Children’s Literary Salon – Military Offspring: A Whole New Genre

The Children’s Literary Salon is pleased to announce our upcoming program, this Saturday, November 12th at 2:00 p.m.

Join authors Nora Raleigh Baskin (The Summer Before Boys), Sara Lewis Holmes (Operation Yes), Rosanne Parry (Heart of a Shepherd, Second Fiddle), and Suzanne Morgan Williams (Bull Rider) talk about children in military families and how they are portrayed in their contemporary novels for kids.

Nora Raleigh Baskin, a Publishers Weekly “Flying Starts” 2001 is the author of several novels for young people.  In 2010 she won the ALA  Schneider Family award. Ms. Baskin has also published short stories, and personal narrative essays which have appeared in The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and The Writer Magazine. Ms. Baskin teaches creative writing through the Gotham Writers Workshop and the Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY. Her 8th young adult novel The Summer Before Boys was released by S&S this spring and received a starred review from Kirkus. A YA novel, Surfacing will be published in 2013 by Candlewick Press.

The Summer Before Boys: Twelve-year-old best friends and relatives, Julia and Eliza are happy to spend the summer together while Julia’s mother is serving in the National Guard in Iraq but when they meet a neighborhood boy, their close relationship begins to change.

Sara Lewis Holmes is the author of Letters From Rapunzel and Operation Yes. Operation Yes was named by Booklist as one of their “Top Ten Arts Books for Youth 2009,” was a Cybils Middle Grade Finalist, and garnered an Audie for the best audio book recording for children ages 8-12. She grew up clueless about the military until she married an Air Force pilot, and now has 27 years of experience in planning, improvising, and serving as part of a military family.

Operation Yes: In her first ever teaching job, Miss Loupe uses improvisational acting exercises with her sixth-grade students at an Air Force base school, and when she experiences a family tragedy, her previously skeptical class members use what they have learned to help her, her brother, and other wounded soldiers.

Rosanne Parry is the author of Second Fiddle and Heart of a Shepherd, which has been honored as a Washington Post’s Best Kids’ Book of the Year, a Kirkus Reviews Best Children’s Book of the Year, and a Horn Book Fanfare Best Book of the Year. She also plays the violin for which she has never been honored with a prize of any kind. She now lives with her husband in an old farmhouse in Portland, Oregon, where they raise four children, three chickens, five kinds of fruit, and their voices in the occasional song.

Second Fiddle: Six months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, three eighth-grade girls living on an American military base with their families in Berlin try to save a Russian soldier, who has been beaten and left for dead, by smuggling him to Paris, where they are going to perform in a music competition.

Suzanne Morgan Williams is the author of the middle grade novel, Bull Rider and 11 nonfiction children’s books. Bull Rider won a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City, has been selected for several state award lists, is a Junior Library Guild Selection, and represented Nevada at the National Book Festival in Washington D.C. Suzanne’s work takes her into classrooms and communities from the U.S./Mexico border to the Arctic.

Bull Rider: Fourteen year old Cam O’Mara is a ranch kid and a skateboarder, not a champion bull rider like his brother Ben, but when Ben is seriously injured in Iraq, Cam turns to his family traditions and bull riding to overcome his grief and give his brother hope for a new life.

This event will be held in the Stephen A. Schwarzman branch of New York Public Library (5th Avenue & 42nd Street) in the Berger Forum on the 2nd floor.

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