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    March 28, 2013: Big at Bologna

     

     

    This year at the Bologna Children's Book Fair, the focus has shifted to middle-grade.  “A lot of foreign publishers are cutting back on YA and are looking for middle-grade,” said agent Laura Langlie, according to Publisher's Weekly.  Lighly illustrated or stand-alone contemporary middle-grade fiction is getting the most attention.  Read more...

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    March 10, 2013: Marching to New Titles

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Check out these titles releasing in March...

     

     

     

     

     

    March 5, 2013: Catch the BEA Buzz

     

    Titles for BEA's Editor Buzz panels have been announced.  The middle-grade titles selected are:

     

     

    A Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates #1: Magic Marks the Spot by Caroline Carlson

     

     

    Counting By 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan

     

     

    The Fantastic Family Whipple by Matthew Ward

     

     

    Nick and Tesla's High-Voltages Danger Lab by Bob Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith

     

     

    The Tie Fetch by Amy Herrick

     

    For more Buzz books in other categories, read more...

     

     

     

    February 20, 2013: Lunching at the MG Roundtable 

     

    Earlier this month, MG authors Jeanne Birdsall, Rebecca Stead, and N.D. Wilson shared insight about writing for the middle grades at an informal luncheon with librarians held in conjunction with the New York Public Library's Children's Literary Salon "Middle Grade: Surviving the Onslaught." 

     

     

    Read about their thoughts...

     

    February 10, 2013: New Books to Love

     

     

     

     

     

    Check out these new titles releasing in February...

     

     

     

    January 28, 2013: Ivan Tops List of Winners 

    The American Library Association today honored the best of the best from 2012, announcing the winners of the Newbery, Caldecott, and Printz awards, along with a host of other prestigious youth media awards, at their annual winter meeting in Seattle.

    The Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature went to The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. Honor books were: Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz; Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin; and Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage. 

    The Coretta Scott King Book Award went to Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America written by Andrea Davis Pinkney and illustrated by Brian Pinkney.

    The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, which honors an author for his or her long-standing contributions to children’s literature, was presented to Katherine Paterson.  

    The Pura Belpre Author Award, which honors a Latino author, went to Benjamin Alire Saenz for his novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, which was also named a Printz Honor book and won the Stonewall Book Award for its portrayal of the GLBT experience.

    For a complete list of winners…

     

    January 22, 2013: Biography Wins Sydney Taylor

    Louise Borden's His Name Was Raoul Wallenberg, a verse biography of the Swedish humanitarian, has won the Sydney Taylor Award in the middle-grade category. The award is given annually to books of the highest literary merit that highlight the Jewish experience. Aimee Lurie, chair of the awards committee, writes, "Louise Borden's well-researched biography will, without a doubt, inspire children to perform acts of kindness and speak out against oppression."

    For more...

     

    January 17, 2013: Erdrich Wins Second O'Dell

    Louise Erdrich is recipient of the 2013 Scott O'Dell Award for her historical novel Chickadee, the fourth book in her Birchbark House series. Roger Sutton, Horn Book editor and chair of the awards committee, says of Chickadee, "The book has humor and suspense (and disarmingly simple pencil illustrations by the author), providing a picture of 1860s Anishinabe life that is never didactic or exotic and is briskly detailed with the kind of information young readers enjoy." Erdrich also won the O'Dell Award in 2006 for The Game of Silence, the second book in the Birchbark series. 

    For more...

     

    January 15, 2013: After the Call

    Past Newbery winners Jack Gantos, Clare Vanderpool, Neil Gaiman, Rebecca Stead, and Laura Amy Schlitz talk about how winning the Newbery changed (or didn't change) their lives in this piece from Publishers Weekly...

     

    January 2, 2013: On the Big Screen

    One of our Mixed-up Files members may be headed to the movies! Jennifer Nielsen's fantasy adventure novel The False Prince is being adapted for Paramount Pictures by Bryan Cogman, story editor for HBO's Game of Thrones. For more...

     


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Announcing: The Midgrade Football League!

Feb 4, 2013
Miscellaneous

Congratulations to the Baltimore Ravens for winning a football game during last night’s Destiny’s Child reunion concert. I have always admired the Ravens for being the only literary-themed franchise in professional sports, and they get bonus points for picking a dark, 19th-Century poem filled with themes of heartbreak and death.

literary football

Also considered: the Longfellow Waysides and the Miltonian Lost Paradise.

This championship team and its three authorial mascots (ravens named Edgar, Allan, and Poe) have inspired me to imagine a league of our own with names based on works of middle-grade literature. These might include:

Atlantic Division

  • The Connecticut Tesseracts: Named after the four-dimensional constructs in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.
  • The Washington Bridges: Named for the titular construction project in Bridge to Terebithia by Katherine Paterson.
  • The Mixed-Up Files of New York: Named after this blog (and also From the Mixed-Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg).
  • The Mississippi Thunder: Named for a farmhand in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor.
  • The West Virginia Beagles: Named for the dog in Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

Pacific Division

  • The Seattle Yonders: Named for A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck, and based in a city that’s a long way from Chicago.
  • The California Whipping Boys: Named for the character in The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleishman.
  • The Green Lake Holes: Named for the products of hard labor found in Holes by Louis Sachar.
  • The Alaska Wolves: Named for the pack encountered in Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George.
  • The Seoul Shards: Named after the pottery pieces in Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard.

Have ideas for additional teams? Leave them in the comments!

Greg R. Fishbone is the author of the “Galaxy Games” series of midgrade sports and sci-fi from Tu Books at Lee & Low Books. Visit him at http://gfishbone.com.

Written by: Greg R. Fishbone on February 4, 2013.
7 Comments
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5 Comments

  1. Ms. Yingling  •  Feb 4, 2013 @5:45 am

    Thanks for posting this. Now I don’t have to look up who won the Super Bowl! I love The Tesseracts, especially. I’d love to see their play book!

    Greg R. Fishbone Reply:
    February 4th, 2013 at 7:16 am

    @Ms. Yingling, glad to be of service! I think the Tesseracts would tend to overshoot the endzone and wind up in the wrong stadium, but they’d be fun to watch.

  2. Cathy Ogren  •  Feb 4, 2013 @11:14 am

    My ideas are on pause for the moment, but I enjoyed your post. Very Clever!

  3. Jayne  •  Feb 4, 2013 @7:03 pm

    Thank you for posting a chuckler. Enjoyed it very much.

  4. Jen Swanson  •  Feb 5, 2013 @10:29 am

    Very ingenious post! And thanks for adding a bunch more books to my “to be read” list!!

  5. T. P. Jagger  •  Feb 5, 2013 @9:20 pm

    Thanks for your post, Greg. I will never view the Baltimore Ravens the same again.

    If we wanted to expand the naming to include picture books, I’m thinking the Washington Wild Things would be appropriate (based on Where the Wild Things Are and the fact that Washington, DC is . . . Well, you get the idea.)

    -T. P. Jagger

    Greg R. Fishbone Reply:
    February 6th, 2013 at 7:31 am

    I know it’s baseball but what about the Cleveland Wild Things after Charlie Sheen’s character in Major League? And there’s already a team in Japan called the Nippon Ham Fighters…so why not the Nippon Green Eggs and Ham Fighters? :D