Fusenews: In Springtime the Only Pretty Ring Time When Flowers Sing

From author Kathleen Krull I saw this interesting announcement on the CCBC-net listserv:

As someone who has Baby Got Back on her iPod (I’m one of those people who prefers to walk through life with it permanently set on random so that my day contains at least one kind of controlled random event) I had nothing but true unfettered appreciation for Cheryl Klein’s recent parody Baby Got Book .  This is due in large part to the fact that she even adapted the opening word for word.  Extra points for the sentence, "You say you want to get in my shelves?"  Maybe just those of us who have the darn thing memorized will love it right, but I’ve no shame.  Thanks to bookshelves of doom for the alert.

Movie news didn’t go away in my absence, I’m sorry to say. A new BACA Alert, and not from the Spice Girl you’d suspect.  From Cynopsis Kids :

Cynopsis Kids also had the skinny on the new Hobbit movie too:

The secret behind finding the perfect pen name is answered for us at long last.  Big A little a was good enough to link to the secret formula .  According the rules, mine would be Antonia Saul Avis, which ain’t half bad.  And no, I didn’t pick a birdy last name on purpose…. okay, maybe I kinda did.  I like The Story of Avis, but maybe she’s not my favorite character.  But any other last name I put would be too nerdy for words, and I don’t want to make you too embarrassed for me to read my blog.

One of my favorite awards are the Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards .  They’re given out every year to "children’s books published the preceding year that effectively promote the cause of peace, social justice, world community, and the equality of the sexes and all races as well as meeting conventional standards for excellence." Simple enough.  From SLJ’s Extra Helping  I discovered that the most recent winner was Emily Arnold McCully’s fabulous  The Escape of Oney Judge: Martha Washington’s Slave Finds Freedom (Farrar), which took the top prize in the category of Books for Younger Children.  Yessss!  The other winner was  We Are One: The Story of Bayard Rustin (Calkins Creek) by Larry Dane Brimner which swept the Books for Older Children category. The honor book turned out to be a title that I meant to review but never got around to last year.  One Thousand Tracings: Healing the Wounds of World War II (Hyperion) was written and illustrated by Lita Judge and was on the New York Public Library’s 100 Books for Reading and Sharing as well.  Happily the honor books in the older children’s category were Rickshaw Girl (Charlesbridge), by Mitali Perkins  , Elijah of Buxton (Scholastic) by Christopher Paul Curtis; and Birmingham , 1963 (Wordsong) by Carole Boston Weatherford. Well done all around.