According to Playbill, songwriter Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening) and Legally Blonde lyricist Nell Benjamin are adapting Kate DiCamillo's children's novel Because of Winn-Dixie into a Broadway-aimed musical. I have no idea what kind of competition there is on the kid-friendly-musical front (...is Lion King still running?), but this sounds like the kind of thing that grandparents will be taking their grandchildren to for years to come.
The full-length trailer is out for the upcoming Japanese anime adaptation of Mary Pope Osborne's mega-popular Magic Tree House books. The film will open in Japan on January 7, 2012, and I suspect it will turn up in American theaters eventually. This series has sold more than 92 million books worldwide, so it seems like it would be well-worth the cost of dubbing... unless, of course, there's already a competing English-language edition in the works*.
Do kids really need a scratch-and-sniff illustrated guide to New York's aromas, both good and bad? My first thought was "Ew!", but then I remember my elementary school peers' passion for those Garbage Pail Kids cards, and remember that it's not my job to judge.
I love this idea: Abe's Peanut is a literary and art publication aimed at seven to eleven-year-olds. The publishers print original children's stories on artist-designed postcards. The cards are mailed out to their subscribers on a weekly basis, each one telling a portion of a four-part serialized story. The examples I've read seem a little flimsy, story-wise, but I'm pretty sure the joy of receiving something so cool in the mail on a weekly basis would make up for any half-baked writing.
Rather oddly, there will be two big-name book releases for children coming out next month written by long-dead authors:
Shel Silverstein's Every Thing On It will be released on September 20th. This is the second original book to be published since Silverstein's death twelve years ago, and will feature more than 130 never-before-seen poems and drawings.
The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories is a collection of seven rarely-seen stories by Dr. Seuss. The stories (which were originally published in magazines between 1950 and 1951) were collected by Seuss scholar Charles D. Cohen. The book will come out on September 27th.
Yesterday, Publishers Weekly posted a helpful round-up of the kids' comics announcements released at this year's Comic-Con, including info on upcoming titles from Smile's Raina Telgemeier, the Amulet series' Kazu Kibuishi, and Walking Dead author Robert Kirkman. (Note: The article's second-to-last paragraph is all about graphic novel tie-ins for various products, so if you don't care about a book series based on Lego’s Ninjago toy figures, feel free to skip it.)
If you're looking to buy the latest 39 Clues book (which was pretty awesome, by the way), you might want to pick it up at a Barnes and Noble. My local store was offering a deal where if you bought Vespers Rising, you also got a free copy of the 39 Clues Agent Handbook. I'm not sure what non-game-playing readers (like me) would DO with an agent handbook, but it might make a nice Easter gift for somebody...?
At first I was surprised to hear that they'd made a sequel to last year's excruciating Diary of a Wimpy Kid adaptation, but then I read some reviews that tossed around phrases like "has 'straight to video' written all over it" and explained that the first film was made for a pittance and grossed $75 million. Then this made a lot more sense:
If you've never read the best-selling 39 Clues series, I noticed a "buy one, get the next for half price" deal at my local Barnes and Noble. I don't know if the deals will get better or worse as we get closer to the April 5th release of Vespers Rising (the 11th 39 Clues book), but a series-wide 25% off isn't a bad price (particularly since there only seems to be one Complete Boxed Set left on Amazon).
And in far, far more horrifying movie news, when I was looking up Hunger Games director Gary Ross, I found out that his next film (after HG) is apparently going to be a movie adaptation of one of my all-time favorite books, Norton Juster's 1961 novel The Phantom Tollbooth.
In a word: GYAH. The Phantom Tollbooth is just not meant to be a movie*—particularly not some kind of 3-D, CGI-laden extravaganza sure to send me into spasms of rage. Here's hoping this project dies a quick and quiet death.
*Actually, Wikipedia informs me that it already is, but I'm choosing to ignore that.
How Rocket Learned to Read, written and illustrated by Tad Hills
Contest Book #9
How Rocket Learned to Read, the latest picture book from bestselling author and illustrator Tad Hills, is an engaging, attractively illustrated story about a small dog who transforms from a reluctant reader to an enthusiastic one.
When autumn comes, all Rocket wants to do chase leaves and nap... until a little yellow bird announces that she is his new reading teacher. Rocket thinks maybe he'll do some napping anyway, but his interest is hooked when the bird starts reading aloud from a thrilling story about a dog with a missing bone. Over the course of a school year, Rocket learns about spelling, writing, and sounding out words, and by the time spring rolls around he and the little bird are able to read together.
Hills's book offers vibrant illustrations, a gentle sense of humor, and a wonderful message about the difficulties and rewards of learning to read. We've heard that picture book sales are declining, and while some of the possible causes definitely hold true here*, we're still recommending How Rocket Learned to Read as a solid pick for any preschool or kindergarten students on your holiday shopping list.
*How Rocket Learned to Read is both expensive ($17.99) and aimed at an extremely small sub-set of children (four-to-seven-year-old beginning readers).
The Memory Bank, by Carolyn Coman and Rob Shepperson
Contest Book #1
The Memory Bank (text by Carolyn Coman, illustrations by Rob Shepperson) is the story of two sisters. When Hope's evil parents banish her baby sister Honey for breaking the family's "No laughing" rule, Hope puts on her nightgown, crawls into bed, and gives up on life. Her near-constant dreaming attracts the notice of the staff at the Memory Bank, where humanity's memories and dreams are stored. The Guardian of the Dream Vault wants Hope to become one of the Bank's resident dreamers, but Hope is determined to find Honey first.
Half playful black-and-white images and half fanciful prose, The Memory Bank is too long to be read out loud to small children in one setting but too simplistic to hook the 9-to-12 set. This makes its ideal audience rather small, as smart seven-year-olds with good vocabularies and a high tolerance for manufactured whimsy can be hard to come by. The publishers were clearly hoping to recapture the magic of Brian Selznick's 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, but The Memory Bank reminded me more of the books of Nick Bantock: lovely to look at and entertaining to read, but ultimately rather forgettable.
The Times has posted an article about Zora and Me, a new kids' novel featuring a fictionalized version of Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston as a girl detective. Written by Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon, the novel is the first book not written by Hurston to be endorsed by the Zora Neale Hurston Trust, an organization created in 2002 dedicated to bringing Hurston’s work to a larger audience.
I'm interested in checking out the book, but I really don't care for that cover. Couldn't they have chosen something less hokey?
How did this slip by me? I know last month felt like it was all Mockingjay, all the time in the kids' lit world, but seriously: how did I miss this?
Author Norton Juster and illustrator Jules Feiffer, the creative team who produced The Phantom Tollbooth (one of my top-five favorite books EVER), have a new book out*. Behold:
I had never heard of Common Sense Media before yesterday, but their purpose statement sounded innocuous enough: they're a nonprofit organization dedicated to "improving the lives of kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in a world of media and technology." Unfortunately, this School Library Journal article paints a more disturbing picture. CSM's reviews break literary content down into various categories, including appropriate age levels, "good stuff", and "what to watch out for". Thus a book like Lauren Kate's Fallen gets a high rating, because it contains relatively low levels of violence, sex, drug and alcohol abuse, bad language, and consumerism. (Plus, the author of the review feels fallen angels are "more charming" than vampires, although no reason was given for that assessment.) The fact that Fallen was poorly thought out and featured an emotionally bipolar love interest doesn't bother CSM one bit, apparently.
Ugh. Look, if you're worried about what your kid is reading, read it yourself. Don't rely on someone else (no matter how well-respected) to tell you what's safe and what isn't. And just think: young adult and kids' books can be fun. You might even enjoy yourself!
Laura Miller wrote an essay for Salon about two recent studies that link the mere presence of books in a child's home with the number of years of education the child will complete. The first study (published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility) looked at samples from 27 nations, and found that "growing up in a household with 500 or more books is 'as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.' Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books."
The second study will be published later this year in the journal Reading Psychology, and found that giving "low-income children 12 books (of their own choosing) on the first day of summer vacation 'may be as effective as summer school' in preventing 'summer slide' -- the degree to which lower-income students slip behind their more affluent peers academically every year."
I suspect the presence of books says a LOT about the value a household places on education (which might have something to do with the number of years a child spends in school, too), but find both of these studies fascinating nonetheless. Read on, my doves! It's good for you!
Lord Sunday is the final book in Garth Nix's ambitious fantasy/adventure series “The Keys to the Kingdom”. Over the course of the six previous novels Nix's protagonist—an asthmatic 12-year-old named Arthur Penhaligon—has learned that he is destined to inherit the House, a space at the center of the universe created by a godlike being known as the Architect. In defiance of the Architect's wishes, the House was separated into seven parts, each controlled by a different Trustee: Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, Drowned Wednesday, Sir Thursday, Lady Friday, Superior Saturday, and Lord Sunday. Arthur has defeated the first six Trustees and assumed control of their realms, but he still has to defeat Lord Sunday—the trickiest and least vulnerable Trustee of all.
Reading this series was like looking at a technically impressive painting that I failed to connect with—the books were truly epic in scope, but lacked sufficient humanity to make a lasting impression. The constant literary shout-outs, Biblical references, and nods to Arthurian legend were fun, but Nix failed to develop his characters into three-dimensional beings. (Imagine the exact opposite of Rick Riordan's “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series. That coasted by on jokes and character development; this sacrifices humor and personality in favor of ever-more-intricate plotting.) Still, one has to admire Nix's undeniable effort and skill—both of which are constantly on display—and fans of puzzles and literary allusions should find these books to be rich sources of entertainment.
I'm not sure if this contest will be of personal interest to our normal demographic, but it sounded too good to ignore: Random House Books and the Kids Crooked House Company have put together an essay contest inspired by Mary Pope Osborne's massively successful Magic Tree House series. Kids interested in entering must submit a response to this question: Write about an adventure you would like to have in the Magic Tree House. Where would you go and what would you do? The grand-prize winner will be awarded their own "Magic Tree House" (a custom-designed playhouse by Kids Crooked House) and 10 runner-ups will receive an autographed copy of one of Osborne's books.
Mary Pope Osborne will review the submissions and choose the winner. Entry forms can be downloaded from MagicTreeHouse.com and will be accepted until October 31st, 2010. The winners will be announced in mid-December. Good luck!
As I went through the Wordcandy mail a few weeks ago, I was pleased to run across a package from Scholastic containing not only the final book in Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series, but also the first. We're always happy to receive new series... but not having to hunt down every previous installment makes us even happier.
The Keys to the Kingdom kicked off in 2003, when Nix's Mister Monday introduced Arthur Penhaligon, the seventh-grade boy destined to save the world. Arthur—the youngest and only adopted child of a large family—is severely asthmatic, and an attack that should have killed him brings him to the notice of Mister Monday, one of the seven supernatural beings who have usurped control of the House at the center of the universe. Arthur finds himself in possession of half of Monday's key, and discovers that he'll have to steal the other half if he wants to undo the damage that Monday's visit has caused.
Nix makes it clear from the get-go that Mister Monday is straight-up fantasy, not a fun, winking take on the genre à la Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series or Michael Buckley's Sisters Grimm books. The novel borrows heavily from the Bible and classic mythology, with bits of Arthurian legend and poetry thrown in. I usually prefer my fantasy leavened with some humor, but there's something admirable about Nix's approach—if nothing else, he obviously believes young readers are capable of appreciating a story even if it hasn't been gussied up with vampire love triangles or toilet humor or whatever. Not all YA authors can say the same.
I'll report back when I get around to the final book in this series—the just-released Lord Sunday—with a more comprehensive review. (Books two through six are on hold at my local library.) Mister Monday wasn't my usual cup of tea, but reading a book trying to sell itself on substance rather than style made for an pleasant change of pace.
According to Playbill, songwriter Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening) and Legally Blonde lyricist Nell Benjamin are adapting Kate DiCamillo's children's novel Because of Winn-Dixie into a Broadway-aimed musical. I have no idea what kind of competition there is on the kid-friendly-musical front (...is Lion King still running?), but this sounds like the kind of thing that grandparents will be taking their grandchildren to for years to come.
