Good News & Reviews for Stephanie Barden!

Woohoo & Good news for Stephanie Barden! There's lovely write up in the latest issue of Notes from the Horn Book for Stephanie's new book CINDERELLA SMITH (in the Chapter Books for Young Readers section). Here's what they have to say:

The eponymous main character of Cinderella Smith by Stephanie Barden is a bouncy, entertainingly dramatic (she says, “Alas” a lot) young girl with a penchant for losing shoes—here, a special ruby-red tap shoe that she needs to play the Pumpkin Blossom Fairy in her dance recital. If she can’t find the shoe, it’s so long, solo. Cinderella’s energy, captured expertly in illustrator Diane Goode’s emotive line drawings, is infectious; readers will delight in her expressions (e.g., dribbly-spit for Seattle drizzle) and enthusiastic use of adverbs and will look forward to Cinderella’s next appearance.

You can check out the latest issue here (and a big thanks to Wendy Wahman for sending the link).

Leslie Patricelli accepts Horn Book award

Some of us were lucky enough to know Leslie when she lived in Seattle. Here, she accepts an award for HIGHER! HIGHER!



(E-mail subscribers, you'll have to click through to watch the video.)

National awards: a big, fat list

Not all the categories are up to date, but this Horn Book list of national awards for authors and illustrators is a quick way to keep tabs on the best stuff in our field. Next time you can't think of what to read next, go there.

Richard Peck fans: check out his Horn Book interview

Notes from the Horn Book offers this five-question interview with the great Richard Peck. Here's a tease:

Season of Gifts is Richard Peck’s third novel about Grandma Dowdel; she appeared first in A Long Way from Chicago, a Newbery Honor Book in 1999, and again in A Year Down Yonder, which won the 2001 Newbery Medal. Peck’s numerous other honors include the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, and the National Humanities Medal. Raised in downstate Illinois but a longtime resident of Manhattan, Peck, an inveterate traveler, was packing for the Riviera when I caught up with him on a recent Monday morning.

1. Grandma Dowdel is only the most recent of your great ladies. Who was your great lady?
Grandma Dowdel is my humble homage to all my long-vanished great-aunts: Midwestern farmwomen in Lane Bryant dresses who ruled the universe from black-iron stoves in kitchens hot enough to steam the calendars off the walls. They left the small boy I was in no doubt about who ruled. And now I want to bring them back in the looming person of Grandma Dowdel for a young generation who may barely know one adult from another.

Read the rest...

Karla Kuskin on reviewing children's books

In a vintage Horn Book piece, Karla writes something quite lovely, something we can all aspire to when we're writing picture books:

Like poetry, a picture book has to be written in two ways. It must work when read aloud, and also when read silently to oneself. Every syllable counts. Most important, the well-chosen words need to be simple but never simplistic, clear and strong enough to interest a child and hold her attention. Style alone is not sufficient. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature he announced that there were "five hundred reasons why I . . . write for children." One was that, "they still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity . . . " Another was: "They love interesting stories." Short, interesting stories are the structural steel that supports the illustrations in picture books. Look up "illustrate" in a Webster's Unabridged. The root is illustrare. And among the definitions are "to light up, illuminate, embellish, shed light upon, to throw the light of intelligence upon, to make clear, to elucidate by means of a drawing or pictures." And all that is just what wonderful illustrations do, and have done ever since books were first illuminated in medieval times by talented, cloistered hands.

Read the rest here.