Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood

By Michael Chabon

When I was growing up, our house backed onto woods, a thin two-acre remnant of a once-mighty wilderness. This was in a Maryland city where the enlightened planners had provided a number of such lingering swaths of green. They were tame as can be, our woods, and yet at night they still filled with unfathomable shadows. In the winter they lay deep in snow and seemed to absorb, to swallow whole, all the ordinary noises of your body and your world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. It was the place into which the bad boys fled after they egged your windows on Halloween and left your pumpkins pulped in the driveway. There were no Indians in those woods, but there had been once. We learned about them in school. Patuxent Indians, they’d been called. Swift, straight-shooting, silent as deer. Gone but for their lovely place names: Patapsco, Wicomico, Patuxent.

A minor but undeniable aura of romance was attached to the history of Maryland, my home state: refugee Catholic Englishmen, cavaliers in ringlets and ruffs, pirates, battles, the sack of Washington, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Harriet Tubman, Antietam. And when you went out into those woods behind our house, you could feel all that history, those battles and dramas and romances, those stories. You could work it into your games, your imaginings, your lonely flights from the turmoil or torpor of your life at home. My friends and I spent hours there, braves, crusaders, commandos, blues and grays.

More here:   http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22891

In Nothing but Ghosts, acclaimed author Beth Kephart (Undercover and House of Dance) artfully juxtaposes themes of grief and torment with the persistence of beauty. Katie must reconcile herself with the notion that “Things disappear and vanish. That’s the fact. Before you’re ready for them to go, they go, and after that all you can do is keep the idea of them bright inside yourself.”

Spurred by a need to make sense of her own recent loss, Katie becomes compelled to solve the mystery that has shrouded Miss Martine’s withdrawal from society. She begins to delve into the community archives with the assistance of a local librarian, an atypical beauty herself, trying to break through a tangle of riddles and hidden truths.

Though confronting her own ghosts, Katie keeps busy through the long, hot summer, dividing her time between the big old house she now shares only with her father, the library where she conducts her research, and Miss Martine’s garden where secrets are being unearthed daily. Meanwhile, Katie’s father is grieving in his own eccentric but even-handed way. He restores paintings for a living and his latest acquisition might just hold an important key.

Beth Kephart’s dazzling new novel is wise and wonderful, certain to be a revelation for young adult readers. As Katie makes a few necessary discoveries, she begins to let love in once again. In doing so, she honors an important promise, “a daughter’s promise: to live my life with my eyes wide open. To honor exuberance, and color.” 

From Paper Cuts, the NYTBR’s Book Blog:   

Remembering Eden Ross Lipson

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times Eden Ross Lipson in 1993.

Eden Ross Lipson, who died yesterday at 66 from pancreatic cancer, was a person of superhuman energies. An editor at the Book Review for 31 years, she was most visible for the last 21 of them as The Times’ children’s books editor until her retirement in 2005. (Click here to read her final children’s special issue.) She also wrote more than 100 articles and reviews for The Times about cultural phenomena ranging from “Harry Potter” to “The Lion King”; edited “The New York Times Parent’s Guide to the Best Books for Children” (Three Rivers Press) and, for a time, The Times’ internal newsletter TimesTalk. For three years, she was the volunteer librarian at the Adolph S. Ochs School, PS 111, on West 53rd Street, which had no librarian of its own and hardly any library. In 2005, Eden founded an internship program to bring young editors from children’s publishers into the library to read to third-graders — visits from which she thought the editors might learn even more than the kids.

Eden was zealous in her search for new talent. Peter Sis (the winner of many awards for illustrated books like “The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain” and “The Tree of Life”), remembered meeting her 25 years ago when they were neighbors in the East Village. Not yet an author and not imagining he would become one, Sis commented in an e-mail that he was encouraged when Eden told him, “You know, you just might be very good one day.”

In late March, Eden was at home on East Second Street, fielding calls from a friend about evening plans and from a nurse at Mount Sinai. When she got off the phone, she smiled and said she had a surprise, and brought out the unbound pages of her first children’s book: “Applesauce Season,” illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein. The homey kitchen in his pictures looked like her kitchen, and the figure cooking alongside a small boy looked familiar too. Roaring Brook Press will publish it in August, and last week Eden saw a finished copy in the hospital; the publisher had produced exactly one, just for her.

James Yang. Atheneum, $15.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-4169-0936-1
Taking the idea of “fitting in” literally, Puzzlehead and his friends Mo, Bob, Sue and Stevie use their heads—literally—to figure out how to play. (The whole gang, with oversize heads in unusual geometric shapes, seems to exist in only two dimensions, like paper cutouts.) “Come spin with me, Puzzlehead,” cries Bob, whose T-shaped head fits perfectly into a kind of whirligig, which he spins around on. “That will make me too dizzy,” Puzzlehead replies glumly. At last Puzzlehead locates a space into which his head fits neatly. Though once installed (upside down), “there was not much to do in his perfect Puzzlehead place.” Yan’s (the Joey and Jet books) stylish pages are full of typographic whimsy, with dialogue bunched by the heads of the speakers, big capital letters used for emphasis and entire sentences set in curvy lines that match the arc of the action. A clever conclusion brings the whole gang back together and delivers the story’s message that—regardless of their shape—a few heads are better than one. Ages 3–6. (Apr.)

The fact that Disney’s recent blockbuster hit Race to Witch Mountain, starring Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) as a taxi driver who winds up helping two aliens-disguised-as-teenagers find their space ship, has literary roots may have been lost on a few fans. The reason is that the film’s source material, a backlist science fiction title by Alexander Key, fell out of print years ago. Although Key’s book, Escape to Witch Mountain, originally published in 1968, wasn’t on shelves in time to reap the benefits of Race to Witch Mountain, Key’s agency, McIntosh & Otis, has seen to it that Escape to Witch Mountain will receive a chance at a new print life.

Escape to Witch Mountain was originally published by the now-defunct Philadelphia-based Westminster Press. Escape saw a number of iterations in Hollywood. It was adapted into a 1975 feature film by Disney and spawned two sequels, a 1978 theatrical release called Return from Witch Mountain and a 1982 TV movie called Beyond Witch Mountain. Yet another adaptation followed, in the form of a 1995 made-for-TV movie. Despite all the Hollywood attention, the book fell out of print sometime in the late 1980s. A rep at McIntosh & Otis, which oversees the Key estate, could not confirm when or why the book fell out of print, though Pocket, at one point, published a paperback edition.

Disney’s 2009 movie adaptation slightly rejiggers the original material, tweaking certain plot points and setting the story 30 years later. (In the book, two orphans–one with telekinetic abilities–escape a nefarious man who claims to be their guardian, only to discover they’re actually aliens. The 1975 film altered aspects of that plot line and, among the updates in the 2009 film, Johnson’s L.A. cabbie is the orphans’ protector, instead of an inner-city Irish priest.) 

With renewed interest in the book spurred by the new film, McIntosh & Otis has sold reprint rights to Escape to Witch Mountain to Sourcebooks. The agency fielded a number of requests at the Bologna Book Fair, and Sourcebooks’s Lyron Bennett and Daniel Ehrenhaft ultimately struck a deal, for an undiclosed amount, with McIntosh & Otis’s Edward Necarsulmer. Sourcebooks will release a paperback edition of Escape to coincide with Disney’s DVD release of Race to Witch Mountain, a date for which has not been set.

A rep from McIntosh & Otis also confirmed that a tie-in cover for Sourcebooks’ reprint is pending given talks with Disney, which released, in January, a novelization tie-in to coincide with the movie.

http://www.bookpage.com/0904bp/children/childrens_poetry.html

The follow-up book to former Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has been scheduled for a fall 2009 release. The Associated Press (via USA Today) reported that Rodale Books will publish Our Choice in November “on 100% recycled paper. The book, which proposes solutions to the global warming crisis documented in Inconvenient Truth, was called The Path to Survival when first announced two years ago.”

Awards: Children’s Choice Book Award Finalists

On May 12, as part of Children’s Book Week, Jon Scieszka, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, will host and announce the Children’s Choice Book Awards. Until then, from March 16 through May 3, kids will be able to cast their votes for their favorite books, author, and illustrator at bookstores, schools, libraries and online at BookWeekOnline.com.
 
The finalists were determined by close to 15,000 children and teens. The titles are:
 
Kindergarten to Second Grade Book of the Year:

• The Donut Chef by Bob Staake (Golden/Random House)
• Katie Loves the Kittens by John Himmelman (Holt)
• The Pigeon Wants a Puppy! by Mo Willems (Hyperion)
• Sort It Out! by Barbara Mariconda, illustrated by Sherry Rogers (Sylvan Dell)
• Those Darn Squirrels by Adam Rubin, illustrated by Daniel Salmieri (Clarion)

Third Grade to Fourth Grade Book of the Year:

• Babymouse: Puppy Love by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm (Random House)
• One Million Things by Peter Chrisp (DK)
• Spooky Cemeteries by Dinah Williams (Bearport)
• Underwear: What We Wear Under There by Ruth Freeman Swain (Holiday)
• Willow by Denise Brennan-Nelson and Rosemarie Brennan, illustrated by Cyd Moore (Sleeping Bear)

Fifth Grade to Sixth Grade Book of the Year:

• 100 Most Dangerous Things on the Planet by Anna Claybourne (Scholastic Reference)
• Amulet, Book One: The Stonekeeper by Kazu Kibuishi (Graphix/Scholastic)
• The Big Field by Mike Lupica (Philomel/Penguin)
• Swords: An Artist’s Devotion by Ben Boos (Candlewick)
• Thirteen by Lauren Myracle (Dutton/Penguin)

Note: The finalists for Book of the Year in the Kindergarten through Sixth Grade categories above were the books that received the highest number of votes in the IRA-CBC Children’s Choices program.
 
Teen Choice Book Award:

• Airhead by Meg Cabot (Point/Scholastic)
• Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown)
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press)
• Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen (Viking/Penguin)
• Paper Towns by John Green (Dutton/Penguin)

Note: More than 2,200 teens voted for their favorite book of 2008 on the TeenReads website, part of the Book Reporter network. The five books that received the highest number of votes are finalists for the Teen Choice Book Award above.
 
Author of the Year:

• Jeff Kinney for Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (Amulet /Abrams)
• Stephenie Meyer for Breaking Dawn (Little, Brown)
• Christopher Paolini for Brisingr (Knopf)
• James Patterson for Maximum Ride: The Final Warning (Little, Brown)
• Rick Riordan for Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Battle of the Labyrinth (Hyperion)

Illustrator of the Year:

• Laura Cornell for Big Words for Little People by Jamie Lee Curtis (Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins)
• Robin Preiss Glasser for Fancy Nancy: Bonjour Butterfly! by Jane O’Connor (HarperCollins)
• Mo Willems for The Pigeon Wants a Puppy! (Hyperion)
• David Shannon, Loren Long and David Gordon for Smash! Crash! by Jon Scieszka (Simon & Schuster)
• John J Muth for Zen Ties (Scholastic Press)

The Author and Illustrator of the Year finalists were selected by the CBC and CBC Foundation from a review of bestseller lists.
 
Al Roker, winner of last year’s Impact Award, will present the 2009 Impact Award to Whoopi Goldberg, “in recognition of her vast contribution to the promotion of literacy and the love of reading among young people.”

To read my round-up of a few exceptional books for young readers on the subject of Honest Abe, see BookPage’s January issue.   Or look here:

http://www.bookpage.com/0901bp/children/honest_abe.html