Lucy Maud

Mental health issues touches us all. At least today we can talk about it more than in Lucy Maud's time. Still not enough; but better I suppose.

Upcoming Events

Mark your calendar for these upcoming events:

The Word on the Street, Vancouver's version of the "National Book and Magazine Festival." It's on Sunday, September 28 from 11 to 5. You can find the relevant info. here. You can catch up with me from 1 - 1:30 in the Magazine Life Tent and at 3:30 in the Kids' Tent. I'll be talking about KNOW in the morning and my latest book, Robots, in the afternoon. (More on that book in the next few days.)

Also in Vancouver, is Fall Book Hatching, sponsored by CWILL-BC. Come meet local authors and illustrators for this fun afternoon event. Fall Book Hatching is Sunday, October 5 from 1 to 3 in the downtown library's Alice McKay Room. You can see some pictures from the spring equivalent of the event: Spring Book Hatching, here. Fun, fun. Wish I could be there!

Finally, if you happen to be in Tofino this coming weekend, there's Art in the Garden. This annual event is a chance to meet local writers and artists and enjoy the ambience of the Tofino Botanical Gardens. It's this coming weekend, both afternoons.

Where the Wild Things Are

The lament that I've too much to do before I blog, is as ongoing as the stack of books I want to mention is growing, but, for now, here's a profile of Maurice Sendak. A bit of a curmudgeon, that Wild Man, but, oh, what a genius. (Thanks to Book Ninja for the heads up.)

Jacob Two-Two - Book Four-Four

Yes, Mordecai Richler has left this Earth, but still a fourth Jacob Two-Two book is forthcoming. Tundra Books has contracted Cary Fagan to write a fourth book in the Jacob Two-Two series. You can read about it here.

I enjoyed Fagan's Kaspar Snit books a great deal, so I look forward to seeing what he does with Jacob and friends. (He sends him to sea, that much we know.) Fagan has the appropriate level of zaniness in his writing that's for sure (and, as I recall, satire, which is also Richler's schtick). So, I'm excited about how this will turn out. What I'm very excited about though, is that Dusan Petricic has been contracted to illustrate all four of the books. I adore his fabulous style. I know what's going on my 2009 Christmas Wish List!

Finalists for TD Book Prizes Announced

Okay, so I'm a little late with this, but the finalists for the TD Canadian Children's Literature Awards have been announced. Congratulations to all.

Check out I.N.K.

Some interesting posts over at I.N.K. (Interesting Non-fiction for Kids): Dark Subjects and First Class Travel on Other People's $$. Had a dream about Fuse #8 last night. Obviously, I need a holiday, but both of these kids' lit blogs are worth checking out.

MOM, I'm bored!

If you're a parent, you might have heard that phrase a few times this summer. (Bored is a swear word in our house, but it still comes up from time-to-time.) The next time the b-word is uttered, toss a copy of Helaine Becker's Boredom Blasters their way and scream "Bored people are boring people." Okay, perhaps I'm the one who needs a holiday, but your kids still can't go wrong with this book, which has the subtitle: Brain Bogglers, Awesome Activities, Cool Comics, Tasty Treats, and More....

This is one of Becker's older books. It won the Silver Birch Award in 2006 and obviously delighted kids with ideas such as "Silly Kid Tricks," tips on fortune telling and palm reading, ideas for story and joke telling, quizzes (e.g., How Funny Are You?), recipes and a whole lot more. My favourite are the ideas for Wacky Machines You Can Really Use, which give instructions for Rube-Goldberg-style machines such as the Automatic Toaster, Automatic Face Washer and Automatic Dressing Machine. Lots of fun here, and if this book doesn't grab your little darlings Becker has a whole whack more: Funny Business, Secret Agent Y. O. U., Are You Psychic, to name a few. Boredom Blasters was illustrated by the lovely and talented Claudia Davila, who also illustrated some of my books.

Font Conference

Oh my goodness, this is too funny not to share. Thanks to BookNinja for the link.

Inclusive Literature vs. Propoganda in Sweden

It is a gimmic to sell books, or not? Do the books tell good stories? That's what we should be asking, I think. Would love to see some of the books. Anyone out there who has?

On the Road with Wow Canada!

Okay, it's not too PC considering the price of gas and global warming and all, but we're going on a road trip in a few weeks. To our credit, we'll be driving our spanking new hybrid, which we can ill afford (Anyone want to by a great Toyota 4-Runner? I'll throw in a box of great books to sweeten the pot!) and we'll be hiking once we arrive at our destination. In the car I'll definitely be packing Vivien Bowers' Wow Canada! Exploring This Land from Coast to Coast to Coast.

In this fact-and-fun-packed book, we join 10-year-old Rachel, her older brother Guy, a stuffed beaver (Bucko), Mom and Dad as they cram in their van and head out to explore our vast country from coast to coast to coast. (As Guy tells us in the introduction, "Our whole family is going on a trip across Canada. When my parents told us, they said we had to do it now because in two years I'll be fourteen and 'cool,' and I won't want to go anywhere with my family.")

The scrapbook style of the book provides something for everyone: a map introducing each province or territory, fabulous photographs with short captions, longer chatty entries of the trip as seen through Guy's eyes, lots of great, and very funny sidebars such as Exceedingly Weird (according to Guy), Food I Was Introduced to for My Own Good (such as oysters), According to Mom (who loves to fill in the details), According to Dad (more details and historical bits), Guy's Family Car Trip Survival Tips (new and crazy ways to drive your parents crazy), Things We'll Do and Places We'll Go Next Time, and more.

This book is packed full of info. I can't imagine how long it took Bowers to research and write. It is a keeper for sure and was deservedly so an award winner when it was released. (It won the Red Cedar award one year when I had a book on the short-list, too. It also won the BC Book Prize (Sheila Egoff award), the Hackamatack, and the Information Book Award from the Children's Literature Roundtables. ) Here's a review from Canadian Materials. Happy road tripping, whether you're on a bike, on foot, or (gulp) in a car.

To YA or Not to YA

The blur between what is an adult book and what is a "young adult" (YA) book is a fuzzy one as this article attests. Frankly, this sort of nonsense makes my blood boil,

Mark Haddon, who wrote numerous novels for children before “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” said in an e-mail message that he recalled “a number of people looking down their noses at me when I explained what I did for a living, as if I painted watercolors of cats or performed as a clown at parties.”

Many adults don’t realize how much the Y.A. genre has changed since their days of reading teenage romances and formulaic novels. “A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. is the Garden of Eden of literature,” said Sherman Alexie, whose first Y.A. novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” won the National Book Award for young people’s literature last year. Even the prestige of that award didn’t make him impervious to the stigma. “Some acquaintances felt I was dumbing down,” Alexie said in a phone interview. “One person asked me, ‘Wouldn’t you have rather won the National Book Award for an adult, serious work?’ I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian — that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing Y.A.”

and I think the author is bang on when she said that many adults have no idea what YA really means. Get thee to a book store and check it out. Really, anything goes, and some of the best literature going is written for young people who will gladly toss a book aside if it doesn't grab them from the beginning.

Kids' Books from Across the Pond

Things have been crazy busy without much time to post. For now, here's a list of recommended books from UK's Telegraph newspaper.

Pack Some Mags in Those Bags

Getting ready for a day at the beach or perhaps a road trip? Why not slip some kids' mags in with the Frisbee, sunscreen and lemonade? The summer issues of KNOW and YES Mag are hot off the press.

The theme for this issue of KNOW is night life -- what goes on in your neighborhood at night (ahem, just the stuff fit for the consumption of 6-to-9 year olds)? The kids can read about night-blooming plants and animals that are out and about at night. There's also a Where's Waldo-type spread that highlights the people who are hard at work while most of us are asleep. Elsewhere in the pages are columns on skin (and how sunscreen works), the steps that go into the making of a comic, garter snakes, shark skin, Mercury and how palaeontologists remove fossils from the rock. And, of course, activities, puzzle pages, and ideas of how to participate in future issues. Thirty-two pages of fun, fun, in my unbiased opinion!




For the older kids (and their parents), YES Mag is heading Into the Danger Zone! In this issue they're looking at science in the extreme -- outer space, volcanoes, venomous animals, deep sea, microbiology labs and more. There are also features on vehicles that run on air, the Svalbard Seed Bank tucked up in the chilly Norwegian mountains, and also the physics and chemistry of how those beach essentials -- sunglasses and sunscreen -- work.

Happy (Belated) Canada Day!

We had a happy Canada Day around Tough City. So happy and full of action that I didn't find time to post despite my best intentions. Before I get to a couple of books celebrating our big mass of a country, I'll pass this link on (since I seem to be hepped on alphabet books at the moment): Beyond the Letters: A Retrospective of Canadian Alphabet Books. It's five years out of date, but there's lots of interesting information, and, of course, links to great Canadian books, here. Definitely worth a look.

First up, Eh? to Zed: A Canadian ABeCedarium. Written by Kevin Major and illustrated by Alan Daniel, this is largely an illustrated book with pictures to pore over. Each page (and thus each letter) is allotted a page where Daniels has constructed a collage of images related to the letter. So, for example, the text for L is: Loon, lacrosse, Lillooet, lumberjack. And the accompanying image illustrates just that (with a twist in that the loon is a rubbing of the dollar coin, the "loonie.") But, like most picture books, there's more to it. If you read the text on both pages of a spread, you'll see you have rhyming stanzas such as this:

Gould, Gretzky, Greene, Grizzly bear
Habitant, Horseshore, humpback, hare

Daniel's illustrates the text in an interesting and varied way. For instance, for G we see Glenn Gould on the jewel case of a CD, a skating Wayne Gretzky, and a museum mounted grizzly bear (on a platform). Nancy Greene is shown on one half of one of those flip books where you can change the head, torso and legs of creatures (in this case people) to make funny images. We see Nancy's toqued-head and her legs with skis, but for a torso she has the back of Gretzky's (#99) jersey. Hmm, a little odd, but okay. The strange thing though is that a native person on the other side of the flip book (with a befeathered headress and leather-clothed legs and feet) has what appears to be a cowboy's torso. There is no mention of this native person here or in the text at the back of the book. An oversight or deliberately done to promote discussion? I'd love to know. (Actually, now I DO know! See below.)

At the back of the book there is a densely packed (VERY small font!) four-page spread of text and this is not to be missed: it is full of gems. The pages are titled The Choice of Words, The Choice of Images and is followed by: "Kevin Major's caravan of words cheers our history and celebrates our heroes. It couple the well known with the obscure, the curious with the symbols of our nation. For every province and territory there is a place name, for many junctions of our country something to be discovered. Here are some morsels of information the author came up with for the 104 words."

Even more enlightening and interesting are the notes to Daniel's art: "Alan Daniel's response to these 26 quartets of words reflects the cultural artefacts that have emerged throughout our history. The tableaus he has created are filled with both folk and fine art, the sacred as well as the commercial. They are objects to display in museums and toys to fill a child's idle hours. Several of them call for special mention." So, for example, the Mountie is a whirligig, the Humpback is a soapstone carving, and a cornhusk doll holds a Lacrosse stick. Here's what he has to say about the flip book for G: "A flip book can put Nancy GREENE on skates or make her namesakes Graham and Lorne do a switch-about in television land." Oh, you mean that's Graham Greene? Yikes, I never would have known unless I mined the back for this detail. It's unlikely Graham Greene or Lorne Greene will mean much to kids, but hopefully it won't be lost on the adult reader and it certainly made me want to pore over every other page to see what else would come to light.

Here's the Q, X and Z test:

Quahog, quarter horse, quints, Qu'Appelle
Xenon, xylograph, x-country, x-ing
Zamboni, zipper, zinc, zed

Okay, a bit of a stretch for some because xenon, Zamboni's, and zippers aren't really Canadian (zippers are marginally), but Major skillfully makes them fit in his explanatory notes, so I'll give him that!

In honour of Canada Day, or any day for that matter, this book is one for the bookshelves of all Canadian kids. Just don't forget to spend time with the four pages of notes at the end. They bring so much more to the book and truly make it interactive, not to mention giving an excellent grounding in the diversity of our countries history, geography, citizens, culture, and art.

Here's a review from Canadian Materials.

One More Alphabet Book

Okay, a week or so ago I said I was going to review some alphabet books and then stopped at two. Not much of a list, so here’s another one: M is for Maple: A Canadian Alphabet. Another one from Sleeping Bear Press in Chelsea, Michigan. Apparently they have plans for one from each province (and territory perhaps?). If, like me, you’re wondering why an American publisher is so keen on Canadian content here’s some insight from the June 2008 issue of Quill and Quire: “…publisher Heather Hughes grew up in PEI and also lived in Edmonton before settling in Ann Arbor, Michigan.”

First, the Q, X and Z test:

Q is for Quebec
X marks the spot (where the Last Spike was driven)
Z is for zipper

I like how the author has handled the Z, which was actually not designed by a Canadian:

Z stands for Zipper, which everyone knows
is very important in tents and in clothes
A U.S. inventor had a zipperish notion
but it took a Canadian to get the zipper in motion.

In the notes that accompany this page, he adds more information. (The zipper was invented by an American, but it was perfected and patented by Canadian Gideon Sundback.)

The Canadiana covered in this title is broad indeed: Anne of Green Gables, Kim Campbell, the Dionne quints, Eh, northern lights, Ojibwa, Stampede, Underground Railway, etc. It’s a cursory look at the country, of course, but what can one do with only 52 entries. (Each entry has a main entry – the rhyming text – and then another entry for that letter. For example, U covers both Underground Railway and Ukranians.)

This title is written by Mike Ulmer and beautifully illustrated by Melanie Rose. Ulmer, who is the sport’s columnist at the Toronto Star, has also written a few other alphabet books, including J is for Jumpshot: A Basketball Alphabet and H is for Horse: An Equestrian Alphabet. Rose has been the illustrator for a number of Sleeping Bear titles and it's clear why -- her illustrations support the text well and, in particular, she captures the essence of people well. A particular favourite is the joy on the gold seeker's (K is for Klondike) face as well as the two children playing in a pile of ruby red maple leaves (M is for maple.) This last image is used on the cover.

Here’s a review from Canadian Materials and here's a teacher's guide.

On Tasha Tudor

Wow, I had no idea. I played Little House on the Prairie in my playhouse, but she took it all the way.

Reading on Paper vs. Reading On-Line

This is a great article from Slate, by Michael Agger, illustrating beautifully how we read on-line. Well worth a look.

The Lists of Summer

And so the summer book reading lists begin. Here's one from The Tyee. I'm not sure what's more fun, reading the book blurbs or the blurbs that introduce them? (e.g., Perfect book to read during the commercial breaks of Dancing with the Stars reruns; perfect book to hold open with mouth whilst spooning tofulatti into your mouth; perfect book to read on the beach, especially under small arms fire or threat of hurricanes...).

Tips For Success

The sun is shining, the house is quiet, I've got the best coffee in the world (or at least my world) and Fuse #8. As usual, her site is full of great reviews and links-o-rama. Here's one from today, which will be invaluable for anyone trying to get into the baffling industry of children's books. Take heed, take heart. Thanks to Pixie Stix Kids Pix for all of the work that went into this. Looks like another site for my ever growing list of RSS feeds.

The Quest for Independence

I live in a remarkable place. Remarkable for its beauty and charming citizenry of course (ahem), but also for the fact that is has four, YES FOUR, independent bookstores. That, in a place with approximately 5000 people in the greater region (say, if I drew a 100 km diameter circle from where I live). Granted, there are a gazillion visitors to the area each year and they certainly do help, but we like our books here and I personally love our bookstores. Now, whether they all survive in the end is another thing, but they're hanging in there. (All have to sell other stuff -- coffee, kites, more coffee, kayak trips, expensive outdoor clothes, etc. -- but the primary purpose in three of the stores is to sell books.)

If you've ever wondered why writers and publishers whine about the dearth of independent bookstores, check out this blog post by Annick Press president Rick Wilks. As he says, independents mean diversity and that is a fine thing in many (actually, all) aspects of life: the more diversity, the more choice for you dear reader. The more diversity, the more knowledgeable staff who've actually read the books and care about giving you the best information (and book, of course) they can. So, just as when you shop for food (and, well, just about anything) cheap is most often not better. Cheap means someone is getting screwed. So, please, when it comes to books, put sticker price aside and support your independents.