You Don't Look Like You Have Fangs

"That's funny, you don't look like you have fangs," said Pat Cummings as she sat down by me at a conference we both attended last fall. This may not be a conventional salutation, but I knew where it was coming from. As the current face of Kirkus Reviews in the children's-literature world, I represent a publication that has a reputation for cruel (if you’re an author), honest (if you're a review reader) reviews. When many authors think of Kirkus, they probably imagine someone with fangs, horns and a barbed tail.

"You should come ...

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In Memoriam: Bernard Waber, 1921-2013

Bernard Waber died on Thursday, May 16^th at the age of 91. The author of over 40 children’s books, he is probably best-known for series of books about Lyle the crocodile that began with The House on East 88th Street. In a brief essay he wrote about his career, Waber remembered that

My own early efforts at drawing were mostly confined to the laborious copying of

photographs of film stars and other celebrities. I received respectable grades in art classes

during my school years but doubt I thought it seriously indicated a career direction.

Perhaps art seemed too ...

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In Memoriam: Liesel Moak Skorpen, 1935-2013

I have reached the age when I habitually read the obituaries; reading of lives well-lived pleases me, and fortunately there are more of those than the other in my local paper. One name in particular caught my eye this past Sunday: Elizabeth Frackelton Moak Skorpen. When your last name is Smith, just about any other surname is cooler than yours, and this surely was one to conjure with. But it also rang a faint bell.

Reading along, I learned that she was familiarly known as Liesel, and the ringing became a little stronger. Then I came to this bit: “Liesel ...

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Famous Last Words

“So, um, well, will you give it a read...please?”

Here at Kirkus, we pay a lot of attention to our last lines. So do our readers. I have heard multiple readers say that they just skip to the end of a review to get the Kirkus verdict, then they go back to the beginning to read how we arrived at it. Knowing this, we put a lot of effort into that last line.

When we love a book, we try to pour all our emotion into it. The review of M.T. Anderson’s savagely brilliant Feed concludes, “The ...

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Spoiler Alert

Call me crazy, but spoilers don’t bother me. I remember years ago just blinking when a librarian colleague complained that a review she’d read revealed the end of a book. She asked me whether I thought it wasn’t the duty of the reviewer to keep key plot points under wraps, and my utter lack of response visibly frustrated her. It just hadn’t occurred to me.

Some background is probably in order. The vast majority of my review reading has been done as a professional librarian, when I typically read four or five different review journals in ...

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Stories for All: A Great Idea

I heard about a nifty initiative last week, one that is worth talking about: The Stories for All Project, from First Book, an organization that puts books into the hands of children in need across the United States and Canada. Seeing the desperate need for children of color and other minorities to see themselves in the books they read, First Book will be purchasing $500,000 worth of new children’s books from each of two publishers, HarperCollins and Lee & Low.

Wow.

Ever since Nancy Larrick sounded the alarm in her landmark Saturday Review essay, “The All-White World of Children ...

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Messing with History (Newbery History)

And the Newbery Goes to…Red Sails to Capri?!

History overturned! Recently the infamous decision of the 1953 Newbery committee—to award the medal to Ann Nolan Clark’s llama snoozer, Secret of the Andes, instead of two E.B. White’s transcendent Charlotte’s Web—was voided.

Not really.

What actually happened was this: A group of graduate students in the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children’s Literature master’s-degree programs loosely reenacted the decision with me as facilitator, as is done every year. The "committee's" decision to withhold the medal from Secret of ...

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Bookmarking a Relationship

There’s something intimate about a book recommendation. When a book speaks to your soul somehow, you really want to share it—and to see that it speaks equally to someone else’s. Even for professional book recommenders, there’s something intensely gratifying about a successful connection of book to reader. Readers who take your recommendation are committing time and possibly money because they trust you, and a failed recommendation is at some level a betrayal of that trust.

When I was a librarian, if I found a stack of books left neatly on a table, I knew I had ...

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All the Wrong Words

“This is an uncorrected proof. Reviewers are requested to check all quotations against the published edition.”

This or similar boilerplate appears in virtually all the books Kirkus Reviews works on. We—and many other media outlets—typically receive limited-run, prepublication advance copies of books that may still be in the copy-editing process. Reviewers know this, and we tend to read past obvious errors and typos, confident that they will be eliminated in the finished book.

I recall one book that for some reason doubled “St.” and rendered the historic capitol of Russia as “St. St. Petersburg.” Another was a British ...

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Printz Committee Says No to TFiOS

The second-guessing began as soon as the announcements were made. Why did such-and-such a committee choose this book and not that for the medal? Why wasn't Wonder among the Newbery honorees? What about It Jes' Happened—why no Sibert nod for it? And how come Pinned didn't emerge with a shiny Coretta Scott King medal?

But of all the Monday-morning quarterbacking, one murmur was loudest: What the heck happened to The Fault in Our Stars? John Green's runaway best-seller about two teens with cancer soared in the Amazon rankings well before it was even published thanks to ...

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The Empty Shelves of 2013

Is there anything quite so lovely as an empty bookcase? Mine are rarely this beautiful. My office is in a constant state of packing and unpacking, with boxes and packages arriving by the dozen every day. I have a fairly complicated and not-quite-capacious-enough system of storage for the floods of books that ebb and flow (mostly flow) over the course of the year. This particular bookcase is reserved for titles starred in Kirkus. I save them all year long and then sift through them as I compile my lists of the best.

Having finally finished 2012’s lists, I have ...

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The Morris Shortlist: A Look at New Voices

The countdown to the ALA award announcements day, arguably the most exciting day of the children’s-literature year, began, for me, in the fall of 2011, when I was appointed to the Morris YA Debut Committee. Not as well-known as its older counterparts, the Newbery, Caldecott and Printz, it has a very specific mission: to “[honor] a debut book published by a first-time author writing for teens.” I have done a fair amount of committee work but always in the realm of children’s books, not books for teens. I thought that the Morris, with its relatively restricted scope, would ...

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In Memoriam: Gerald McDermott

“Fumpseeitattwee!” my then–2-year-old daughter said to me imploringly.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Fumpseeitattwee!”

She clearly wanted something badly, but I was darned if I knew what it was. She pestered me with the same request over the course of an afternoon and evening. Finally, in a stroke of delayed parental genius, I had it: “Thump! She hit that tree.” It was a line from the one of her favorite books, Zomo the Rabbit, by Gerald McDermott.

We’d read that book so many times that I could (and probably did) recite it in my sleep, and ...

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Peeking into ‘The Water Castle’

“This one is special,” concludes the Kirkus review of The Water Castle, by Megan Frazer Blakemore. Indeed it is. This middle-grade mystery/fantasy twines together such disparate threads as the Peary-Henson Polar expedition, turn-of-the-20th-century medical quackery, the fragile demarcation between legend and history, and a sixth-grader’s equally fragile sense of self.

Their father’s catastrophic stroke takes Price, Brynn and Ephraim Appledore-Smith from their home in Cambridge to Crystal Springs, Maine, to take up residence in the titular Water Castle, the huge, almost architecturally impossible mansion built on the grounds of their mother’s family’s old “curative”-water ...

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Children’s-Book Apps: A 2012 Update

Looking back over 2012 in book apps and interactive e-books as I’ve compiled my lists of the best has been, as always instructive. Not even three years after the launch of tablet technology in the consumer marketplace, what constitutes a great children’s-book app looks very different now from the way it did two years ago, when Kirkus first started reviewing them.

Within the realm of apps and e-books for children, the most momentous change is in where the best stories are coming from. Of our top 10 apps of 2010, seven were electronic adaptations of printed books. Our ...

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The Other Side of the YA Boom

And why wouldn’t adults want to read books written for teenagers? If J.K. Rowling’s A Casual Vacancy is representative of what’s being ...

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Where the White People Weren't

Where were all the white people?

This past weekend, I had the good fortune to be invited to participate in the A Is for Anansi children’s-literature conference mounted by the Institute of African American Affairs at NYU. I was invited because years ago I published an article on the almost complete absence of black characters in fantasy books for children—a void that has remained largely unfilled in the decade-plus since and that I will write more about in a future column. I was a little nervous about the invitation; I am not an academic, and I don’t ...

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The Book That Wasn't

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to notice a conversation on Child Lit, a children’s-literature listserv, about a book called Bear Story: Just a Silly Man Who Wears a Fur Coat and Needs a Shave, by Liz Scott and illustrated by Marju Rose. It had been reviewed and starred by Kirkus Indie, our review service for the self-publishing community, and we published the review in our July 15, 2012, issue.

This story about a bear that wakes up from hibernation to discover that a factory has been built around him and is continually mistaken for a worker rang ...

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Not My Cuppa Butterbeer: J.K. Rowling's 'The Casual Vacancy'

If J.K. Rowling consciously set out to write a book to prove that she is not limited to child-wizard fantasy—and I think that’s entirely likely—she has succeeded with The Casual Vacancy. But not magically, and readers who hope to find something of Harry within its pages won’t.

Like most of the publishing industry, I’ve had half an eye on the loudly trumpeted first adult book by the author of the much-beloved and billion-selling Harry Potter series. It wasn’t a particularly skeptical eye, either. As Clayton Moore described last week, plenty of authors have ...

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On Reading 'Forever...'

How old were you when you read Forever…?

I was 11, which makes me among one of the first generations for whom a surreptitious read of Judy Blume’s barrier-busting (pun kind of intended) novel of teen sex marked our crossing from innocence to experience (at least hypothetically).

Judy Blume’s books were fixtures in the lives of preteen American girls in the ’70s. We read them all: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Deenie and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t. Within their pages, we learned about, respectively, menstruation, masturbation and something strange called “nocturnal emissions.” My ...

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