Parenthetical

Carina Chocano’s New York Times article “A Plague of Strong Female Characters” gets at most of my issues with this trope: “Strong female character” is one of those shorthand memes that has leached into the cultural groundwater and spawned all kinds of cinematic clichés: alpha professionals whose laserlike focus on career advancement has turned them [...]

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Diane Ravitch is an education expert I’ve long respected. As assistant secretary of education under George H. W. Bush and a member of conservative think-tanks, she was a strong supporter of No Child Left Behind. Now she’s come to believe the reliance on test-based “accountability” is a failure: KS: What do you think about the [...]

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I talk with adolescents all day, but I have limited experience with little kids. I get scared when confronted with a tiny, semi-verbal creature and tend to fall back on my instincts — which, I’m ashamed to say, with girls means I often compliment them on some aspect of their appearance. They (and their parents) [...]

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My badass colleague Arianna and her friend Anna, the Wandering Librarians, wandered to the American Library Association conference in New Orleans this week to present on great graphic novels for girls. I hear everything went well; yay! (Insert ALA-attendee envy here. But I’m sitting in my house without A/C and am not a sweaty puddle?) [...]

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My initial response to Meghan Cox Gurdon’s incendiary WSJ column is here, but it got crazy long and I decided this topic needed its own post. Ok, so there’s a lot of dark YA lit because teens want to read it — both the Literature and the popcorn. There’s also tons of light YA lit. [...]

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Ok, I’m way late to the party on this one because I was in the middle of wrapping up my school year, but: a couple of weeks ago, Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote a column called “Darkness Too Visible” in the WSJ about dark YA lit. There’s too much of it nowadays, teens are inundated with [...]

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Picture books aren’t my usual scene, but urban community totally is. So I loved this book trailer for a new picture book about the 2003 blackout in New York (via Fuse #8):

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Maybe Genius is really hitting it out of the park today (and by “today” I mean “the day I picked to catch up on my last month of feeds”). Here’s a handy list of dystopian tropes. I’m thinking about using it to create Dystopian Bingo. Would you play with me? A couple of favorite bits: [...]

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I recently had to think about this ubiquitous question from a different angle when asked to read a colleague’s manuscript to see if it could work for a YA market. Why is it or is it not a YA novel now? What changes could she make to turn it into a YA novel, and how [...]

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Paolo Bacigalupi (Ship Breaker) is interviewed in School Library Journal this month: “Master of Disaster”. He talks about his take on the now-trendy post-apocalyptic genre. Reading the interview I had the unsettling feeling that he stole the kind of thoughts that are churning around in my brain all the time and used them as interview [...]

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