AboutSusan Dove Lempke writes about children, their books, and their grown-ups, and about life in the public library. She is Youth Services Supervisor for the Niles Public Library District, reviews for the Horn Book Magazine, and writes a book review column for the International Reading Association's newsletter, Reading Today. Recent Posts:Categories:Archives:
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Something Different Every DayOctober 29, 2008 Faint praiseAbout a new fiction title, this Kirkus reviewer begins his/her review, “Modestly engaging, …” Ouch! posted by Susan at 8:43 pm | Comments (1) October 14, 2008 Fare thee well, SATA!
I love Something About the Author. I love all those pretty blue volumes sitting on the shelf. I love learning about the authors, who are some of my very favorite people. I love having the perfect resource when a student needs information about an author. But I didn’t love it enough to keep buying it at $116 a volume for an increasing number of volumes each year. I didn’t love that they started padding their content to increase their number of volumes. I didn’t love that they began covering authors who hadn’t even published in the U.S. And the last straw was the volume where they covered both Jan and Stan Berenstain, with multi-page bibliography for Jan Berenstain which they repeated a few pages later for Stan Berenstain. The other thing I didn’t love is the same thing every Youth Services librarian doesn’t love. All those pretty blue volumes are space hogs! And so, at last, it is fare thee well to the whole 150 volumes.
posted by Susan at 1:56 pm | Comments (0) September 22, 2008 Learn from my mistakesYou know, when I started this blog, I thought of it as a way to share some of my experiences in 25 years as a children’s librarian. I sort of forgot how often my experiences could be filed under the category “dumb mistake”. Here’s another storytime one! Everyone knows better than to get in front of a storytime group with a book you haven’t read before. If you ever did, it would likely be a mistake you’d only make once. But what you might forget is, you have to look at the actual copy of the book that you are going to read in front of a group. It’s not enough to be familiar with the story–you have to have looked at the book’s physical pages. Otherwise you end up with:
“Hey, Ms. Susan!!!! There are scribbles on that book!” “Oh, no!” “Somebody scribbled on it?” “Why did they do that?” I valiantly continue: “Leonardo snuck up on the poor, unsuspecting boy. And the mon…”
“Oh, no! More scribbling!” “It’s blue!” “They scribbled some more?” “‘Oh yeah?’ replied Leonardo. ‘Then why are you crying?’ ‘My big brother stole my action fig…’”
Collective groan: “Ohhhhhhhh, noooooo!” Sorry, Mo Willems. I feel this may not have been the most effective rendition of Leonardo the Terrible Monster ever. On the bright side, at storytime the week before, The Hello, Goodbye Window was a huge hit! So maybe next week will go more smoothly. One thing is certain: I will have checked every page of every book I am reading. posted by Susan at 3:52 pm | Comments (0) September 17, 2008 Biting my tongue
So far there’s only one drawback to being on the Geisel Award Committee. Mostly, it is great. You get to intensively study a particular area of children’s literature for a year, and how children interract with it. Fun stuff for someone like me. There is a drawback, though, and that is, when I get a really wretchedly awful horrible no excuse for its existence book that fits into the potential Geisel Award category, I can’t blog about it. Sad. posted by Susan at 8:20 pm | Comments (0) August 14, 2008 A small community with a great libraryEvery summer, we go off to the north woods of Michigan for a couple of weeks of reading, eating blueberries and cherries, and hiking around. It is blissful, especially after six weeks of summer reading bedlam. But every once in awhile, you still need to check in with the world, and these days, that means email. We make a trek into the local public library and use their computers. The staff is warm and courteous, and never make us feel like vacationers shouldn’t be taking up their resources. It’s always a very pleasant trip to make. While in another even smaller community on the Lake Michigan shore on a short trip this year, we visited another library, just because librarians on vacation find it really hard to pass up peeking at a library. What a contrast it made! When you enter the building after climbing the stairs to get to the library, you are greeted with a sign saying, “Please do not leave donations of books. Our shelf space is very restricted.” Friendly! Those shelves? It’s like taking a trip into my childhood (and maybe my mom’s, too). Of course they have those Landmark and Childhood of Famous American books, as well as lots of old Bobbsey Twins and many other books the Baby Boomers remember fondly. But far worse were the nonfiction children’s shelves:  The 400s and 500s Oh my gosh! That Boys’ Book of Science and Construction was published in 1958, if I recall correctly. I especially liked the chapters on atomic science. Not every community has the money to support a great library, but come on…1958? So I was especially happy to get back to this wonderful library:  Grayling, Michigan's great library At this library, the first science shelf looks like this:  Beginning of the 500s I’m just so impressed because this is a beautiful, busy library in a community that is struggling with some economic issues and nothing like the wealth of the community with the library above. It’s a great resource to the kids and the adults as well, and even their out-of-town visitors. Kudos to you! posted by Susan at 4:25 pm | Comments (0) April 24, 2008 No Child Left Behind @ your library?I am back on my early literacy soapbox, thanks to the checklist someone passed to me of how library staff in one library system are being rated on their storytimes. The checklist is entirely based on Every Child Ready to Read standards. It includes things like: “Presenter makes connections between letters in children’s names and in alphabet book or book title”. Reading is important. Building reading skills is important. Getting young children ready to read using the six skills of early literacy is important. But the most important thing is story. Schools have to implement No Child Left Behind styles of teaching reading to get funded. But I think many of us in Youth Services would agree that focusing too much on the mechanics of reading is a huge mistake. Are we falling into that same trap in libraries? It’s the stories that count the most. Story is fundamental iin humankind–it’s why we pass them along for hundreds of years. It’s why we tell them to our children over and over. Stories help children become loving, connected, ethical human beings by what they tell about how people relate to each other. (Often the “people” are animals in picture books, but it means the same thing.) Stories are also how children can broaden their experience out of their own family into the whole big world out there of the past and the present and the potential future. I love building early literacy elements into the library space. And any good storytime provider is going to work the six early literacy skills into their story programs naturally, because books are made out of words and words are made out of letters and leading children into talking about the stories and predicting what’s going to happen are just the sorts of things you do while reading with children. But you have to start with good stories. In my Storytime for Big Kids program this week (ages 4-K) these kids, like so many others I have worked with over the years, were amazed and delighted by Keiko Kasza’s The Wolf’s Chicken Stew. I could have spent a lot of time talking about how the wolf was making 100 of each food to feed the chicken to fatten her up; we could have speculated on whether the foods were nutritious or discussed if one of the children in the room had a name that began with W, same as Wolf….but all of that would have sidetracked the surprise that makes children burst out laughing, when the Chicken introduces “Uncle Wolf” to the 100 chicks he’s been inadvertently feeding. It’s the story that counts. It’s the story that provides the foundation, and the phonological awareness, letter knowledge, print motivation and so on get swept in with that great belly laugh and the longing to read the story again and again. So please, put “Did the presenter use some great stories” on your storytime checklists. Otherwise, all we are providing is No Child Left Behind @ Your Library. posted by Susan at 12:58 pm | Comments (5) March 21, 2008 Library books are too scary!Last weekend, a mother asked me to help her find some books for her preschool daughter that might persuade her that all library books are not scary. She explained that for her daughter, any book where someone expressed fear, or there were surprises, or someone got angry, were all very stressful. Even beloved Mister Rogers was scary to this little girl on the days when he covered subjects like “What do you do with the mad that’s inside you? I tackled the subject enthusiastically, but a few shelves of books later I realized just how challenging the problem was for her. Almost all picture books have an arc to them, and most of the time, the peak of the book would be stressful to a very sensitive child. Think of how many books you’ve read where baby duck wanders away from mama duck, or where the curious dog goes out exploring and gets into trouble! For most children, it’s a good, healthy way to have a little tension that then gets resolved at the end. For this child, though, the stress of the library books became too much for her, and she began to refuse to read anything that came from the library. She was okay with her own books at home, because she knew them already. She knew they would come out happily, so she could bear the stressful middles. But library books are unknown. Beneath all those beautiful covers lurk lost, scared, worried, or angry characters! Adult readers, I think, sometimes worry too much about kids finding a book scary. But some of us go the other direction and worry too little about it. I realized in looking for safe, sweet books that most of the books I love to use in storytime would send this child screaming from the room–anything by William Steig, say, or Lilly spending time in the Uncooperative Chair once again. So this gave me something to ponder, and also a good idea for a new bibliography. Here are a couple I gave to the mom, if you ever need some happy, safe reading for yourself or for a child:
It sure isn’t easy, being a kid! posted by Susan at 11:41 am | Comments (1) January 17, 2008 I’m thrilled and I’m mad–this year’s ALA awards
I also loved all of the choices on the Caldecott Committee’s list, but being the stick-in-the-mud that I am, I didn’t agree that their top choice should have been on the list at all. It’s not exactly the committee’s fault. They just interpreted the criteria completely literally. There’s nothing in the criteria that says a picture book has to be, well, a picture book. But since it’s a literary award given out by the American Library Association, I think they need to interpret picture book more narrowly to include the criteria that a picture book is a book that is shelved in the picture book section. Nobody would call The Invention of Hugo Cabret a picture book, except someone using the Caldecott criteria. Now the door has been opened for that award to be interpreted much more broadly. It has always been for up to age 14, and I have no quarrel with that. But it will bring in graphic novels of all kinds, and so very disparate forms will be vying for the same award. We need a new award to cover the newer forms, and let the Caldecott be for picture books as we interpret it in the real world as it has always been. Did I mention that Hugo Cabret is one of my very favorite books of the year? Because it is! posted by Susan at 1:24 pm | Comments (0) December 7, 2007 Will Hugo Cabret lead to a new book award?
I think everyone at the table agreed that Hugo is a magnificent book, and fits the bill for the Newbery in being “distinguished”. Here’s the question: Does the book work well enough through the writing alone to merit the Newbery? And here’s the other question: Are we living in a time when it will become necessary through all of the new ways of looking at the world and at literacy to revise the Newbery criteria to fit the whole package? And here’s one more question: Would it be better to come up with an award that could encompass works that are both visual and verbal, and may also include other formats as well? And if so, who would sponsor that award? Would ALSC and YALSA each want their own version of it? I would maintain that according to the Newbery criteria as they currently stand, Hugo relies too much on the illustration to fit the bill. Too much of what I know about Hugo himself, about the setting, and too much of the pacing come through those pictures for the award for writing to go to that book. It fits the Caldecott even less, because as far as I’m concerned, any book that would not be shelved in the picture book section should not win the Caldecott medal. So that means that one of the year’s best books winds up slipping through the cracks completely for the major ALA awards. Too young for the Printz, too many pictures for the Newbery, not a picture book for the Caldecott. I guess I’m in favor of revising the criteria of both the Newbery and Caldecott to better encompass the books of the future. Otherwise, the Newbery medal may come to be associated not just with books that don’t especially appeal to kids (a longstanding issue) but also with books that are old-fashioned. We don’t need a new award–we need a new way of looking at the Newbery. posted by Susan at 4:32 pm | Comments (1) November 19, 2007 The snowflake bidding begins!Did your favorite picture book artist create a snowflake to buy this year? The first auction begins today, so come spend a few pleasant minutes browsing through the creative work of these artists, and find one to bid on!  Auction 1 will begin accepting bids on Monday, Nov. 19 at 9:00 a.m. with a starting bid of $50 for each snowflake. All bids must be placed before the close of Auction 1 on Friday, Nov. 23 at 5:00 p.m. Don’t forget that 100 percent of the proceeds from this online auction will benefit sarcoma research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and that all but $25 of the winning bid is tax deductible.
Read about all the illustrators who contributed to this auction at the sites linked below. (The order presented is the same as on the auction page.)
posted by Susan at 7:41 am | Comments (0) Next Page »
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