Some Horn Book Highlights

The kidlitosphere is full of reports on trips to BEA. I didn't go to BEA. I read the new issue of The Horn Book.

THB carried a big feature by Linda Sue Park called Still Hot: Great Food Moments in Children's Literature. There were a number of short pieces by other authors on reading and food. My favorite was the one by Peter Sis in which he talks about eating in a park with friends while reading The Three Musketeers out loud. I was taken with it because it was so totally alien to my own teenage experience. It's only a modest exaggeration to say that most of the people I knew when I was a teenager thought The Three Musketeers was a candy bar. (One I used to really like.) So reading Sis's food memoir was like reading about something that happened in a foreign country. Wait! It was something that happened in a foreign country!

Debby Dahl Edwardson's article Reading Under the Midnight Sun: Implications of Worldview had nothing to do with food, but was terrific nonetheless.

Okay, reviews. There were a number that caught my eye.

Jacqueline Davies' book Tricking the Tallyman is set in Tunbridge, Vermont in 1790. I've never been to Tunbridge, but when I was a young'un the place was famous for its World's Fair, which had a reputation for being a lot of fun. Tricking the Tallyman isn't about the fair, but I did notice it. And now you won't forget it, either, will you?

I've never read anything by Caroline B. Cooney, but her If the Witness Lied sounds interesting. Could it have a little Jon and Kate thing going?

I don't think of Norwegians as being particularly funny (not like those Danes!), but Klaus Hagerup's Markus and the Girls could be entertaining.

Brian James's The Heights is supposed to be a reworking of Wuthering Heights.

Starclimber! Kenneth Oppel!

Tamora Pierce has another Beka Cooper book out.

I still haven't read Kate Thompson's The New Policeman, and now I see she has a new book out, Creature of the Night, which THB reviewer calls a "gritty crime thriller." Gritty. I like gritty.