Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, Claudette Colvin, fifteen years old, stayed in her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. It was March 2, 1955, but in the intervening years, this story has been all-but-forgotten. Phillip Hoose's work is essential reading.
Admittedly, I chose There's an Owl in the Shower because I had read Jean Craighead George's classic My Side of the Mountain. I knew of her reputation for including ecological and environmental themes in the stories she has written for children. But when I realized that it had been published in
When Penelope Lively was interviewed by Emma Donoghue in 2003, the author was tickled to have her books for children acknowledged; her writing for children was routinely dismissed and she explained that she now felt quite distanced from it. The news of this dismissal shocked me because I came of
Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night, written by Joyce Sidman, illustrated by Rick Allen. Published in 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Books for Children. "There are definitely faster methods of making a picture, but few more enjoyable in a backwards sort of way." The artist was speaking of production,
Think there's nothing in common between this year's Giller Prize winner and Mélanie Watt's Scaredy Squirrel series? Take this quote from Lynn Coady's Hellgoing: "You can only be vigilant, she thought, about a few things at a time. Otherwise it’s not vigilance anymore. It starts to be more like panic."
