Off with Their Heads!


Book Description

When Hansel and Gretel try to eat the witch's gingerbread house in the woods, are they indulging their "uncontrolled cravings" and "destructive desires" or are they simply responding normally to the hunger pangs they feel after being abandoned by their parents? Challenging Bruno Bettelheim and other critics who read fairy tales as enactments of children's untamed urges, Maria Tatar argues that it is time to stop casting the children as villians. In this provocative book she explores how adults mistreat children, focusing on adults not only as hostile characters in fairy tales themselves but also as real people who use frightening stories to discipline young listeners.




Handbook of Research on Children's and Young Adult Literature


Book Description

This landmark volume is the first to bring together leading scholarship on children’s and young adult literature from three intersecting disciplines: Education, English, and Library and Information Science. Distinguished by its multidisciplinary approach, it describes and analyzes the different aspects of literary reading, texts, and contexts to illuminate how the book is transformed within and across different academic figurations of reading and interpreting children’s literature. Part one considers perspectives on readers and reading literature in home, school, library, and community settings. Part two introduces analytic frames for studying young adult novels, picturebooks, indigenous literature, graphic novels, and other genres. Chapters include commentary on literary experiences and creative production from renowned authors and illustrators. Part three focuses on the social contexts of literary study, with chapters on censorship, awards, marketing, and literary museums. The singular contribution of this Handbook is to lay the groundwork for colleagues across disciplines to redraw the map of their separately figured worlds, thus to enlarge the scope of scholarship and dialogue as well as push ahead into uncharted territory.




Gary Paulsen


Book Description

Much of Gary Paulsen’s life has been lived close to the natural world. A three-time Newbery Honor winner, Paulsen writes adventure stories, such as Dogsong, Hatchet, and Woods Runner, where his young main characters struggle to survive in the natural world. Other stories touch on family visits to Minnesota, as in The Winter Room and Harris and Me, or science fiction, as in Time Hackers. Recently, Paulsen and his son, Jim, collaborated on two books involving a boy, his father, and their dogs. In 1997, Paulsen won the Margaret A. Edwards Award for his lifetime contribution to young adult literature.




In Darkness


Book Description

Winner of the 2013 Michael L. Printz Award This is the story of "Shorty"-a 15-year-old boy trapped in a collapsed hospital during the earthquake in Haiti. Surrounded by the bodies of the dead, increasingly weak from lack of food and water, Shorty begins to hallucinate. As he waits in darkness for a rescue that may never come, a mystical bridge seems to emerge between him and Haitian leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, uniting the two in their darkest suffering-and their hope. A modern teen and a black slave, separated by hundreds of years. Yet in some strange way, the boy in the ruins of Port au Prince and the man who led the struggle for Haiti's independence might well be one and the same . . .




Reading Together


Book Description

Reading Together is the essential guide for parents interested in starting a book club with their kids and raising their children to become book-loving adults. This book is the first guide to parent-child book clubs. Written by a group of moms and their adolescent children who started a book club while the kids were in first grade, this how-to book shares the dos and don'ts they learned over more than 100 meetings and 100 books. Brimming with insight and inspiration, Reading Together includes the details of organizing and structuring meetings, tips on finding diverse books and choosing titles that spur discussion, common book club challenges and how to overcome them, and more. Readers will also find plenty of curated booklists with brilliant recommendations for middle grade and YA readers across genres, from sci-fi to mystery, adventure, and graphic novels. This book is a go-to gift for bookish parents who hope to raise a reader and connect with their community through the magic of books. ONE-OF-A-KIND: With detailed advice gathered over more than a decade and an engaging story at its core, Reading Together is an inspiring and useful handbook for parents looking to start a book club of their own and nurture a love of reading in their kids. A WINNING FORMULA: This book promises a stronger parent-child bond and is a pure celebration of books and reading—a winning recipe. GIFT APPEAL: Reading Together is an attractive gift or impulse-buy for a bookish parent or a parent of bookish kids. Perfect for: • Bookish parents with children • Parents of bookish children • Parents looking to encourage reluctant readers • Parents looking for after-school activities that are good for their kids • Grandparents of school-age children • Elementary school teachers and librarians




Dust Off the Gold Medal


Book Description

The oldest and most prestigious children’s literature award, the Newbery Medal has since 1922 been granted annually by the American Library Association to the children’s book it deems "most distinguished." Medal books enjoy an outsized influence on American children’s literature, figuring perennially on publishers’ lists, on library and bookstore shelves, and in school curricula. As such, they offer a compelling window into the history of US children’s literature and publishing, as well as into changing societal attitudes about which books are "best" for America’s schoolchildren. Yet literary scholars have disproportionately ignored the Medal winners in their research. This volume provides a critically- and historically-grounded scholarly analysis of representative but understudied Newbery Medal books from the 1920s through the 2010s, interrogating the disjunction between the books’ omnipresence and influence, on the one hand, and the critical silence surrounding them, on the other. Dust Off the Gold Medal makes a case for closing these scholarly gaps by revealing neglected texts’ insights into the politics of children’s literature prizing and by demonstrating how neglected titles illuminate critical debates currently central to the field of children’s literature. In particular, the essays shed light on the hidden elements of diversity apparent in the neglected Newbery canon while illustrating how the books respond—sometimes in quite subtle ways—to contemporaneous concerns around race, class, gender, disability, nationalism, and globalism.




Pioneers and Leaders in Library Services to Youth


Book Description

This compilation of 97 biographical essays celebrates public and school library service to children and young adults through the professional lives and contributions of its pioneers and leaders. Devoted entirely to the field of youth library services, the essays represent both outstanding librarians in the field, as well as those whose work has made significant contributions supporting the work of professional youth librarians. Sketches include modern-day workers, spanning the late 19th century until 1999. Will inspire young people as it underscores the continuing importance of youth library services.







Collection Development and Management for 21st Century Library Collections


Book Description

Packed with discussion questions, activities, suggested additional references, selected readings, and many other features that speak directly to students and library professionals, Gregory’s Collection Development and Management for 21st Century Library Collections is a comprehensive handbook that also shares myriad insightful ideas and approaches valuable to experienced practitioners. This new second edition brings an already stellar text fully up to date, presenting top-to-bottom coverage of the impact of new technologies and developments on the discipline, including discussion of e-books, open access, globalization, self-publishing, and other trends; needs assessment, policies, and selection sources and processes; budgeting and fiscal management; collection assessment and evaluation; weeding, with special attention paid to electronic materials; collaborative collection development and resource sharing; marketing and outreach; self-censorship as a component of intellectual freedom, professional ethics, and other legal issues; diversity and ADA issues; preservation; and the future of the field. Additional features include updated vendor lists, samples of a needs assessment report, a collection development policy, an approval plan, and an electronic materials license.




International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature


Book Description

The International Companion Encyclopedia answers these questions and provides comprehensive coverage of children's literature from a wide range of perspectives. Over 80 substantial essays by world experts include Iona Opie on the oral tradition, Gillian Avery on family stories and Michael Rosen on audio, TV and other media. The Companion covers a broad range of topics, from the fairy tale to critical theory, from the classics to comics. Structure The Companion is divided into five sections: 1) Theory and Critical Approaches 2) Types and Genres 3) The Context of Children's Literature 4) Applications of Children's Literature 5) The World of Children's Literature Each essay is followed by references and suggestions for further reading. The volume is fully indexed.