Blog
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PW’s Best Children’s Books of 2016 Announced
Titles featured on the picture books list include Jazz Day: The Making of a Famous Photograph by Roxane Orgill, illus. by Francis Vallejo (Candlewick) The Journey by Francesca Sanna (Flying Eye) Leave Me …
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First Book and Pearson launch #ReadUP: A Non-Partisan Call-to-Action for Education and Literacy
For every use of the #ReadUP hashtag through November 8, 2016, First Book will donate a book to a child in need, with funding from Pearson of up to $10,000. …
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Nominations Open For 2017 Lemony Snicket Prize For Noble Librarians Faced With Adversity
CHICAGO, IL — Librarians face adversity every day, whether they are defending a challenged book, responding to collection and building damage after floods and fires, remaining open as a safe space during …
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Two August House Titles Honored as 2016 NAPPA Winners
Atlanta, Georgia (October 31, 2016) — An exciting year for thrilling book collections just got even more exhilarating with the announcement of the 2016 NAPPA winners. Parents will recognize the …
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22 Talented Educators Will Share Expertise Throughout 2016-17 School Years as Scholastic “Top Teaching” Bloggers
NEW YORK, NY — Scholastic (NASDAQ: SCHL), the global children’s publishing, education and media company, has announced the 2016–17 team of 22 exceptional preschool–grade 8 educators to serve as bloggers …
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The Big Questions
Contributed by SF Said
I write children’s books because I believe they’re the books that change people’s lives.
My favorite book as a child was Watership Down by Richard Adams. I re-read it as an adult, trying to understand why I’d loved it so much. More than a thrilling adventure story about rabbits, I saw it was a story about the big questions of human life: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we belong? How should we live?
I think that’s why it meant so much to me. My family’s roots are in the Middle East. My ancestors were Iraqi, Egyptian, Kurdish, and Circassian Muslims. I grew up in Britain in the 1970s, where such origins were unusual. Negotiations around identity, difference and belonging were daily facts of my life. Even my name was an issue. Sabah Falah Said is an ordinary Arabic name, but unpronounceable in English! Whenever it came up, people would question it to such an extent that I ended up using initials.
So when I read Watership Down and saw that the hero of the rabbits’ myths was called El-Ahrairah, it struck a very deep chord. The greatest rabbit who ever lived had an Arabic-sounding name? That gave me what Junot Diaz has described as a feeling of seeing myself reflected; realizing my background could be something more than a burden.
A children’s book had given me a way to think about myself and my place in the world. So now I put everything I have into writing children’s books. I put years and years of work into making each book the best it can possibly be, making them as thrilling as I can, but also filling them with those big questions; Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we belong? How should we live?
In my first book, Varjak Paw, these questions are explored through cats and dogs. Varjak is a cat who makes friends with a dog and learns that a dog can be the best friend a cat could ever have.
My new book, Phoenix, is set in a galaxy where humans and aliens are at war. The humans have even built a great spacewall to keep the aliens out. The main characters are a human boy on the run and an alien girl he meets. She’s a refugee from the war who has grown up in camps, hated and feared by humans. But they discover that they have more in common than they thought—and together, they might even save the galaxy.
I didn’t write Phoenix about a specific situation in the real world. I wanted to explore those ideas of identity, difference, and belonging that I’ve been living with all my life, and that I think lie at the roots of so many situations, all over the world.
Things have changed so much since my childhood. People are on the move as never before; hundreds of millions of us now live outside our countries of origin. One response to that is to build walls. But another is to build bridges of understanding— as my characters in Phoenix must do to survive.
Young people everywhere are hungry for stories to help them navigate this world. My highest hope is that a book like Phoenix might help them think about the world, their experiences of it, and other people’s experiences as Watership Down helped me. I love the idea that children’s books can be bridges connecting people, showing them that however different someone else might be, the things which unite us are greater than those which divide us. And that difference can be a source of richness: something to be celebrated, not feared.
SF Said is the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize–winning author of Varjak Paw. He was born in Lebanon in 1967, but has lived in London since he was two years old.
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How Audiobooks Can Help Struggling Readers
Teachers, parents, and librarians have found that children benefit from hearing complex words and sentences not typically present in ordinary conversation. Advances in digital technology also allow teachers to bring …
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America’s Youth Have Spoken: Hillary Clinton Is Generation Z’s Choice for President
NEW YORK, NY — Channel One News, a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt company, today announced Hillary Clinton the winner of OneVote 2016, Channel One News’s nationwide mock election for students in …
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Happy Picture Book Month!
Throughout the month, authors, illustrators, literacy activists, and other children’s book devotees celebrate the enduring power of the illustrated book. Visit picturebookmonth.com and KidLit TV to join the fun!
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Remembering Author Natalie Babbitt
Born in Ohio in 1932, Babbitt knew that she wanted to become an illustrator at age nine, when she received a copy of Alice in Wonderland illustrated by John Tenniel. Her …
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Kid Lit Helps Kids Be Who They Are
Parr writes books with the goals of empowering children to be strong, kind people, and of helping make complex messages about feelings more accessible to kids. Kids today still need …
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#MyCreativeYear: Why Creative Teens Should Share Their Story
NEW YORK, NY — Today’s teens have many ways to connect and share with their peers including online, social media, texting and more. Even though there are countless options available, …
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Creating Effective Libraries
Allen suggests getting rid of old, unpopular books, using an easy check-out system, changing book displays, providing plenty of nonfiction, clearly organizing books, and including student input on which books …
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Sponsor a Literary Landmark for Children’s Book Week 2017
BRYN MAWR, PA — United for Libraries is partnering with the ALA-Children’s Book Council Joint Committee to designate seven Literary Landmarks during Children’s Book Week (May 1-7, 2017). United for …
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Willy Wonka Reboot
“Fantastic Beasts” producer David Heyman is teaming with Warner Bros. to create the new movie centered around Wonka and his early adventures. If the reboot is a hit, it seems …
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First Book Partners with Reading Rainbow® to Offer Acclaimed Skybrary to Educators Serving Kids in Need – at a Fraction of the Cost
WASHINGTON, D.C. — First Book, a nonprofit social enterprise, is partnering with 28Reading Rainbow® to provide educators serving children in need with access to Skybrary, Reading Rainbow’s award-winning app of …
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Debut on the Indie Bestsellers List
Children’s Illustrated: If You Give a Mouse a Brownie by Laura Numeroff, illustrated by Felicia Bond (Harper)
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We Need More
Contributed by Ashley Herring Blake, Author
I recently started working in an indie bookstore. The great thing about this job, aside from being surrounded by beautiful books all day long, is that it gets me out of my writer brain and back in touch with my reader brain. I work mostly in the kid’s section, and every day customers come in with very specific requests. I’ve noticed a lot of the teens who frequent the young adult section don’t ask for recommendations all that much, but the middle grade and advancing readers section is a cornucopia of parents looking for certain books or certain topics for their kids.
The other day, I had a mom ask me for a book with a trans character for a first grader.
And let me tell you, I scratched my head for a few seconds. We talked about some of the picture books we had—and we do have a couple, though none of them struck the right chord with this mother—and finally, I moved into our advancing readers section.
I picked up Alex Gino’s George.
I explained that she’d probably have to read this to her first grader, but that George was a beautiful book about a trans girl in the third grade named Melissa who, more than anything in the world, wanted to play Charlotte in her school’s production of Charlotte’s Web. I told her about how Melissa wasn’t out to her family and they called her “George.” We talked about how Melissa gets made fun of a little bit, but we also talked about how Melissa makes a friend who accepts Melissa for who she is and how, eventually, so does Melissa’s family. The mother beamed after we talked it through and she left the store with the book in her hands.
Now, I don’t know that mother’s story. I don’t know if her first grader is trans or has a trans friend or a trans cousin or what have you. What I do know is that by writing George, Alex Gino was able to connect a mom and her kid in a way that no other book could. The book was able to provide a mirror for someone, a really, really young someone, who might be feeling lost and alone and scared. There are many reasons to feel lost and alone and scared when you’re in elementary school: divorced parents, a death in the family, difficult or changing friendships. All of these are valid and the books that deal with these issues are important too.
But here’s the difference: There are a lot of books about divorce, death, and friendships out there.And in the end, I only had one book to put in that mother’s hands. After talking with this mother, the children’s book manager at my store found some more books about trans kids for younger readers and ordered them, and that is excellent, but we need more options. We need more trans picture books. We need more chapter books where the main character has two moms or two dads. We need more middle grade stories where the main character is figuring out they’re not quite as boy crazy as her best friend is. We need more young adult novels with bisexual main characters, and trans main characters, and gay main characters, and asexual main characters. We need more intersectionality in LGBTQIAP+ literature, where our queer characters—for all ages—are also people of color.
Those books are out there and that is fabulous. But we need more.
So, how do we get more?
Well, we write them. We write them with sensitivity and love and respect. If those stories are our own, we tell them. If they are not, we boost those to whom those stories belong. We do the work and get our work checked and rechecked so that it comforts instead of harms. As readers, we buy these books. We request them at our libraries. We tell our friends about them, we tweet about them, we tell anyone who’ll listen.
I believe the world is changing for the better. It’s not becoming more diverse. It has always been this beautifully varied. But we are illuminating those stories more and more. But that will only continue if we keep on questioning, keep on boosting, keep on writing and reading and talking about those mirrors for the kids who need it.
Let’s keep it going.
Ashley Herring Blake used to write songs and now she writes books. She reads them a lot too and has been known to stare wistfully at her bookshelves. She lives in Nashville, TN with her husband and two sons. www.ashleyherringblake.com
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Diversity in the News: October 2016
The newsletter is a valuable resource for librarians, teachers, booksellers, parents and caregivers, publishing professionals, and children’s literature lovers. Find thought-provoking articles, diverse new releases, and more in this month’s issue and sign …
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Reading Habits of Young Boys
Professor of Educational and Social Research at the University of Dundee Keith Topping conducted two of the largest studies ever into boys’ reading habits. Topping found that boys read less thoroughly, …
