children’s literature
-
Home, Even in the Most Dangerous of Times and Places
For the Guardian, Julia Eccleshare explores why homelessness is rarely represented in children’s literature. What she finds is that novels for young readers tend to capitalize on the idea of “home” as a place of “fundamental security,” a theme that young readers…
-
New Frontiers in Childrens’ Lit
“When we are born, a doctor or midwife calls us boy or girl. But that’s based on our outside, our cover, and who they think we are,” Silverberg writes. “What about who we think we are?” A new book aims…
-
Internet Content Mills Have Nothing on the Hardy Boys
Even after eighty years of publication, Simon & Schuster is still putting out several Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew titles each year, thanks to ghostwriters and an assembly-line-like process: Book packagers are a kind of outsourced labor, not unlike factories in…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Matthew Baker
“Master fictioneer” Matthew Baker talks about his new middle grade novel, If You Find This, artists as tricksters, his favorite comic strips, and why children are still capable of believing in impossible things.
-
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…
-
Conversations with Literary Ex-Cons: Jack Gantos
Jack Gantos discusses the sense of “delusional invincibility” he had in 1970s New York that led him to prison—and then on to a career as an award-winning children’s book author.
-
The Rumpus Interview with Tomi Ungerer
Writer and illustrator Tomi Ungerer discusses his exile in Ireland, being a target of censorship, and his work’s recent resurgence of popularity in the US.
-
The Tale of Beatrix Potter
At the Public Domain Review, Frank Delaney takes a look at the life of Beatrix Potter and the people, places, and rabbits that inspired her work.
-
Goodnight Structure, Goodnight Narrative Form
The classic children’s book Goodnight Moon is a model example of successful narrative structure, argues Aimee Bender in the New York Times. The story follows enough traditional patterns to be satisfying, but also deviates in new and unique ways: “Goodnight…
-
The Jewish Little House on the Prairie
Sydney Taylor’s beloved children’s classic All-of-a-Kind Family is being resurrected by Lizzie Skurnick books. The series of books follows the lives of a Jewish family of four girls and their brother living in pre-WWI New York. These are not only…
-
Buy the Books
The lack of people of color in children’s book is stifling, but what’s even scarier is a generational staying of the trend. Kathleen Horning examines this stagnancy for the School Library Journal: If we want to see change, if we…