SWEET ON BOOKS BLOG

Today is the anniversary of Margaret Wise Brown's 100th Birthday!

In her memory, perhaps tonight is a good night for a little Good Night Moon reading??  Here is a link to her website, where you can see she was so much more than the beloved Good Night Moon title.  Enjoy...

Diary of a Wimpy Kid 5 Announcement!

OK.....we have a date....November 9, 2010.  And the color of the cover......drumroll please....PURPLE!

Amulet (Wimpy's publisher) announced all this today.  The book's title will be released in July.

Click here to read the full press release.  Get your Wimpy fans excited!

wonder-shirts.com

There is this great site that has been around for many years, that you probably don't know about - but you should!  Wonder-Shirts is a site that offers t-shirts for kids (and adults) featuring artwork by children's illustrators with characters from kids books (natch!).  Wonder-Shirts has agreements with some great illustrators, think Mo Willems, Rosemary Wells, Kevin Henkes and more. 

What a great gift idea for the kids in your life.  A Kevin Henke's Lily book and a Lily t-shirt - perfect!  An Elephant and Piggie book and an Elephant and Piggie T-shirt, my five year old would be in heaven.  And don't we all have enough plastic toys (I know I do!)?  So why not do something a little unique for you next bday party present...if yours is anything like my family, your children probably have 2/3 parties to attend this weekend.  So why not order a few t-shirts to have on hand, and head to your local independent book shop to get the matching book and start giving one-of-a kind birthday presents!

Katherine Patterson...

Is our new ambassador for Young People's Literature.  Author of such classics as Bridge to Terabithia, The Great Gilly Hopkins (an all-time favorite book when I was a child), Jacob I Have Loved, to just name a few, Patterson has now taken on this new position.  Lucky us!  She takes over where Jon Scieszka left off.  

The Children's Book Council just announced Patterson has embarked on a writing project and she will be writing monthly essays over the two year tenure of this post about her work writing for children to be published by Clarion Books entitled, Read for Your Life: Speeches and Writings of Katherine Paterson. Each essay will be available for download individually or by subscription.  At the end of the two years, they will be published in a paperback edition.

Click here to get to a the Children's Book Council website, where you can download the first essay free (but only until May 24th, so hurry!

Children's Book Council announce the winners of the 2010 Children's Choice Book Awards

As usual, the CBC, in conjunction with Every Child a Reader, Inc., has picked outstanding efforts to be celebrated from the past year.  What's special about this award is the winners were voted on by children! The only national award that lets children have their say.  I like it!  Take a look at the list below.  Please note (we say unabashedly) that we have reviewed most of these books on Sweet on Books, and loved them all.  An interesting note about one...my daughter has been bugging me to review a book called Dork Diaries - she resumes her argument weekly when she wanders into my office and sees it still lying in the (giant) "to be reviewed" pile...Sorry H, you are vindicated - not that I ever doubted your recommendation!  I will get to it immediately...

Author of the Year

James Patterson for Max (A Maximum Ride Novel) (Little, Brown)

 

Illustrator of the Year

Peter Brown for The Curious Garden (Little, Brown)

 

Kindergarten to Second Grade Book of the Year

Lulu the Big Little Chick written and illustrated by Paulette Bogan (Bloomsbury USA)

 

Third Grade to Fourth Grade Book of the Year

Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute written and illustrated by Jarrett J. Krosoczka (Knopf/Random House)

 

Fifth Grade to Sixth Grade Book of the Year

Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-so-fabulous Life written and illustrated by Rachel Renee Russell (Aladdin/Simon & Schuster)

 

Teen Choice Book of the Year

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

Click here to go to press release on CBC website.

We are back blogging!

Ok...sorry....this blog has been woefully ignored.  What with reading and reviewing children's books for Sweet on Books and raising a few kids, this blog has been neglected.  We are hoping to change that right now.  May is such an exciting month for children's literature, and we are seeing such exciting things, we just need to pass them on!

Our friends at Shelf Awareness have a great quote today from Ireland's first children's laureate Author and publisher Siobhán Parkinson:

 

"I believe that children's literature lays the foundations of the imaginative life of a people, and that every child deserves to have access to a reading haven.... Literature plays a unique role in helping us to interrogate who we are as a society; it has the power to make us understand what it means to be human, and it offers us that most subversive of things--pleasure."

Here is a link to the full article in the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Did you know the US has a National Ambassador for Young People's Literature??  None other than the fabulous Katherine Patterson.  Stay tuned for more on that...including free downloads of Patterson's writing!