Rethinking Thomas Jefferson

Blame Ken Howard. Or those orange biographies. I can't remember which came first, but at about the same time my parents took me to the film musical 1776, which starred a young Ken Howard as the very romantic Thomas Jefferson, I also read the Childhoods of Famous Americans biography of Jefferson. From kindergarten on, I revered our third president.

Find more great books exploring the past among our 2011 Best Books for Children. 

I don't recall exactly when I learned about Sally Hemings, but it sure wasn't when I was a kid. At some point I became ...

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How to Talk to Kids About 9/11

As the nation pauses to remember 9/11 on its 10th anniversary, like most Americans, I find myself remembering the day and its aftermath. Those of us who worked with small children had one abiding concern—to protect them from the savagery. If the attacks punctured our collective innocence, or at least our sense of invincibility, they also threatened the individual innocence of our children. How could we allow them to know that their world was so fragile?

Find more children's books about 9/11.

This attitude persisted for some time, even years in some quarters. Children just should ...

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Found in Translation in App Land

Last week, I wrote about the pitfalls that plague some international children’s books in the App Store. Now, let’s talk about why having a multitude of overseas apps available for an American audience is a great idea.  

Read more new and notable books for children in September.

First, let's face it—the United States is an international country. In my small suburb, the local school system serves English-language learners from 24 countries, covering 15 languages. Across the river in the big city of Portland, Maine, the school system estimates that about 50 different non-English languages are spoken ...

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Lost in Translation in App Land

Anyone who has spent any time in the App Store knows that what's on offer there is fundamentally different from what one would find in a bookstore or library, even allowing for the obvious differences in format. One in particular that has struck me is the ease with which works from non–English-speaking countries find their way to the marketplace.

Check out children's and YA editor Vicky Smith's last column on reading with both guilt and pleasure.

Trolling the Internet for information on exactly how an app is approved for inclusion in the App Store yielded a ...

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From the Stacks: Guilt and Pleasure

Do you ever love a book that you feel you shouldn’t? I'm not talking about a typical “guilty pleasure” sort of book—legions of smart, emancipated women find themselves tucking into Twilight and its spawn as if they were chocolate-covered nougats. A little shamefacedly, they confess that they find the sexual politics of so many of these books utterly retrograde but nevertheless hugely enjoyable. But that guilt is a light one, not the kind that a person really feels, well, guilty about.

Read children's and YA editor Vicky Smith's last column on A Year with Butch ...

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5 Can't-Miss Back-to-School Picture Books

Start sharpening those pencils. It's that time of year again, when summer days shorten, and kids need to focus on going back to school. Here are five 2011 starred picture books that will help make that transition an easy one for parents, students and teachers alike.

See our complete 2011 back-to-school picture-book roundup.

Substitute Creacher

Chris Gall

In this cautionary tale that combines humor and a touch of magic, good behavior is the lesson of the day when a particularly naughty class of students has a substitute teacher.… Gall’s illustrations use speech bubbles that drip with green slime ...

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Bring Back 'Butch and Spike'

There's no shortage of great school stories. Many ascribe the phenomenal success of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to its being grounded in the comfortable formula of the school story. Before Holes, Louis Sachar charmed readers with the antic goings-on at a particularly bizarre school in Wayside School Gets Little Stranger and others. And Andrew Clements, author of the sublime Frindle, has built an entire writing career around them.

Find out about more great school stories.

But I have a special place in my heart reserved for A Year with Butch and Spike, by Gail Gauthier, now ...

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From the Stacks: Revenge Is Best Served Loud

When you style yourself as "the world's toughest book critics," you have to expect that you will make authors unhappy on a regular basis. The advent of social media has allowed authors to express their frustration widely via blogs, Facebook and Twitter. But no one, to my knowledge, has achieved catharsis with such brio as Lara Zielin, who turned the Kirkus review of her newest book, The Implosion of Aggie Winchester, into a black-metal masterpiece.

Read the last From the Stacks on the state of publishing.

The very definition of a "good sport," Zielin talked to me about her ...

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'Noodle and Lou': A Video Conversation

Worm Noodle is down in the dumps, and it's up to his best friend, blue jay Lou to bring him back up—a task he accomplishes with utmost style. Noodle and Lou's author, Liz Garton Scanlon, sat down with Children's & Teen Editor Vicky Smith to talk about this unlikely friendship, the fabulosity of worms and Arthur Howard's just-right illustrations for this oh-so-warm celebration.

Read other picture books about odd-couple friendships.

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From the Stacks: Stories Are Alive and Well

I spent the weekend in a version of kids’ book heaven—the Children's Literature Summer Institute at Simmons College in Boston. Somewhere in the vicinity of 20 authors and illustrators of books for children and teens were in attendance, speaking about their work and mingling with conference attendees. Among the latter were teachers, librarians, academics, publishers and book reviewers, as well as people who simply have a deep and abiding love for kids’ books, both for their own sake and the power that they have to enrich and change children's lives.

Read what children’s and YA editor ...

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'Matched': A Video Conversation

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From the Stacks: Rated 'Complex'

Recently, a concerned mom contacted us as part of an effort to establish a rating system for books similar to the ones currently in place for movies and video games. Her son had checked a couple of books out of the children's room of her local library, and she did not feel that they were appropriate. She wasn't trying to ban them or make them unavailable—just to provide the same kind of guidance for parents that they've become accustomed to with other media.

Read Vicky Smith’s last From the Stacks on disorganized reading.

Unfortunately for ...

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'Astronaut Academy': A Video Conversation

Dinosaurs on wheels? Crazy-scary lacrosse with flaming balls and spikes? Middle-school meanness? It's all there in Dave Roman's spectacularly goofy Astronaut Academy. Roman here talks with Children's & Teen Editor Vicky Smith about his debut graphic novel, the magic of the perfect name and the way people might talk in the future.

Find more great graphic novels for middle school.

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Harry Potter: Breaking up is hard to do

July 14, 10 p.m. "You're not gonna cry. I swear to God, if you're gonna cry, you're not sitting with me." Such was the sympathy my daughter had for me as I contemplated the end of the end of a 13-year relationship. We were on our way to the midnight premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two (or, as some in the children's-literature world have abbreviated it, HP 7.5).

Were you crying too? Read our list of books for Potterites in withdrawal.

I remember clearly reading reviews of Harry Potter and ...

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'Okay for Now': A Video Conversation

Readers met Doug Swieteck in the Newbery Honor–winning The Wednesday Wars. In Okay for Now, Doug's family has moved to "stupid Marysville," where his father is just as brutal but maybe, just maybe Doug can become his better self. Author Gary Schmidt here talks to Vicky Smith, Kirkus Children's & Teen Editor, about Doug, John James Audubon and putting characters you love into terrible situations.

Find more novels with great boy characters among our 2011 Best Books for Children.

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From the Stacks: (Dis)organized Reading

My reading life, it seems, has always been organized in stacks. First there were the stacks of children's books my mother made sure I had from the beginning. These coexisted with the slippery stacks of comic books my brothers left lying around and graciously shared with me. Every once in a while I would load the former into a bookcase or curl up with the latter before returning them. Happily for me, the Uncle Scrooge comics became mine, but I always had to give back the superhero ones.

Read Children's and YA Editor Vicky Smith's last article ...

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'Countdown': A Video Conversation

Eleven-year-old Franny has lots of questions but very few answers. Is her older sister up to something illegal? Why are she and her best friend not getting along anymore? What's wrong with her beloved uncle? Will the world come to an end tomorrow? Set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Deborah Wiles’ Countdown brilliantly evokes the uncertainty of the era. Here, Kirkus Children’s & Teen Editor Vicky Smith talks to Wiles about writing her book and putting together its fascinating documentary elements.

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Romance by the Alphabet

When I was a teenager, I made a discovery that would've been impossible if my local library had not blatantly flouted cataloging rules. In direct contravention of accepted practice, it shelved fiction books by the authors’ real names, not pseudonyms. Want to read Mark Twain? You'd find him in the C’s. Lewis Carroll? D’s. George Eliot was in the E’s, but only because her real name was Mary Anne Evans.

Read Children's and YA editor Vicky Smith's last blog about Brian Selznick at Kirkus.

Not, I hasten to add, that I was in ...

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'All the Way to America': A Video Conversation

Dan Yaccarino's picture book, All the Way to America: the Story of a Big Italian Family and a Little Shovel, is a warm and funny family history told in just 40 pages. Here he talks to Kirkus’ Children's & Teen Editor Vicky Smith about art, food and yelling. "There’s a lot of yelling in Italian families. We call it talking."

Find more great picture books that celebrate friends & family among our 2011 Best Books for Children.

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Brian Selznick, Unceasing Wonders

Brian Selznick didn't have to do it.

He didn't have to return to the groundbreaking pictures-and-text format that stunned the children's book world in 2007 and won him an unlikely—though entirely deserved—Caldecott medal for The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Weighing in at about two pounds, the 500-plus-page tome combined textual and visual storytelling in a way no one had quite seen before.

Find more adrenaline inducing titles among our 2011 Best Books for Children.  

In a world where the new becomes old in the blink of an eye, Selznick could have honorably rested on his ...

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