiers, a boy and a girl, gasped in unison, “We love [...]

We make assumptions about our writers sometimes, don’t we? We imagine what they look like, how old they are, and how much of a story they’ve taken from their own life experiences. When I was in graduate school in the summer of 1997, studying secondary English education, I was assigned a book called Make Lemonade [...]

The first time I finished The Book Thief, I was on a plane riding home from a visit to see my sister for her law school graduation. I cried on page after page, my tears falling faster than I could wipe them away, sliding down my face then my chin then my neck to my [...]

For a variety of reasons (including some truly great conversations with my former coworkers and beloved friends at Children’s Book World) I cannot stop thinking this, so I am writing it down here:
I think WHEN YOU REACH ME by Rebecca Stead is a serious Newbery contender, and is my first true pick of the year.
Also, [...]

I was vaguely aware of The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt for a while. As in, I’d heard of it and seen its cover in stores and knew it was a 2008 Newbery Honor Book and was always mildly curious about it, but not curious enough to ever pick it up until recently, when I [...]

Can the movie POSSIBLY be as good as the trailer?
(Please?)

The Cybils are the annual awards given out by kidlit bloggers for the best kidlit of the previous year. I am ashamed to say that I am not remotely involved in this yet – I didn’t even vote – but I think that the awards are an awesome idea and I hope to be involved [...]

One! Hundred! Demons! is a wonderful book by Lynda Barry, a cartoonist, novelist, and playwright whose work appears all over tarnation. The deserving recipient of both an Alex Award and the 2003 Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Album, this is the sort of book that makes a person want to sing from the mountaintops about the [...]

NEWBERY: Couldn’t be more thrilled about THE GRAVEYARD BOOK. Gaiman’s profanity-laden Twitter post was hilarious. I am so, so happy that a genre book won; that a bestseller won; that a book kids will want to read won. When you compare this to the last few years of winners, I believe this one was an [...]