Mama’s Window by Lynn Rubright (Lee and Low, 2005) tells the story of “Sugar” Martin, a young black boy who lives with his uncle in a Mississippi Delta swamp. For as long as Sugar can remember, his mother has worked to raise funds for a stained glass window for the Sweet Kingdom Church. Some think her idea is foolish, but she insists that the window is important, that beauty is important. After his mother’s illness and...
I’ll be honest. I got this book exclusively based on the teaser quotes on the back cover: “The new C.S. Lewis” and “Hotter than Potter.” Wow! I thought. The first book in The Doppleganger Chronicles, The First Escape (Tyndale Press, 2008) introduces us to the Dopple twins, Saskia and Sadie, who have been abandoned at Isambard Dunstan’s School for Wayward Children. Although their mother said she would return, the twins are now fourteen and she hasn’t...
Special thanks to my son, co-writer of this blog entry. Steampunk fiction is a sub-genre of sci-fi “set in an era or world where steam power is widely used” (wikipedia). Think 19th century Victorian England with a fantasy/sci-fi twist. Scott Westerfeld’s steampunk novel Leviathan (Simon & Schuster, 2009) is set during the beginning of World War I, and follows many of the historical events of World War I. A big part of what makes this novel...
In March I attended the Missouri SCBWI Agents Day. One of the agents praised Dan Yaccarino’s The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau (Knopf, 2009) and sure enough, this is a fantastic picture book–biography, science, and nature all rolled up with wonderful text and artwork. Check out this trailer.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” A fire fighter, an Olympic speed skater, a veterinarian, maybe president of the United States? So You Want to be President? written by Judith St. George and illustrated by David Small (Penguin) gives the real scoop about being president. There are good things about being president: a big white mansion, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, and a movie theatre in your house. There are bad things about being...
Susan Beth Pfeffer’s the dead & the gone (Harcourt 2008) is a companion story to her previous YA novel Life as We Knew (Harcourt 2006). The novel takes the same cataclysmic disaster, but this time tells the story from the perspective of Alex Morales, a seventeen-year-old boy living in New York City. When a meteor hits the moon and pushes it closer to the Earth, the change in gravitational pull causes massive worldwide destruction. Tides...
