Month: January 2020

There are 24 Jack Reacher books in the popular Lee Child series. Fans can rest assured that new titles will be appearing now that Lee Child has decided to have his younger brother, Andrew, take over the series.  Lee Child states that his brother has more energy and ideas, at this point, to do the character justice.  The new author name will appear as Andrew Child.

It’s hard to believe, but  Anne Carroll Moore DID NOT like Goodnight Moon, the famous picture book by Margaret Wise Brown. Moore was a leading advocate for children’s rights in the library, developing the children’s room at Pratt Institute and at New York Public. Moore graduated from Pratt with a degree in library science in 1896 and developed a set of standards for children titled the four respects: respect for children, for children’s books, for fellow workers and for the professional standing of children’s librarians. We librarians owe her a huge debt of gratitude. Before 1896 children were seen as a nuisance in the library, and often excluded until the age of 14. But oddly enough, she had a wee problem with censorship, refusing to order Wise’s classic for NYPL. She also didn’t like Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, two classic children’s chapter books. Oh well, none of us are perfect…

The 2020 Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature for young adults has been announced! And the winner is…..

Dig by A.S. King!!! Now, I must admit, that even though I have always loved King’s books…I did not read this one this year! Be sure to click on the image to get your copy. I am certainly putting it on my TBR list immediatly. If you are wondering what the book is about:

“The Shoveler, the Freak, CanIHelpYou?, Loretta the Flea-Circus Ring Mistress, and First-Class Malcolm. These are the five teenagers lost in the Hemmings family’s maze of tangled secrets. Only a generation removed from being simple Pennsylvania potato farmers, Gottfried and Marla Hemmings managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions and now sit atop a seven-figure bank account, wealth they’ve declined to pass on to their adult children or their teenage grand children. “Because we want them to thrive,” Marla always says.

What does thriving look like? Like carrying a snow shovel everywhere. Like selling pot at the Arby’s drive-thru window. Like a first class ticket to Jamaica between cancer treatments. Like a flea-circus in a doublewide. Like the GPS coordinates to a mound of dirt in a New Jersey forest.

As the rot just beneath the surface of the Hemmings precious white suburban respectability begins to spread, the far flung grand children gradually find their ways back to each other, just in time to uncover the terrible cost of maintaining the family name.”