NSLS Blogs

 Home » Blogs » Something Different Every Day

Something Different Every Day / Reviewing

January 17, 2008

I'm thrilled and I'm mad--this year's ALA awards

I couldn't be more thrilled by the Newbery Committee's picks, esp. giving the top honor to the wonderful Laura Amy Schlitz's unconventional book Good Masters, Sweet Ladies: Voices from a Medieval Village. I thought her book A Drowned Maiden's Tale was overlooked last year, but she sure wasn't overlooked this one! Bravo to the Newbery Committee and all of their choices.

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?

After a vigorous discussion of Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret at NSLS this morning, I came away with the strong feeling that we are on the verge of a change. As most of you know, Hugo Cabret is told both through Selznick's evocative pencil illustrations and through his text--without one of those, you don't have the whole story. One person brought along the audiobook version of Hugo, and explained that in place of the pictures, it uses sound effects--where a picture might show Hugo walking, the audio version uses the sound of feet walking along. So, while the beauty of the pictures isn't there, some of the information being conveyed is.

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 1, 2007

Does the Caldecott go to male illustrators?

For a energetic discussion of whether it's worthy of note that the Caldecott Medal very often goes to male illustrators, take a look at Roger Sutton's blog, and take the time to read through the (now) 43 comments. It's quite fascinating.

Posted by susan at 9:01 AM | Comments (0)

September 1, 2007

Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed!

Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and purchase something putrid. If you as a librarian live by the oft-quoted phrase "A good library should have something to offend everyone," then sometimes you have to buy things that you find offensive. We purchased Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! at a patron's request, and I'd like to heartily encourage other libraries to feel very free to ILL it rather than purchasing another copy. I couldn't find any reviews of it in the major journals, so I thought at least I would do the public service of reviewing it now.

DeBrecht, Katharine. Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! Illustrated by Jim Hummel. Kids Ahead/World Ahead Publishing, 2005.

A pair of brothers long for a swing set, but their parents insist that "having everything given to them would not make them feel good about themselves, and that earning things on their own would make them feel proud and become better people." Since in a happy coincidence they have a lemon tree growing in their yard, Tommy and Lou get the great idea of selling lemonade. They then fall asleep and dream that they live in a nightmarish world called "Liberaland". Their lemonade stand is initially a huge success, and they even begin putting money aside for kids with no shoes, but then a liberal comes along and takes half of their earnings in taxes and uses the money to buy dustpans for the children who need shoes. The boys are also forced to take down their picture of Jesus and replace it with a picture of a big toe, and after many other unreasonable changes are made to the stand, the liberals take it over altogether.

DeBrecht's clumsy writing style ("'Well,' the liberal's red cheeks smiled") reads like someone who hasn't read children's books thinks children's books sound. Hummel's cartoon illustrations, while better-executed, fall into the same trap with such clunky cliches as all of the children's signs using backward letter E's. Any witty moments are thoroughly mired in nastiness, and none of it makes sense anyway--who paid for the sugar in the lemonade? Who paid for the glasses? How could a lemon tree have "hundreds of lemons on each outstretched branch"? Dustpans? Sometimes random things aren't funny, they are just dumb.

But to be fair, the book is exactly what it attempts to be: A satire on liberals. It is unintentionally satirical at times as well, as in the portrait of Ronald Reagan in the boys' living room with his eyes gazing upward just like in many home portraits of Jesus. But make no mistake, this satire on liberals is very pointed, with many references to recognizable politicians such as Hilary Clinton (seen teetering on her high heels in a pink pantsuit) and Jimmy Carter. The author and illustrator apparently so despise Teddy Kennedy that they have put him in twice, physically as Mayor Leach but also as the senator from Taxachusetts. Adults of a conservative mindset will get several chuckles from this picture book, but they are its only likely audience.

Posted by susan at 9:04 AM | Comments (1)

July 18, 2007

Girl Books and Boy Books

It works like a charm: whenever there is a 7th/8th grade boy standing in front of our service desk asking for a book off of the Rebecca Caudill list to read, the only available book is

This year's Caudill list (Illinois' children's choice award) seems to be the most divided ever between books that appeal to girls, and books that appeal to boys, with not a lot appealing to both equally. It's an excellent list with lots of good choices in general, but still...how did they end up with so many books that fall squarely in one camp or the other?

My instinct is that it fits with the whole princess fad in general. Little girls can wear pink from head to toe, often with sparkles, and their books have begun taking on that appearance too. Princess Academy is relatively restrained. There is also a huge surge in books about fairies, as you may have noticed, and of course the very popular Emily Windsnap to appeal to mermaid fans.

Then on the other side, we have the whole Guys Read phenomenon, which generally is a great thing--we have a display in our library filled with sports and dragons and adventure books and raucous humor.

But in general, I'm a little queasy about the way book jackets are signaling so strongly that a book is intended for a girl audience or has boy appeal. I reviewed the new Sharon Creech book for Horn Book , and made my 17-year-old son burst out laughing when I jokingly handed it to him out of my bag when he had asked for his own book. Yet over half of the characters in that book are boys, and there's no reason at all for them to have given it a cover like this:

Do they feel that the only way a book will sell these days is if it appeals to one group or the other? There was some complaint this past year that all four of the Newbery choices were girl-centered, character-based books with nothing there to appeal to boys. Are the books becoming more divided, or is it the audience? Are we telling girls and boys that they should be reading different books?

Posted by susan at 4:24 PM | Comments (2)

May 22, 2007

Do you have time to read grown-up books?

I must confess that my reading lately is almost all limited to children's and YA books. I read more slowly now, and discussion groups keep highlighting great new books for kids and YAs and somehow, I only find time for grown-up books on vacations. Okay, I'll admit it: TiVo probably doesn't help.

But if I were to wear one of those buzz marketing buttons where you invite someone to ask what you're reading, I could say "Moby Dick," because that really is what I'm reading. In a convoluted sort of way, it is Roger Sutton's fault. Roger, editor of the children's review journal The Horn Book Magazine, posted on his so-wonderful-I-am-jealous blog this entry about a company that markets a text reader where the sentences are broken up into short increments. On the site, they have a demo you can try, so I did, and found myself immediately caught up in, of all things, Moby Dick!

I didn't find the reader all that helpful, but it did get me started. Since Melville's masterpiece is in the public domain, you can find the entire humongous novel online, and you know, it is not hard at all to read a chapter a day of anything, even a book you might as an English major have successfully avoided for decades. So, for your enjoyment, here it is: http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/moby/. You would be amazed at all of the classics you can find online--everything from Bleak House to the Aeneid.

So now, even with a TiVo filled to the brim, the Summer Reading Game looming on the horizon, and stacks of YA novels and children's books to read, I can say I'm reading Moby Dick. What are you reading?

Posted by susan at 4:08 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2007

I want to like graphic novels

When it comes to the new surge of children's publishing in the area of graphic novels and comics, I feel like I am living in the Flintstone's cave while the Jetsons are zooming around. It's not that I don't like pictures to play a significant role in storytelling--I love picture books! It's not that I don't like comics for kids--I read my share of Archie, Superman, and my favorite, the melancholy Batman.

I already know that manga and I can never be friends. I am too old to learn how to read a book backwards. But I'd really like to like graphic novels. So for my next review column in Reading Today, I decided to tackle the world of graphic novels. That way I'd read a few, and I knew I'd at least like some of them, and even if I didn't I figured that the teachers who make up the main audience for Reading Today probably felt about graphic novels pretty much the same way I do. Maybe we could all learn to like them.

So far, not much success. The new Marcia Williams version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is gorgeous, bawdy fun...but the teachers aren't going to like that bawdy part too much. Tiny Tyrant, translated from the French reads like the equivalent of 12 cartoon storyboards. It's a little funny, but not funny enough. Kids will love it; their teachers will not care for the guns, the explosions, the cartoon humor.

So far I've hit one that I loved--To Dance: A Ballerina's Graphic Novel. And of course Babymouse is great fun, while also being suspiciously pink and girl-oriented. Makes me wonder...is it graphic novels I don't like, or is it boy humor? I'll keep reading...

Posted by susan at 1:37 PM | Comments (4)

February 27, 2007

I am NOT a censor!

Is there any librarian out there who wouldn't say (and loudly), "I am NOT a censor!"? I encountered someone recently who claimed not to believe in censorship, and explained in the next sentence that she thought this year's Newbery winner did not belong in the children's department of public libraries. Her reasoning was that it was a young adult book, I guess because the s-word did not belong in a children's book. The main character is ten, and absolutely nothing happens that would be inappropriate in a children's book, so let me just put it out there: she's kidding herself. She wants to call it YA because that makes her feel better about not buying it. She is a censor.

But she's not the only one. I'll bet we routinely kid ourselves when we censor. For one thing, we always call it selection rather than censorship. Nobody can afford to buy everything, so part of what we are paid for is our professional expertise on which of the 4000+ books that will come out this year we will buy. Obviously we're going to pick up the book on a current topic that's gotten stars from the various review journals. Obviously we're NOT going to buy the book that's gotten lousy reviews and is overpriced to boot. But from there, the waters get a lot more murky. Maybe I'm not going to buy that book that got fantastic reviews but is on a subject that I can't imagine kids truly being nearly as interested in as the adult reviewers (Kurlansky's book about cod, say) and I think that's still clearly selection, though of course it is nudging a little closer to censorship because it's based on my opinion of what would interest kids. But let's say maybe it's a book with okay reviews on Britney Spears, and I feel that Britney, with her public meltdowns and her public appearances sans underwear, has become a poor role model for today's kids, so I decide not to buy that book. That, my librarian friends, is really close to censorship. That's not comfortable, though, so I might tell myself instead, "Oh, let's wait and see how Britney does after rehab and THEN buy something--this book will be out of date so quickly".

I think one of the best things about the whole Lucky debate has been the opportunity for each of us to take a good look in the mirror. Are you a censor? Sometimes, maybe, just a little?

Posted by susan at 4:20 PM | Comments (1)

January 3, 2007

The books--they sparkle!

Not the writing, sadly. The writing has included a good deal of 'meh,' a lot of 'seen it before,' and very little that sparkles. But what the books lack in ingenuity and polished prose, they make up for in glitter, and I mean that literally--it's one of the Trends of 2006.

Publishing houses are going to great lengths to catch our attention this year, so we have had book jackets with embossed lettering, shiny foil, cut-outs, and of course, glitter. They are pretty and eye-catching, but many of them aren't greatly improved by the addition of a necessary Mylar jacket for library circulation.

Another children's book trend this past year is the increase in the Everything and the Kitchen Sink book. You know the kind--there's the main story, and then there may be a whole second text in a different font aimed at a different audience. They may decide to add "value" to the book by writing one book to begin with, and then loading the back pages with lots of information which mostly doesn't correspond to the reading level of the first half of the book. Or, it may be a book about insects, but written in poetry, with a glossary at the back of each of the insects discussed, AND each of the poetic forms used. I am not making this up, by the way.

Another trend--the gatefold illustration. Publishers have decided that children's book buyers love illustrations with lots of flaps, and a big gatefold as a triumphant climax. Gatefolds can be very effective, if you're unfolding it to see the full span of the Brooklyn Bridge. But now I sometimes wonder if they are throwing them in to drive libraries crazy, because we all know that our patrons don't immediately realize that it's a folded page, and they rip them to shreds.

That's just a few of the year's trends in children's publishing--more to come!

Posted by susan at 4:32 PM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2006

Crossing my fingers for M.T. Anderson

The National Book Awards are announced tonight, and I am crossing my fingers that M.T. Anderson wins for his stunning historical novel The Astonishing Adventures of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume OneI: The Pox Party. It's an amazing book about slavery in the time of the American Revolution--heart-wrenching, poetic, beautiful, ghastly all at once.

Anderson shows such control and craftsmanship over his material, working in all sorts of historical details but never at the expense of character, and never in that way historical writers so often do where the research shows through the fiction. It is seamless, and it will break your heart.

I can't think of another writer with the range Anderson has. He was nominated previously for the NBA for his futuristic YA novel Feed, which has one of the all-time best first lines and a theme that is becoming ever more frighteningly real. He's also the author of the hilarious Whales on Stilts, a satire on series fiction for kids, and a picture book biography, Handel, Who Knew What He Liked. And that's just some of his published work!

I fully expect him to eventually win the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his body of work, but for now, I will be delighted if he comes away tonight with a National Book Award!

Edited to add: Hooray! Hooray!

Posted by susan at 10:10 AM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2006

Librarians who can't count

Or, My Top Ten--Whoops, Make That Eleven--Favorite Books of 2006

My editor at Reading Today, John Micklos, gently informed me this morning that the Top Ten Favorites list that I whittled down for so long actually has eleven titles on it. How mortifying! How ridiculous! How painful to have to cut another title off that list! Farewell to Uri Shulevitz's lyrical So Sleepy Story.

It reminds me of another stellar moment in my library career, when back at the Chicago Public Library I wanted to order a popular sex education book, but at the last minute decided that I wanted to order two copies instead of one. That was the bad ol' days of typed order forms and carbon copies, so I typed the 2 beside the 1, intending to white out the 1. Alas, I forgot, and was shocked and dismayed to see on the next order report that in fact I had purchased 12 copies. Fortunately, the regional library kindly took 10 of them off my hands, but it just goes to show that there is a good reason I am a librarian and not an accountant.

Posted by susan at 8:53 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2006

A good old-fashioned book

Boy, I am finding as a new blogger that the problem is that one week you have no ideas and then suddenly you have six! So now I have found some things to talk about but I'm going to dole them out.

In looking for books to put on my best of the year list for Reading Today, I came across a new picture book...new, and yet it could easily have been written forty years ago. Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen features a library with a card catalog--literally, not the computer one that people still call the card catalog. There's a computer at the circulation desk, and a computer on the head librarian's desk, but this lady with her hair in a bun and glasses and sensible flat shoes is from another era.

I would expect to be fairly offended by this old-fashioned portrayal of a library and especially of the librarian--she lectures about rules and says repeatedly, "No running!" And yet it's an irresistible book, which begins with a magnificent lion walking into the library and liking it so much that he sticks around for storytime, and roars his disappointment when the stories are over: "RAAHHRRRRR!

The look of the book is also very old-fashioned. There isn't a speck of gold on the cover. Nothing is embossed, no holes are cut into the pages, and there isn't a huge gatefold anywhere in sight. There's just thick, cream-colored paper with a touching story and acrylic and pencil artwork by Kevin Hawkes with just the right amount of detail. Gatefolds aren't necessary when the white space on the page is used so effectively, as in the last two pages where the picture extends over both pages and almost bursts off of the page to show a very happy reunion between a once-stuffy librarian and a lion.

What a treat to see publishers like Candlewick going back to making books with great stories and elegant, restrained design!

Posted by susan at 3:52 PM | Comments (0)

August 6, 2006

Only 4,000 published in a year

Since there are only @4,000 children's books published each year, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a list of my favorite books of the year...should it? Ever since beginning as a children's book reviewer in 1994, I've had the chance to vote for what I think are the best books of the year. But that was always working from a set list--books that had gotten starred reviews in the particular journal, say. It was still a ton of reading, but other people were voting too, and it never seemed too overwhelming.

This year is going to be different. For the first time, I'll be publishing (in the International Reading Association's newsletter Reading Today) my own list, side by side with their other reviewer's list. It's hard to even know where to start! Well, actually it's easy to know where to start--The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is where I'll start. It's knowing how to tackle the remaining 3,999+ books that's daunting.

Do they still teach speed-reading?

Posted by susan at 4:15 PM | Comments (0)

July 4, 2006

Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's not

Most of the time, I feel very privileged to be a reviewer of children's and young adult books. It used to be a little more fun back before the advent of the Advance Reader Copy, which are handed out very freely at conferences now, and look very much like the finished book complete with cover and blurbs on the back. Before then, you'd get a galley, usually with no more information on the cover than the title and the author's name. So you'd wade on in with no idea of what to expect, and every once in awhile you would come across something amazing--What Jamie Saw, or Out of the Dust. Nowadays, with ARC's everywhere, by the time you are holding something wonderful in your hands, chances are someone has already posted about it on a listserv. But still, most of the time reviewing is a lot of fun, even if not quite as adventuresome as before.

Every once in awhile, though, you hit a string of books that make you wonder how it is possible that publishers reject so many books and still manage to publish so many mediocre ones. The past few days I have gotten to the point of wishing I could boil my reviews down to a single phrase:

"Biography of a big jerk"
"Has first-time novel written all over it"
"Beautiful book design, no content"
"There's such a thing as being too affirming"
"Making the characters dinosaurs doesn't make it a dinosaur book"

But then you pick up the new Alice Walker picture book There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me, and you remember that it really is a privilege to be a children's book reviewer.

Posted by susan at 3:12 PM | Comments (0)