friday march 28
Lolly Robinson has a great article in the March/April issue of The Horn Book Magazine about what makes a good alphabet book.
“Trying to figure out what makes a good alphabet book is like determining what makes a good meal for a child. It’s a matter of taste as well as developmental maturity. A baby might be partial to mashed peas, a toddler to plain pasta, and a six-year-old may prefer the textural complexity of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The child who is still learning to recognize and name letters doesn’t want to be overwhelmed, while one who has mastered this trick is looking for a little more action and maybe even a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, there are alphabet books for every taste — hundreds, in fact, from the simplest name-the-letter books to those that present puzzles and challenges for older elementary-age children and even adults. Alphabet books stopped being just for pre- and beginning readers long ago.”
I couldn’t agree more! The diversity of high quality alphabet books is really amazing. You can read Lolly Robinson’s entire article here, but I thought her bibliography so good, I’ve detailed the titles she discusses here.
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wednesday march 26
I’ve read a whole string of great new books lately. Some I won’t blog, like Richard Price’s new novel, Lush Life, since you probably already have your place staked out in line for them (do if you don’t), but here’s one you may not have heard much about: Robert Hellenga’s The Italian Lover.
It’s a fairly direct sequel to his debut novel, The Sixteen Pleasures, but you don’t have to have read that novel (I haven’t yet), nor The Fall of a Sparrow (whose protagonist shows up in a major role here, too) to appreciate it.
Margot Harrington is an American book conservator living in Florence, where she came in 1966 to restore books damaged in the great flood of the Arno. In 1975 she wrote a book about her experiences as one of the foreign “mud angels,” her discovery of a book of Renaissance erotica in the convent where she was working, and the grand love affair she had then with an Italian art conservator. Now, some fifteen years later, there is going to be a film made of her memoir.
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wednesday march 19
Twelve-year-old Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike to run his morning paper route in the Indianapolis suburbs. He never comes home.
If you can keep reading past that gut-wrenching premise, keep reading. David Levien’s debut novel, City of the Sun, keeps tightening the suspense from there.
Jamie’s parents, Paul and Carol, spend a year anxiously following the police case on their son while their marriage falls to ashes and the case turns cold. Then a sympathetic patrolman passes them the name of a private investigator. Though they’ve already tried two, Paul finally makes the contact with p.i. Frank Behr. Behr is reluctant to take the case, as the odds of finding any information (much less the boy himself) are so remote. But Paul doesn’t know that the case has a hook that Behr can’t pull away from: Behr’s own son died at the age of seven.
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monday march 17
Versions of The Princess and the Pea have long cornered the pea themed picture book market. But, a new surge in fun and humorous pea related fare addresses this oft-overlooked market, offering laugh out loud alternatives for those of us who have long known that the under utilized pea was truly a comic genius in disguise.
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sunday march 16
Nicola Barker’s extraordinary novel, Darkmans, published in 2007 and short listed for the Man Booker Prize, didn’t reach my desk until January of this year. So it’s still “new fiction” to me. I’ve been thinking about Darkmans for a while now since finishing it. There's a lot to consider.
Barker sets her wildly strange book in Ashford in Kent, the western terminus of the Channel Tunnel. Ashford is a town whose medieval heart is circumscribed by modernity. In Barker’s novel, it’s a place where the past seeps into the present, with characters influenced by the malevolent spirit of one John Scrogin
, a jester at the court of Edward IV. Scrogin’s infamous act (can’t really call it a prank) was luring beggars to a barn then torching it.
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friday march 14
I recently finished reading Scott Westerfeld's Midnighters series and liked it so much that I looked to see what else he had written (check out Westerfeld's blog here). I found Uglies, which stars Tally Youngblood, who can't wait to turn sixteen.
But instead of Tally getting a driver's license on her sixteenth birthday, in this world turning sixteen means going under the knife and getting a life of parties and prettiness. Shortly before her much-anticipated surgery, Tally befriends a girl named Shay, who shocks Tally by not wanting to be made "pretty." The consequence of not going through with the surgery is being Ugly. For life.
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tuesday march 11
Move over Emmy, Tony, and Oscar. Make room for the Edgar, the literary award that is given annually by the Mystery Writers of America. Named for Edgar Allan Poe, who managed to be a quite a mystery in his own right, the award honors the best mystery writers of the year in a wide variety of categories: Novel, First Novel, Paperback Original, Critical/Biographical, Fact Crime, Short Story, Young Adult, Juvenile, Play, TV Episode, and Motion Picture, plus five 'special awards'. The Edgar Award Ceremony will be held in New York City on May 1.
This year's finalists were just announced, and for mystery lovers it makes for a fine reading list. The nominees for 'best novel' are all available at the Library:
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