I mean, this is cool - this Kickstarter campaign for The Very Hungry Cthulhupillar. It's already fully funded, but for $25 you'll get the hardcover when it comes out. I don't know Eric Carle personally, but I have it on good authority that he has an excellent sense of humor... Ah, Cleveland. Sometimes Cleveland does the coolest things. I went to college in Cleveland, and there was always something experimental going on. I think it's a result of the stakes not being terribly high in that town - it doesn't cost a whole lot to, say, transform a few vacant... Continue reading

After three months of Blind Date With a Book, we've gotten pretty proficient at wrapping books in tissue paper. I did a little stop-motion video of the quickest method I've found to wrap a book, with the fewest folds. Also, Mariah Carey serenades you while you wrap: Continue reading

1. What useful information have you learned from the resource that you have been monitoring since week one? I subscribe to the email newsletters from Shelf Awareness, Booklist, First Edition, Early Word and the Library Journal prepress alerts, which tells you which books will be reviewed in the next issue.... Continue reading

I know it's a losing battle, keeping the place in some kind of tidy shape, and it's certainly not all the fault of my kids. The books, lord the books. But sometimes I am just in a GET IT ALL OUT OF HERE mood, and such is the mood that descended tonight. I haven't had the time to read hardly anything lately, so as we picked up books and shelved them or put them in the Back to the Library bag, I got Milo (11) and Ezra (nearly 10) to talk about the books they've read. Ezra: Battle Bunny is... Continue reading

This week's assignment is all about Goodreads. Oh sure, I am on Goodreads. I am reeeaalllly on Goodreads. I have 2782 books on Goodreads, including two I added just last night (Lucy Knisley's graphic novel food memoir Relish and For the Good of Mankind, an interesting upper-grade nonfiction book about... Continue reading

You might think, if you know me from reading Pink Me, that I am a children's or teen librarian. I'm not - at my system we are all generalists. So while I love fixing kids up with great books, the fact is I also enjoy helping grownups. I spend most of my time drumming up copies of just the right David Baldacci, or helping readers find Amish romance novels and car repair manuals. Which, um... Amish romance novels? Right. I'm going to need a finding aid for that. So I am a little bit of a sucker for books about... Continue reading

Let's find books for hypothetical readers! Hypothetical reader Kate Winslet has this look on her face for just about the whole movie. Maybe he should switch from Doris Lessing to Sylvia Day. Reader #1, come on down! You like Oprah books and Eat, Pray, Love - we're finding you something... Continue reading

This week's Be More Bookish assignment was all about appeal factors. Project Cain and Cain's Blood by Geoffrey Girard These paired novels tell the same story - about a government-sponsored project in which serial killer DNA is used to create clones, which you know can't end well - from the... Continue reading

Graphic novels are uncharted territory for some of us. Here's the presentation that TK, Melissa, and I did at Genre Boot Camp. and then let's talk about superheroes: More booklists and materials are in the Genre Boot Camp folder under Collection Development on BCPL's network, but I wanted to take... Continue reading

I am sorry that Teddy Steinkellner was dumped in a trashcan in middle school. Truly I am. Nobody deserves to be humiliated like that, and I hope the boys who did it look back on that episode and feel gut-wrenching, ball-twisting shame. I hope they grow up and have children and experience the fear that some little pack of fourteen-year-old pricks is going to do something like that to one of their kids. And I have to praise a book about middle school that gives us an episode of upside-down in a garbage can. The clarity of the prose, the... Continue reading

As the kids were getting ready for bed last night, my husband pulled out Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun and flipped through it. Unbored is a pretty great book - it has about a million unexpected and funky things for a kid to do: DIY Fiction! Farting Games! Make a Cigar Box Guitar! and it sits on our shelf until somebody pulls it out and has a little fun with it and then puts it back where it'll sit for another 6 months. That book makes a great gift (although if there's a second edition, I'd recommend... Continue reading

Until recently, I was the librarian at North Point who checked in the new books every day. April does it now, and I miss that little job. Nothing beats a quick glance at EVERY new cover that comes into the library for maintaining awareness of trends and specifics. Am I... Continue reading

Dark inside, dark outside. Dark on top and down below. Dark in a box. Dark with a fox. Dark in a house. Dark with a mouse. I'm sayin - this book is DARK. Hee hee hee. I stayed up til 4am to finish it. So ok - there's this giant earthquake, and that's pretty bad, but even before the earthquake there were a few weird things happening. The crazy got crazier, some old guy on a bus told one of our protagonists something like, "Too much hate, they found a crack, everybody's gonna die." You know, what crazies say in... Continue reading

I just finished reading The Sinister Sweetness of Splendid Academy by Nikki Loftin. This is a damn fine book, a creep-up-on-you book. It has a devil-in-the-noonday-sun quality that many have compared to Roald Dahl. Me, I didn't see the Dahl in it so much - there's little to laugh at, for one thing - and I'd compare it more to creepy-banal British village horror. Love that stuff. The main character in this book carries a heavy emotional burden, and the book, in addition to being a great, suspenseful fairy tale retelling, goes about hip-deep into the braided stream of villainy... Continue reading

A family of hippie hipsters - or post-hipster hippies if you want to split hairs - move from their Hampden rowhouse to a field outside of Monkton and build a house, two toddlers in tow and a bun in the oven. Does mom wear glasses? Does dad wear plaid? Is their jeep a vintage Willys, are their shoes extra-chunky? Does a cat lurk on the periphery? Do not hold any of these things against them. Really, don't. Instead, go find this book, and you will see that I kid because I love. This family could be my friend Sara's family,... Continue reading

I am a lucky woman. By almost any metric, that's me, Lady Lucky. I can walk under ladders. One of the ways in which I am lucky is that there are about five authors out there whose work is just exactly what I want to read. I can go to those authors and always always be surprised and moved. Gibson . Liz Jensen . Nick Harkaway . Charlie Higson . Ian Fleming (but that's more of a sick obsession). And by "always always" I mean - no duds. No books that make me go "ehhh." Neal Stephenson for example. Love... Continue reading

The scene as hundreds of librarians await the award announcements Every year, the American Library Association honors the best in children's and teen literature with a suite of awards collectively known as the ALA Youth Media Awards. The most famous of these awards are the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, given to the "most distinguished contribution to children's literature" and the "most distinguished picture book," respectively. The Newbery is awarded to a book's author, while the Caldecott goes to the illustrator. This year, I was there at the ALA Midwinter Convention for all of the excitement. When I came back, I... Continue reading

Crash your car miles from nowhere on Nevada's Route 375, aka Extraterrestrial Highway, after a series of strange events have led to airplane crashes and highway closures, and what do you expect? Recover from life-threatening injuries only to be handed a non-disclosure agreement and be escorted home by two agents in black suits... oh yeah, this can't be good. What happened to debate partners Reese and David in the month following inexplicable bird attacks that shut down the nation's air traffic? How have they recuperated so quickly from their crash? And what's with the strange vertigo that Reese feels whenever... Continue reading

Well, I read a hundred new picture books yesterday. I do that sometimes, just chew through a teetering stack of new ones. There's no time - no time! to write reviews, so here are my snappety-snap judgements and random associations. Aren't you glad I'm not on the Caldecott Committee like our friend Travis? Those guys probably have to get all reasoned and articulate, instead of, like, holding up a book in front of my colleagues and going, "Look! Ha ha!" Mr. Zinger's Hat by Cary Fagan and Dusan Petričić For example! Here's one that I pushed across the lunchroom table... Continue reading

Oh poor dear abandoned Pink Me! I haven't posted here in WEEKS, so let's just throw some random observations into an edit window and you may get some idea how out of control my year-end season gets: I have been reading a book a day so that I will be able to vote knowledgeably during the meetings of YALSA's Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults committee at ALA Midwinter. Observation 1: Going by YA literature, you'd assume that most teenagers with cultural assimilation issues are only children. Observation 2: A good way to manufacture angst for a teen character in YA... Continue reading

At one point a couple weeks ago, I had 84 kidlit-related apps on my iPad, because I was a first-round judge for the Cybils Awards in the apps category. I have been involved with the Cybils for a few years now, previously serving as a judge in the graphic novels and nonfiction picture books categories, and every year I love it. The best is getting to know the other critics on the panels. Lalitha, Carisa, Cathy, and Mary Ann, it was a privilege and I learned so much! These are the finalists that we chose (it was tough!): Bats: Furry... Continue reading

From The Brick Bible Christmas Story Hey ho it is time for me to haul a giant tote bag of beautiful and enticing books for the kids on your gift list down to Maryland's NPR station (WYPR 88.1 FM) and let Maryland Morning's Tom Hall pick a few he'd like me to talk about! Unfortunately, that segment got lost in the scheduling shuffle this year, so I'll have to make do with a list on Pink Me. NOT a hardship - on the Internet, I have unlimited air time! So here are the books I am sticking in my Santa... Continue reading

Do you know who Dario Argento is? Was? Is, according to imdb. Ah. Live long and prosper, Dario Argento. Dario Argento is a film director specializing in psychological horror. His early work is often cited as inspiration by the likes of John Carpenter and George Romero, with whom he collaborated on Dawn of the Dead. Argento's most famous film is probably the 1977 cult classic Suspiria. Nominally about a teenage girl at a ballet school, it is notably surreal, violent, lurid, and more interested in mood than in plot. Also, there's some marvelous wallpaper in that movie. (And good Lord!... Continue reading

If you read picture books to kids on any kind of regular basis - that is, if you are now or have ever been a parent, a teacher, or a librarian - chances are you have come across the books that you just can't sell. The words you can't wrap your tongue around, the insipid characters whose lines you just hate to hear yourself saying, the forced rhymes that refuse to bounce where you expect them to. And then there will be that beautiful day when you crack open Your Book. The book that flows off your tongue, the book... Continue reading

Here are two books. Two books written for adults but featuring teenage protagonists. This happens quite a lot, and more so lately, and I suppose it is for the simple reason that teenagers lead more interesting lives than adults do. They get out more. Sometimes adult books featuring teen main characters are absolute must-reads for teens - but sometimes they are what they are: emphatically adult literature featuring young people in starring roles. Let's discuss! Wild Girls by Mary Stewart Atwell Book Trailer from Charlie Cline on Vimeo. Kate Riordan has lived in the depressed, left-behind Appalachian river town of... Continue reading