Adele Griffin’s Where I Want to Be

Griffin, Adele.  Where I Want to Be.  2005.  New York: Speak/Penguin, 2007.
This book is strangely similar to Marci Dermansky’s Twins:  two sisters, (close in age but not in this case actually twins) are in many ways opposites: one is considered attractive, the other not so much; one is sociable and well-liked, the other isolated; one [...]

Graham Swift’s Out of This World

Swift, Graham. Out of This World.  New York et al: Poseidon Press, 1988.
More or less contemporaneously, Harry, in England, reminisces about his life with his bomb-manufacturing father while, in alternating sections, his estranged daughter Sophie, in New York, tells a psychoanalyst about her life, also often involving her grandfather, Harry’s father.  The two have parallel [...]

Roddy Doyle’s Wilderness

Doyle, Roddy.  Wilderness.  New York: Arthur Levine-Scholastic, 2007.
The father of an Irish family has been married twice; the first wife left years ago and went to America, leaving a young daughter behind who is now a teenager, and has not seen her mother since she left.   The second wife is the mother of two rambunctious [...]

Click

Park, Linda Sue, David Almond, Eoin Colfer, Deborah Ellis, Nick Hornby, Roddy Doyle, Tim Wynne-Jones, Ruth Ozeki, Margo Lanagan, and Gregory Maguire. Click.  New York: Scholastic, 2007.
Ten authors each write a story that connects in some way to the other nine stories–but the ways are many and diverse.  It happened, according to a Booklist review [...]

The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature

Here’s a book trailer for my new book, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature, out soon from Johns Hopkins University Press.

The book presents close readings of six stories in order to try to develop  a clear definition of children’s literature as a distinct literary form. I begin by considering the plots, [...]

Judith Clark’s One Whole and Perfect Day

Clark, Judith.  One Whole and Perfect Day.  Crows Nest NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2006
As seems to be generally the case with books constructed in this way, this book uses multiple alternating narratives to describe how a bunch of apparently isolated characters manages to actually be connected in ways they’re not (in this case, yet) aware [...]

Amy Goldman Koss’s The Cheat

Koss, Amy Goldman.  The Cheat. 2003.  New York: Scholastic, 2004.
A boy gives a girl the supposed answers to a test, she passes them on to some friends–and the principal finds out. The situation then turns into a whole series of different moral dilemmas for everyone involved.  Who will tell on who, what’s the right thing [...]

Not a Nickel to Spare: The Great Depression Diary of Sally Cohen

Here’s a book trailer for my novel in Scholastic Canada’s Dear Canada series, about a Jewish girl in Toronto in the depths of the depression:

The book is based on my parents’ memories of their childhood, and ends with the characters becoming involved in the Christie Pits riot.
Not a Nickel to Spare [...]

Amy Goldman Koss’s The Girls

Koss, Amy Goldman.  The Girls.  2002.  New York: Scholastic, 2002.
The five girls are a clique, built around the most popular and demanding girl, Candace.  The others always do as they believe she wants–but since she always cleverly manages to suggest what she wants rather than actually saying it, and because the girls are all so [...]

Marcy Dermansky’s Twins

Dermansky, Marcy.  Twins.  2005.  New York: Harper 2006.
I guess I’m not exactly the best audience for books focussed on the identity problems of self-obsessed, whiny, spoiled, upper-middle-class princesses, because mostly I just found this depressingly self-obsessed and whiny, and I doubt if there was more than a moment or two in the entire book where [...]