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February 5, 2009

In The News
In Brief
In the Media
Mark Your Calendar


More News
Moving On Up
Q&A
New in ShelfTalker


Book News
Obituaries
Featured Reviews
On Sale Calendar
   
In the News

CPSIA Stay Provides Relief But Not Reform
In New York City’s Garment District on
Tuesday, 1000 manufacturers and workers
rallied in protest of the CPSIA.

Last Friday’s one-year stay of enforcement of the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act of 2008 has caused many in the publishing industry to breathe a sigh of relief. Even with only about a week left until the testing and certification provisions of the Act were to kick in, many publishers were still struggling to figure out how to comply without costs becoming dangerously high.

The stay gives them another year to put a testing and certification system in place. It also gives the Consumer Product Safety Commission time to provide more guidance on how publishers and other manufacturers of products for children should comply with the confusing law—such as whether printers’ assurances that components and materials are safe is adequate or whether finished products need to be tested—and to study whether certain products, including most traditional books, should be exempted completely because evidence overwhelmingly shows they’re safe.  
More News

Los Angeles Conference Focuses on Children’s Holocaust Literature
Panelists Hamida Bosmajian
and Eric Sundquist, at
last weekend’s conference.

"The truth of the Holocaust shatters the idea that the world is a trustworthy place and that we’re here to protect children. When it comes to literature, we must first tell the truth to the age of the child," said Sinai Temple librarian Lisa Silverman in her opening remarks on Sunday, February 1, at the Jewish Literature for Children Western Conference in Los Angeles.

Sponsored by several Jewish organizations and libraries in Southern California, the conference drew 77 teachers, writers and librarians to the Wiesenthal Center for a full day of panels and small group discussions about a variety of issues dealing with Jewish children’s literature.   
Book News

Still Hungry After All These Years

Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar turns 40 this spring, and Philomel is commemorating its birthday with the first-ever pop-up edition of this international bestseller. Penguin Young Readers Group is gearing up for an anniversary celebration touting this title—and its earnest little protagonist. But before taking a look at what’s ahead, here’s a glance back at how Carle, whose 80th birthday is June 25, got his book publishing start and came to create this tale of hope and metamorphosis.

One day Ann Beneduce, who became editor-in-chief of children’s books at World Publishing in 1964, received a brochure featuring the work of an advertising artist named Eric Carle, who was interested in breaking into children’s book illustration. "I loved the art and knew we wanted him to do something for us," recalls Beneduce, now a consultant, who assigned Carle to create the art for Lila Perl’s Red-Flannel Hash and Shoo-Fly Pie. What the illustrator turned in, she says, "was so much better than anything we could have imagined."  
In Brief
When Stephenie Meyer Speaks...
Call it the Meyer Effect. Last week, Stephenie Meyer recommended a first novel, The Girl Who Could Fly by Victoria Forester (Feiwel and Friends, 2008) on her Web site, and the book has since shot up the sales rankings on Amazon and B&N.com. So what did Meyer say about the book? “It’s the oddest/sweetest mix of Little House on the Prairie and X-Men. I was smiling the whole time (except for the part where I cried).... Prepare to have your heart warmed.” F&F publisher Jean Feiwel called the plug “a stroke of luck,” saying, “You hope something will happen for that debut author you really believe in. But it’s hard these days to make that book stand out in all the noise.” The company went back to press immediately for 10,000 copies.
Author Makes Brief Appearance
Children’s books and authors were a visible part of the ABA Winter Institute, held last weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah. In one instance, very visible. Pictured here at the author reception are Candlewick president and publisher Karen Lotz and first-time children’s author and screenwriter Don Calame, author of Swim the Fly (Apr.). At a dinner following the reception, Calame spoke about the inspiration for his novel, when he was forced to swim the 100-yard butterfly at age 15. While Calame talked, he stripped down to a navy blue Speedo, which definitely got booksellers’ attention. (Sorry, no photo.)

Reading the Tea Leaves
To celebrate Laura Schaefer’s tween novel The Teashop Girls (S&S/Wiseman), Butterfly Books and Literacy Center in DePere, Wis., partnered with Teaosity, a tea shop in Green Bay, to host a "Tea with Me" event for mothers, daughters and lovers of tea last week. Here, Schaefer (second from r.) raises a cup with bookstore customers. The event heralded another nice piece of news: it was meant to be one of the store’s last events—Mark Wilson, who owns Butterfly with his wife Barbara, was transferred to Utah and they had intended to close at the end of January, after 18 years—but a local couple has just stepped in to buy the store.

Big Win in Japan
Last week, Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit (Scholastic/Levine) won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for outstanding children’s books translated into English and sold in the U.S. Earlier this week, translator Cathy Hirano (l.) and author Nahoko Uehashi (r.) met at the offices of Kaisei-Sha, Uehashi’s Japanese publisher, to celebrate with a bit of cake. Guardian of the Spirit tells the story of a spear-wielding warrior named Balsa, who is entrusted with the care of a young prince whose life is in danger. A second book, Moribito II: Guardian of the Darkness, is due from Scholastic in May.
Q&A
Virginia Euwer Wolff
Bookshelf spoke with Virginia Euwer Wolff about her new novel, This Full House (HarperTeen, Feb.).
Coming from rural Oregon, how did you come up with the idea to write a series of novels about inner-city girls struggling for better lives?
It’s true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family’s orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though. Right after college I moved to New York City, and all of a sudden, I was hit with new sights, sounds and smells—crowds of people, all speaking different languages. The impact was tremendous.

read more
Featured Reviews

The Enemy: A Book About Peace
Davide Cali, illustrated by Serge Bloch. Random/Schwartz & Wade, $15.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-375-84500-0
In identical foxholes, two identical soldiers in khaki uniforms wait to destroy each other. "Every morning, I shoot at him. Then he shoots at me,"says one. When he and his enemy both light fires or suffer in the rain, the speaker does not consider their shared hunger and misery. Instead, he consults a manual with a blood-red cover that pits him against "a wild beast... not a human being."When he desperately disguises himself as a shrub to ambush his foe, observant readers notice that a passing "lion"is his equally tired rival, going AWOL. Cali and Bloch (previously paired for I Can’t Wait) establish an absurd waiting game worthy of Beckett. Bloch pairs pen-and-ink cartoons with collage elements like family photos, and gives readers a bird’s-eye view from which to observe the men’s similarities. Kids will not fail to grasp the point. Ages 4–8. (Apr.)

The Forest of Hands and Teeth
Carrie Ryan. Delacorte, $17.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-385-90631-9
Mary’s village has been trapped for generations by a very near, very visible menace: the Unconsecrated—insatiable, flesh-eating zombies that constantly tear at the village’s fences. Yet the Sisterhood—a conventlike order of religious women charged to protect the village’s survival—is as much responsible for the submission of Mary’s village as the Unconsecrated. When the fences are breached and the village overrun, Mary and several others escape through gated paths and arrive deep into the Forest of Hands and Teeth, forced to search beyond it for their future. Mary’s observant, careful narration pulls readers into a bleak but gripping story of survival and the endless capacity of humanity to persevere. That Mary maintains emotional distance serves to render her yearnings and romantic feelings even more poignant and powerful. Fresh and riveting. Ages 14–up. (Mar.)

Reviews from the February 2 issue of Publishers Weekly.

see all of this week's reviews
including our web exclusive Annex *
On-Sale Calendar

March
  1 All in a Day by Cynthia Rylant, illus. by Nikki McClure (Abrams, $17.95; ISBN 978-0-8109-8321-2). 100,000 copies. Goosebumps HorrorLand #8: Say Cheese—And Die Screaming! by R.L. Stine (Scholastic, paper $5.99; ISBN 978-0-439-91876-3). 100,000 copies. Mama’s Right Here by Liza Baker, illus. by David McPhail (Scholastic/Cartwheel, $8.99; ISBN 978-0-545-10043-4). 100,000 copies.
 
  3 The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket, illus. by Carson Ellis (HarperCollins, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-06-123627-3). 150,000 copies.
The Way of the Warrior by Chris Bradford (Disney-Hyperion, $16.99; ISBN 978-1-4231-1871-8). 100,000 copies.
 
  5 Ladybug Girl and Bumblebee Boy by Jacky Davis and David Soman, illus. by Soman (Dial, $16.99; ISBN 978-0-8037-3339-8). 100,000 copies.
 
  10 Hannah Montana: The Movie Storybook (Disney Press, $8.99; ISBN 978-1-4231-1817-6). 125,000 copies. The Very Hungry Caterpillar Pop-up by Eric Carle (Philomel, $29.99; ISBN 978-0-399-25039-2). 100,000 copies. Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls (Book Three): Best Friends and Drama Queens by Meg Cabot (Scholastic Press, $15.99; ISBN 978-0-545-04043-3). 100,000 copies.
 
  19 Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson (Viking, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-670-01110-0). 125,000 copies.
 
  24 Magic Tree House #41: Moonlight on the Magic Flute by Mary Pope Osborne, illus. by Sal Murdocca (Random, $11.99; ISBN 978-0-375-85646-4). 500,000 copies. ABC Disney: Anniversary Edition by Robert Sabuda (Disney Press, $22.99; ISBN 978-1-4231-0930-3). 100,000 copies. Too Many Cats by Lori Haskins Houran, illus. by Joe Mathieu (Random, paper $3.99; ISBN 978-0-375-85197-1). 100,000 copies. Fablehaven, Vol. 4: Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary by Brandon Mull (Shadow Mountain, $19.95; ISBN 978-1-60641-042-4). 100,000 copies. City of Glass by Cassandra Clare (S&S/McElderry,$17.99; ISBN 978-1-4169-1430-3). 100,000 copies.
 
  31 Fancy Nancy: Explorer Extraordinaire! by Jane O’Connor, illus. by Robin Preiss Glasser (HarperCollins, $12.99; ISBN 978-0-06-168486-9). 200,000 copies. Fancy Nancy: The Dazzling Book Report by Jane O’Connor, illus. by Robin Preiss Glasser (HarperTrophy, paper $3.99; ISBN 978-0-06-170368-3). 175,000 copies.
Click here for PW's complete
2009 On-Sale Calendar
  
Moving On Up

Dangerous gossip, star-crossed lovers, backstabbing friends, a notorious cad, an upstairs-downstairs romance. All are woven into Anna Godbersen’s The Luxe, set in 1899 Manhattan, which HarperCollins published in 2007. This saga of high-society life in a less-than-innocent age continued in 2008 with Rumors, and Envy, the third installment, went on sale January 27. Graced with cover art featuring a close-up image of a beautiful young woman in a billowing rococo ball gown, the books have obviously caught the eye of the teen audience: the sales tally for the series is now at 300,000 copies.

And it has some sales momentum, too: first-week sales for Envy were 40% higher than first-week sales for Rumors and 90% higher than those for The Luxe. "It’s been an amazing run from the start," says Cristina Gilbert, senior director of marketing for HarperCollins Children’s Books. "Word of mouth has been huge for these books, and we have provided tools to help pass that word on."
read more
Obituaries

Blair Lent
Blair Lent, who illustrated many books for children over his long career, died on January 27 at the age of 79. He won the Caldecott Medal in 1973, for The Funny Little Woman, and also won three Caldecott Honors. Lent was perhaps best known for his illustrations for Tikki Tikki Tembo, a Chinese folktale retold by Arlene Mosel and published in 1968. See more here.
In the Media


From The Bookseller: Business is expected to be slower at this year’s Bologna Book Fair.


From The Colbert Report: On Wednesday night’s show, host Stephen Colbert complained that he hasn’t won a major award recently, including the Newbery.


From the Christian Science Monitor: President and Mrs. Obama visited a second-grade class in Washington earlier this week, and read aloud The Moon Over Star, a recent Dial picture book.


From USA Today: It’s cooler than ever to be a tween these days, but is an important part of childhood being lost?


From School Library Journal: SLJ tackles the thorny issue of self-censorship in libraries.


From author John Green’s blog: Green contends that teenagers actually like many of the ambitious and sophisticated YA novels that some adults presume they won’t.


From the New York Times Magazine: What are kids learning to read, when they are reading online?


From The Daily Beast: Neil Gaiman talks about the movie version of his novel Coraline, which appears in theaters this Friday.


From Booklist: Andrea Davis Pinkney writes that the Coretta Scott King Award is “40 and Fabulous.”
Mark Your Calendar


The New School in New York City is hosting a series of forums on writing for children, hosted by editor Deborah Brodie. The next forum, on the topic of getting published, takes place Tuesday, February 10 from 6:30–7:30 p.m. and features Kate McMullan, author of many books for young readers, including I Stink!, the Myth-O-Mania series and the Dragon Slayers’ Academy. Tickets cost $5 and can be ordered from the New School by calling 212-229-5488. For more information about the series, call 212-229-5611.
New in ShelfTalker


Alison brings readers along as she figures out how many books to order for an author event (experience helps, but it’s no exact science!), suggests some book art to buy for your Valentine, and goes "hog wild"for some good books. Click here to read all of her latest posts.
 
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