Cybils!

The Cybils Awards have just been announced, and there are some great ones--check them out! Unlike last year, I wasn't on a judging panel this year so have been watching the doings from a distance--I'm glad I didn't have to make some of these decisions, I can tell you! I'm especially pleased to see the Middle-Grade Fantasy award winner, the Elem/Middle Grade Graphic Novel winner, and the YA Fiction winner are all books I've really enjoyed.

And speaking of that M-G Fantasy award winner, check out tomorrow's NYTimes Book Review, too!

Congratulations to all the nominees and to today's winners!

Don't forget!

Nominations for the Cybils open today. For those of you who missed them the last two years, the Cybils are the kidlitosphere's own children's book awards. (Cybils, as Little Willow helpfully explains, is a loose acronym for Children's and YA Bloggers's Literary Awards.) Cybils will be given in nine categories this year:

Poetry
Fiction Picture Books
Non-Fiction Picture Books
Easy Readers
Middle Grade/Young Adult Non-Fiction
Middle Grade Fiction
Young Adult Fiction
Graphic Novels
Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Last year I served as a Sci-Fi/Fantasy judge, and it was a blast. I didn't volunteer this year because, much as I loved it, I simply couldn't figure out how I'd have time. (I am already on the Children's Literature Assocation's Book Award committee, and I can't do two book awards in one year when I'm not on sabbatical.) This year's panelists and judges look fabulous, and I'm sure they'll have a great time sorting through the wonderful books that have been published this year.

Check out the FAQs for the Cybils here, and then go back to the Cybils blog to nominate books in your favorite categories. Remember, you can only nominate one per category, so choose wisely!

Smek-Day and the Cybils

My new column is up over at Literary Mama. In it I talk about why I liked our fantasy/sf winner in the middle-grade category, The True Meaning of Smek-Day, and what intriguing commonalities I found in the books we read. Here's a taste:

the story [of Smek-Day] is as action-packed and adventurous as [several of ] the others . . . which feature plot twist after plot twist, fascinating superpowers (invisibility and flight are the best), and intriguing ways of engaging with technology -- hovercars, a super-reinforced Mercedes, cellphones, convenience stores. These are not, that is, "sword-and-sorcery" fantasy novels, but books fully engaged with modern life and imagining how magic or the supernatural might interact with our technologically-enhanced world.

Read the rest here...

And here they are!

The Cybils winners have been announced--and they sound terrific! I've got some reading to do, again.

Look for brief reviews of the fantasy/sf books here in the next few days...

The Cybils are coming

In this season of voting and awards shows, don't forget that the Cybils announcements are coming up on Thursday, Valentine's Day. You'll find some great gift ideas on the list!

shun the non-believer

There's an ongoing debate in the YA world--flames fanned by, at least, both Justine Larbalestier and the Brotherhood 2.0 guys, who have sadly stuck to their one-year commitment* and gone dark since January 1--between the unicorns and the zombies. Charlie may actually be a unicorn that zombie-lovers could embrace.



Thankfully foul-mouthed unicorns are not on my reading list (as far as I know) for the Cybils SF/Fantasy award. But if they were, I hope they would be like Charlie.


*But! They do have a new social network for nerdfighters!

More Cybils finalists

The rest of the Cybils finalists have now been announced:

Young Adult Fiction

Nonfiction Picture Books

Graphic Novels
(as with science fiction/fantasy, this one is two lists, one each for YA and MG)

Nonfiction

You can also listen to a podcast with the nonfiction picture book panelists, and also check out Jen Robinson, Cybils committee member and organizer, over here at the PBS Parents website, talking about children's books.

So much Cybils-related goodness! Enjoy!

Cybils in the news

The International Reading Association has the scoop.
I already linked to the Fantasy/Sci Fi short list; here are the rest:

Fiction Picture Books

Middle Grade Novels

Poetry

Kudos to the nominating panels, by the way, who read a long, long list of books and pulled together these short lists during a very busy time of year. My hat reading glasses is are off to them!

Cybils

I took the week off from blogging so that we could travel to CT for Thanksgiving. (And, in all honesty, because my laptop died* the day before we left and I couldn't take it with me. Just as well, I suppose, since the connection at my parents' house was overtaxed with all the various laptops we had going. At one point there were four, and one desktop computer, all going at once. The connection was not happy.)

Now that I'm back I'm catching up on all sorts of things. So note, over in the sidebar, that the second Robert's Snow auction will be starting tomorrow. And also, that the Cybils nominations have closed. See that cool widget over in the sidebar? It is highlighting YA and fantasy/science fiction nominees. I'm on the fantasy/SF judging panel, so I'll have lots of fun reading in January when the finalists are announced. In the meantime, you can check out all the fantasy/SF nominees here.


*I still don't know the status of my laptop but I am trying not to let this worry me. No, I am not really good at backing up...

"Kid-Friendly"? Take One

I asked Nick to tell me why he liked Michael Chabon's Summerland recently. I'd read it when it came out, and while there were aspects of it that I liked, I remember thinking that it was not kid-friendly--that I didn't know any kids who would like it. I can't remember now if it was the nostalgia for baseball or the wordplay or what that made me think that. (Not the wordplay, though, what could I have been thinking?) Anyway, I asked him why he liked it. And then I mentioned that I was thinking about what made books "kid-friendly." And he said he didn't think Summerland was kid-friendly, even though he'd liked it, because (I think this is right) there were occasional "bad words" in it.

So we need to back up a bit. To one kid, at least, the very term "kid-friendly" is clearly an adultist term, one that has to do with what adults want kids to read rather than what kids really read. (I think he's influenced by the use of the term "family-friendly" all over the place, which usually does mean "devoid of any controversial content.") Now, I know that's not how the Cybils folks mean it--far from it, as is clear from this terrific post.

Unfortunately our conversation got side-tracked and he didn't tell me why he liked Summerland, so I don't know yet why I was wrong about it or how to define "kid-friendly" in a way that works for both him and me. More on that another time!

Blog Focus Angst

That's the phrase Jen Robinson used in a discussion of children's lit blogging that came up when both she and Kelly Herold blogged about their blogs. It seems that after the kidlitosphere conference a lot of folks started thinking about their priorities for blogging, and both Kelly and Jen (to name the ones I read most and that I know about) have decided to refocus their energies a bit, making sure they cover what they're passionate about and letting the rest go. I really learned a lot reading their posts, especially because I was having a little tiny bit of blog angst over in my corner, too.

I don't know about you, but there's no way I could read all the children's lit blogs that are out there. So I don't mind if they duplicate each other a bit or if they overlap--I know I'm missing a lot of them anyway.

But I do come back to read the ones that are smart, funny, well-informed, and focused. (And no, I'm not going to name names right now, because I know I'll forget one and then feel bad.) It's not necessarily that they cover a "niche" so much as that they convey their particular and specific interest in their work in almost every post (we all get a day or two of "here are some cool links," don't we?).

So what can you get here that you can't get anywhere else? Or that even if you can, it's worth checking out? What I am most interested in right now is my research, which is on fantasy literature and faith (fairly broadly conceived--right now faith is bleeding into pedagogy, in a kind of weird and interesting way*), and YA literature, to which I am a late convert, and how and why children read. I review new books occasionally for The Edge of the Forest, but I don't really want to expand that--there are actually too many not-new books that I haven't read, and still want to read, for me to keep up with all the new. And while I'm happy to join an occasional good cause (see: Robert's Snow), I'm not really good at doing stuff on particular days just because that's the day everyone does them. That's why I've never joined in on Poetry Friday (that, and, I am just much more fiction- than poetry-oriented), and why contests and such are not a big part of what I do.

I don't see much changing around here as a result of this introspection (and, if you've read this far, thanks for your patience!). What I do see is a shift in attitude, and perhaps posting frequency. I'll post when I have something new to share. I'll try to have something new reasonably often to make it worth your checking back here, and I may still occasionally give a book away (perhaps not every month), but the focus is going to be on the big three above: fantasy literature, YA literature, and kids' reading.

Up next: I join in the discussion of what makes a title "kid-friendly." Stay tuned. (Probably after the weekend, though...)


*According to John Dewey, this is a natural connection. See "My Pedagogic Creed":

I believe that education . . . is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. . . .
[ . . .]
I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparation. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative.
I believe that the moral education centers upon [a] conception of the school as a mode of social life, that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought. The present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect that unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training.
[ . . .]
I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.
[. . . ]
I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing restructuring of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.
[. . . ]
I believe . . . that the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.

Here Come the Cybils

Nominations for the Cybils open today. The Cybils are a blogger-run literary award for books published for children and young adults, and this year I am on the judging panel for fantasy and science fiction (scroll down to see the other panelists--it's a great list!).

Cybils are awarded in seven categories: poetry, fiction picture books, non-fiction picture books, middle-grade fiction, young adult fiction, non-fiction (MG/YA), fantasy/sci-fi, and graphic novels, so there's something for everyone. If you have a favorite book published in 2007 in any of those areas, head on over to the nominating page and leave a comment.