children’s lit
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Vast Questions About Our Humanity
Alexis Deacon and Vivian Schawrz’s ” groundbreaking philosophy book for toddlers,” I Am Henry Finch, just won the 2016 Little Rebels Children’s Book Award. The award recognizes children’s books that address social justice and equality for youth: Their picture book is about a…
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Fight Club, Now G-Rated
How do you share your favorite books with your kids when those books aren’t quite G-rated? Over at Mashable, Chuck Palahniuk performs a reading from his nonexistent book, Fight Club 4 Kids.
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Too Many Skirts and Dresses
There are a number of picture books with strong girl protagonists, however the majority of them are drawn in skirts and dresses. At the Guardian, Julia Eccleshare calls for more children’s books with “girls in trousers,” in order to campaign against this…
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Intergenerational Cycle of Crap
Gabriel Roth has some hard truths about The Poky Little Puppy, and he’s not wrong. Millions of people enjoyed The Poky Little Puppy as children, because it was cheap and because, being children, they had no standards. They grew up to be…
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Finally, a Seuss Museum
The world’s first museum dedicated to the life and work of Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, is set to open in his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts as soon as 2016. The venture will be a welcome addition to the museum…
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Diverse Books by the Numbers
Over at FiveThirtyEight, Amy Rothschild explores the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, and the many strategies advocates are using to make a lasting change in the landscape of children’s literature. While 2014 showed a hopeful bump in books penned by and depicting people…
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Why Matilda Got Her Measles Shot
Since much of the rhetoric around recent outbreaks of the measles revolves around concern for the well-being of children, perhaps the strongest advocate to answer our concerns is a beloved author of children’s literature. The Guardian shares an emotional letter…
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Goodbye Chestnut, Hello Chatrooms
The Oxford Junior Dictionary takes the forefront this week in the debate over the pedagogy of reference books, as 28 authors join a public campaign to reverse changes that have ousted entries from the natural world in favor of those…
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A Girl’s Guide to Activism
A seven-year-old in California scored a big win for the little guy (or, in this case, the little girl) by convincing Abdo Publishing to stop marketing their Biggest, Baddest Book of Bugs exclusively to boys. Young reader Parker Dains took…
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Modiano the Next Roald Dahl?
For the Guardian, Alison Flood reports that a British publisher has purchased a translation of Patrick Modiano’s only children’s book. The news comes after the author’s Nobel Prize piqued the interest of English readers worldwide.
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The Last Book I Loved: Krabat
1982 was a shitty year. I was 9 years old and in the 4th grade in Appleton, Wisconsin. My parents were going through a nasty divorce, the kind of thing you see on Jerry Springer.
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Book With No Pictures
After publishing a collection of short stories earlier this year, B.J. Novak has just released his first book for children, Book With No Pictures. The title is pretty self-explanatory—as an interview with Novak in the Atlantic puts it, instead of traditional pictures,…