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Borrow this.
Lucy Hull, protagonist of Rebecca Makkai‘s adult novel The Borrower (Viking, June), is a sardonic twenty-something children’s librarian. Her favorite patron, ten-year-old Ian, runs away to escape his...
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Dorothy, how does that make you feel?
The formidable Kenneth Kidd explores the entwined history of children’s literature and psychoanalysis in Freud in Oz: At the Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature (Univ. of...
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Tragedy of the traveling pants—no spoilers
I recently started reading Ann Brashares’s Sisterhood Everlasting (Random House, 2011), a ten-years-later installment of the popular YA Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series (Sisterhood is shelved...
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Deck Z
Chris Pauls and Matt Solomon’s adult novel Deck Z: The Titanic: Unsinkable. Undead. (Chronicle, September 2012) begins in early April, 1912, when German pathologist Theodor Weiss is summoned to...
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Reluctant muses
The Fairies Return, Or, New Tales for Old (Princeton University Press, October 2012), an anthology of revisioned fairy tales originally collected and published in 1934 by Peter Davies, was recently...
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Sumo
I’ve never witnessed an actual sumo wrestling match, so this graphic novel about sumo caught my curiosity. Thien Pham’s Sumo (First Second, December 2012) follows Scott, an American college graduate...
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Missed Connections: F4I [fan for illustrator]
–F4I [fan for illustrator] (Boston) I saw you from across the Paresky Center at the 2011 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards ceremony. You were accepting your honor for illustrating Pecan Pie Baby. Charmed...
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Ye olde children’s poetry
Belt up your kirtles and hold onto your snoods. Fleas, Flies, and Friars: Children’s Poetry from the Middle Ages by Nicholas Orme (Cornell University Press, May 2012) presents a variety of verse from...
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A whole bunch of questions for Lucy Knisley
In her adult graphic-novel memoir Relish: My Life in the Kitchen (First Second, April 2013), Lucy Knisley portrays specific periods of her life and their associated “taste-memories” in a series of...
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The Silver Linings Play…book vs. movie
Crossover writer Matthew Quick, author of young adult novels Sorta Like a Rock Star, Boy 21, and the soon-to-be-released Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, made his debut in 2008 with The Silver Linings...
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Books within books
I’ve just finished reading two adult books in which the title of the book you’re reading is the same as a book in the characters’ world. The Best of Youth by Michael Dahlie is about a ghostwriter of a...
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The Best of Youth
I just finished reading The Best of Youth by Michael Dahlie (W.W. Norton & Co., 2013). In it, aspiring twenty-something author Henry agrees to ghostwrite a YA novel for a respected Hollywood actor...
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