The Places You Will Go

Picture Book of the Month: The End

November 2007

THE END
By David LaRochelle
Illustrated by Richard Eqielski
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine, 40 pages

For a change, this picture book starts with happily ever after. The princess and brave knight fall madly in love but how did that happen? Turn the pages and find out by going back in time and over the series of unfortunate events that led to The End.

David LaRochelle has created a zany story that kids (who relish absurd, slapstick humour) will love. Eqielski's illustrations are larger-than-life and remind me of Tenniel's renderings of the Duchess and her baby in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

This is a great book to use during storytime, providing much scope for interaction as everyone tries to guess ... not what happens next, but what happened before! The possibilities, of course, are endless.

Author-Maker

Get it from the horse’s mouth: the man who decides which manuscript sees print and which is tossed shares his insights about being published.

An Affair to Remember

You’d think a novel about a dying woman would be depressing, wouldn’t you? Yet this one isn’t, for it brings to vivid, delirious life a love affair whose consequences reverberated for 40 years.

Sedgwick Makes Shortlist

 The Costa Children’s Book Award nominees are ...

The Bower Bird by Ann Kelley

Crusade by Elizabeth Laird

What I Was by Meg Rosoff

Blood Red Snow White by Marcus Sedgwick

Read more about the Costas and the shortlists for the other categories here.

The results will be announced on 3rd January, 2008.

View interviews done with the 2006 Costa winners here.

 

Cinema Paradiso

Tots to Teens

By DAPHNE LEE

Pictures That Tell the Best Stories

PICTURE books work as gifts for children of all ages. And then there are illustrated novels, like Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press, 544 pages, ISBN: 978-0439813785), which is on The New York Times' list of the 10 best illustrated children's books for 2007. 

Hugo Cabret was also been nominated in the young people literature category of The National Book awards. (Sherman Alexie won for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - more about this book in the near future.)

One Little Native American Boy

The National Book Foundation 2007 award winners were announced yesterday and Sherman Alexei won the young people's literature category for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

The other awards went to ...

Denis Johnson for Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus                           & Giroux) - Fiction

Tim Weiner for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the                           CIA (Doubleday) - Non-Fiction

Robert Has for Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins) - Poetry

That Time of the Year, Again

It's 43 days to Christmas. Made your lists yet? Trying to figure out who's naughty and who's nice?

Should a good girl be rewarded with the latest Gossip Girls book or served with a stack of Austens? How about a subscription to Vogue? And what would Roger Sutton (left), editor-in-chief of The Horn Book magazine, say if you asked him?

By the way, I wouldn't say no to a subscription to The Horn Book Guide (I've already treated myself to the magazine).

The Right Words, In the Right Order

What was it I once said about how poetry can make you cry, and give you wings too? It can also improve your sex life. Or so I've been told ...

Even the Back of Cereal Boxes

I'm sure I'm repeating myself but I'm just going to tell myself that it's all for people who are new to the column ...