>Flunk reading, do not go directly to jail.
>Apparently some politicos are fond of spouting a factoid (please note correct usage, book reviewers everywhere) that links third-grade reading scores to the formulas states use to estimate their...
View ArticleTwo Scary Stories
Julianna Baggott (aka N.E. Bode) writes in the Boston Globe about a scared-silly principal, who apparently isn’t down with her homonym. And Jon Scieszka leads off the Library of Congress’s Exquisite...
View Article>Can I buy an umlaut?
>I love it when my second-favorite magazine meets the interests of my first: “The young miller is naive, vulnerable and over-enthusiastic, with a poetic imagination, but not psychotic! As to the...
View Article>A question for the pop culture critics
>I’ve just started listening to an audiobook edition of Jane Eyre narrated by Juliet Stevenson. (Did anyone see her recent PBS Mystery turn? It was great.) Stevenson is terrific, but hearing the...
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>"Now we had both done what we both swore we’d never do."
>Simon & Schuster has reissued V. C. Andrews’ notorious Flowers in the Attic and Petals on the Wind in an omnibus edition that screams “if you liked Twilight . . .” But oh how it brings me back....
View Article>I guess Dakota Fanning would be too obvious a choice
>for Alice, but Greenwillow reports news of casting choices for the movie version of The Last Apprentice, one of my favorite scary books. Jeff Bridges as the Spook, huh. Saw him last night in True...
View ArticleStories for a Spooky Night
I hope I will see some of you this evening at 6:00PM at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square for a conversation I’ll be leading about The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, just out from Houghton Mifflin....
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Picture book moments
In picture-book goings-on, bloggers Julie Danielson, Betsy Bird, Travis Jonker, and Minh Lê have a seasonally appropriate discussion about creepy picture books. (And here are the Horn Book’s...
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RIP Lois Duncan
I was sorry to hear about Lois Duncan’s death yesterday. Lois had been writing for young people for a long time–her first novel, Debutante Hill, was published in 1958 (and republished in 2013 by Lizzie...
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Halloween treats
The Halloween countdown is on. As certain people in my house wait not-so-patiently for the witching hour on October 31, we’ve been working our way through our pile of favorite spooky picture books and...
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