MORE 'MIDDLE-GRADE-REALISTIC-FICTION' POSTS
Three Times Lucky By Sheila Turnage Dial (an imprint of Penguin) $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-8037-3670-2 Ages 9-12 On shelves May 10th The Southern Girl Novel. It’s pretty much a genre in and of itself in the children’s literary world. Some years produce more of them than others but they all tend to follow the same format. […]
Wonder By R.J. Palacio Alfred A. Knopf $15.99 ISBN: 978-0-375-86902-0 Ages 9-12 On shelves now They say if you want to win an Oscar you need to play somebody with an extreme personal difficulty (terminal illness, disease, etc.). They do not, for the record, say that about award winning children’s books. There isn’t this general […]
Ghetto Cowboy By G. Neri Illustrated by Jesse Joshua Watson Candlewick Press $15.99 ISBN: 978-0-7636-4922-7 Ages 10 and up. On shelves now. Fun Fact: Parents these days speak in code. As a New York children’s librarian I had to learn this the hard way. Let’s say they want a folktale about a girl outwitting a […]
Charlie Joe Jackson’s Guide to Not Reading By Tommy Greenwald Illustrated by J.P. Coovert Roaring Brook (Macmillan) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-59643-691-6 Ages 9-12 On shelves now. The unreliable narrator. It’s a staple of adult literature, and a relative newcomer to the world of children’s lit. Even books for teens are more likely to sport these first […]
Wonderstruck By Brian Selznick Scholastic Press $29.99 ISBN: 978-0545027892 Ages 9 and up On shelves September 13, 2011 Hype. What’s the point? A publisher believes that a book is going to be big so they crank up the old hype machine and do everything in their power to draw attention to it long before its […]
The Unforgotten Coat By Frank Cottrell Boyce Photographs by Carl Hunter and Clare Heney Candlewick Press $15.99 ISBN: 978-0-7636-5729-1 Ages 9-12 On shelves September 13th. Contemporary Mongolia doesn’t have all that many English language children’s novels to its name. And if you asked me to name everything I knew about Mongolia today, I’d probably find […]
When Life Gives You O.J. By Erica S. Perl Alfred A. Knopf $15.99 ISBN: 978-0-375-85924-3 Ages 9-12 On shelves now. Children’s librarians can be neatly divided into two categories with relatively little difficulty. Basically, they either love and adore dogs and all things doggie related or they don’t. I don’t. I was never the kid […]
Hound Dog True By Linda Urban Harcourt Children’s Books (an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) $15.99 ISBN: 978-0-547-55869-1 Ages 9-12 On shelves September 20th There’s identifying with a work of children’s fiction and then there’s wondering if the author of the work has somehow discovered time travel and was able to observe your younger self. […]
Hidden By Helen Frost Frances Foster Books (Farrar Straus & Giroux) $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-374-38221-6 Ages 10 and up On shelves now. If poems had been introduced to me as a child as puzzles, maybe I would have taken to them a little more. A poem is a kind of puzzle, isn’t it? Depending on the […]
Dead End in Norvelt By Jack Gantos Farrar, Straus and Giroux (an imprint of Macmillan) $15.99 ISBN: 978-0-374-37993-3 Ages 10-14 On shelves September 13, 2011 What makes Jack Gantos tick? It’s a question that haunts every book he writes, from the simplest Rotten Ralph to his own YA autobiography Hole in My Life. It’s a […]