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Children's Book Reviews: Week of 1/12/2009
Picture Books My Brother Bert Ted Hughes , illus. by Tracey Campbell Pearson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux , $16.95 (40p) ISBN 978-0-374-39982-5 Pearson provides a suitably sunny setting for this light verse by the late acclaimed British poet, about a boy, Bert, who can't say no to any exotic pet. Among those hidden in his bedroom are a gorilla, a lion, pangolins (a kind of anteater) and R...
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Safety Act Catches Publishers Off Guard
The children's book industry is currently dealing with a new and pressing challenge that is threatening publishers, bookstores, libraries and schools. It's not the economy or school spending or reading rates—it is a recent act of Congress, which has blindsided the industry with the implementation of stiff safety standards on all children's products, and whose application to books is vague.
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Industry Scrambling to Comply with Child Safety Act
A new government regulation that requires testing of all products aimed at children 12 and under is causing headaches for publishers, booksellers and manufacturers. Books, audiobooks and sidelines fall under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which is set to go into effect Feb. 10; industry organizations are attempting to get books excluded from the Act, even as they work to understand just what the rules could mean for all parties involved.
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Holiday Rebound: Children’s Sales Pick Up in December
Children’s books proved to be one of the most recession-resistant segments of the book business this holiday season, with the Twilight series and the latest from J.K. Rowling leading the pack.
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Stone Arch, DC Comics Ink Kids’ Book Pact
Stone Arch Books has reached an agreement with DC Comics to produce a series of illustrated chapter books based on DC Comics heroes.
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Comics in the Classroom
Long ghettoized—even demonized—in North America as puerile and pulpy, both “comic books” (traditional comics periodicals) and book-format graphic novels are now being used in both k—12 and higher education classrooms as everything from early developmental reading tools to serious literary texts.
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Movie Alert: Inkheart
On the heels of Harry Potter, Eragon and The City of Ember, another popular children’s fantasy series is ready to jump to the big screen. On January 23, New Line Cinema will release Inkheart, based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Cornelia Funke.
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Children's Book Reviews
Picture Books Blueberry Girl Neil Gaiman , illus. by Charles Vess. HarperCollins , $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-06-083808-9 In a magical blessing for unconventional girls, Gaiman (The Graveyard Book) addresses the “ladies of light and ladies of darkness and ladies of never-you-mind,” asking them to shelter and guide an infant girl as she grows.
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Discovered! More Self-Publishers Hit the Big Time
When it comes to self-publishing success stories, children's books have had their share. Christopher Paolini's Eragon was originally self-published by the then-teenage author's family; the book and its sequels are now huge bestsellers for Knopf. And Michael Stadther's self-published novel/treasure hunt, A Treasure's Trove, which offered $1 million in prizes to those who solved its riddles, rode...
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Licensing Hotline: December 2008
Penguin’s Grosset & Dunlap imprint in the U.S. and Puffin in the U.K. will release books tied to Tinga Tinga Tales, a TV series animated by Tanzanian artists and based on traditional Tanzanian art, in spring 2010.
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Q& A with Tony Abbott
Since 1994, Connecticut author Tony Abbott has published more than 70 books for young readers. These include standalone hardcover novels Kringle, Firegirl and The Postcard, as well as a handful of paperback series, among them The Secrets of Droon, which has sold more than 10 million copies. His new paperback series with Scholastic, The Haunting of Derek Stone, debuts with City of the Dead.
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North-South Ushers in the Year of the Little Polar Bear
Lars, also known as Hans de Beer’s ever-friendly Little Polar Bear returns next month in his ninth adventure, Little Polar Bear and the Whales. This character’s popularity and the new book’s timely environmental warning—chunks of ice from a melting glacier block a pod of whales’ passage from the bay to the sea—inspired the publisher to name 2009 “The Year of the Little Polar Bear.” And North-South Books has some celebratory plans in place.
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Chorion: Managing the Brand
When Jon Scieszka and his editor at Simon & Schuster, Justin Chanda, first discussed the idea for Scieszka's preschool boys' brand, Trucktown, it included not only 52 books, but online games, social networking, toys and entertainment. “All this stuff was really crucial to the whole concept of Trucktown,” Sciescka said.
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Children's Book Reviews
Picture Books Tsunami! Kimiko Kajikawa , illus. by Ed Young. Philomel , $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-399-25006-4 An earthquake, a fire, a tidal wave and selfless heroism, all packed into 32 pages, guarantee that this story will hold the attention of even the most restless listeners. Four hundred villagers are saved from death when Ojiisan, a wealthy old rice farmer on the mountainside, feels trem...
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More (and Better) Books for Black Teens
Talk to a YA editor or take a stroll through that section at your local bookstore and it's evident that there's a growing number of books aimed at the young adult market—and those numbers include more titles geared specifically to African-American teens. As publishers are addressing the lack of material aimed at this market—many African-American teens have turned to popular adult au...
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The 'Clues' Keep On Coming
Scholastic’s multimedia The 39 Clues series continued to grow this week, with the second book, One False Note by Gordon Korman, going on sale in the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The first book was The Maze of Bones by Rick Riordan. One million copies of that title are now in print worldwide, along with an additional 500,000 trading card packs. One False Note landed with a 500,000-copy first printing.
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Princess Diaries Take a Final Bow
Princess Mia Thermopolis will don her tiara for the last time in Forever Princess, the 10th and crowning installment of Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries series. Turned down by 12 houses before finding a home in 1999, the inaugural novel, The Princess Diaries launched one of the first commercial, girl-oriented series that have been so successful in the young adult market during the last decade
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Q & A with Jonathan Stroud
Jonathan Stroud burst on the YA scene back in 2003 with The Amulet of Samarkand, the first book in his bestselling Bartimaeus Trilogy. Disney-Hyperion will publish Heroes of the Valley, Stroud’s first novel since the Bartimaeus Trilogy. Children's Bookshelf spoke to Stroud from his home in England.
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Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw
Greg Heffley may be the “Wimpy Kid,” but his series keeps going strong. On January 13, Abrams’s Amulet imprint will release The Last Straw by Jeff Kinney, the third storybook in the series that has staked out a claim on bestseller charts since its 2007 debut. In The Last Straw, which lands with a million-copy first printing, Greg’s father attempts to toughen up his son.
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December Comics Bestsellers
Jeff Kinney’s Rodrick Rules continues to top the list; followed by DC’s Azzarello/Bermejo Joker at #2; Stephen King’s The Long Road Home returns, this time at #5 and Jim Butcher’s Welcome to Jungle (this week at #9) is on the list for the second month in a row.
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