March was an awesome month for readers as this is the fourth fellow 2K10 author's debut. Judith Grave's skin must have goosepimples as her YA, UNDER MY SKIN comes out.
All her parents wanted was for Eryn to live a normal life... Redgrave had its share of monsters before Eryn moved to town. Mauled pets, missing children. The Delacroix family is taking the blame, but Eryn knows the truth. Something stalks the night. Wade, the police chief's son and Redgrave High's resident hottie, warns her the Delacroix are dangerous. But then so is Eryn--in fact, she's lethal. But she can't help falling for one of the Delacroix boys, dark, brooding--human Alec. And then her world falls apart.
There are an estimated 122,356 libraries of all kinds in the United States today American Library Association
Elizabeth Bird, children's librarian at the Children's Center at 42nd Street of the New York Public Library and blogger @Fuse 8 Productions, just blogged about her preview session with Simon & Schuster where editors presented upcoming books to librarians. This is what Elizabeth had to say -
"Alexandra Penfold was up and talking about Shooting Kabul by N.H. Senzai when I came in. The book has a plot that has haunted me since the moment I heard about it, and the cover image too for that matter. In Kabul, Fadi lets go of his six-year-old sister's hand when they're climbing into the truck to take them away. He loses her when she drops her Barbie doll and goes back for it, effectively separating herself from her family. Now they're in America and she's still in Afghanistan. The cover image shows the moment right before the separation. It just kills me, and I haven't even read the book yet."
Nielsen BookScan reported that sales of juvenile books were the strongest of any category in 2008, rising 6 percent from 2007. In 2009, Nielsen reported, sales held mostly even. By contrast, last year adult hardcover and mass market paperbacks both declined nearly 4 percent, and trade paperbacks fell 2 percent - Washington Post
I never like such encompassing titles of articles as The Future of Children's Books. Its sounds so penultimate, as if the writer had a crystal ball and was making definite predictions. But, the Washington Post, with the aforementioned title, does have some interesting revelations about combing technology and literature.
The fact that Jeff Kinney worked full-time for a decade designing popular kid-friendly Web games before writing his best-selling series, DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, originally published online, was a revelation. The online, free online version regularly gets 70,000 hits a day. What this thankfull illustrates that teens and tweens on the internet, with access to content online, will still go out and buy his book. 28 million copes of DIARY OF A WIMPY KID are in print in the United States, according publisher Abrams.
So Publisher are now playing an expensive balancing game, getting kids to read books by offering companion Web sites that are graphic-rich and able to plunge young readers into the story. Along with the tale on the page, kids can dip into online videos and games, win prizes, create Internet identities and get into social networking.
Several publishers are getting into the fray Scholastic launched a 10-book international mystery series called THE 39 CLUES in the fall of 2008. Much of the action takes place online, however, where kids amass hundreds of collectible cards and compete for prizes. According to Scholastic, they have 760,000 registered users. Disney recently started an online book subscription Web site, Disney Digital Book, with hundreds of titles available, in hopes it will cast a spell over kids and their parents. You use a "magic pen" to turn each digital page. Last fall, HarperCollins published a missing-girl mystery, THE AMANDA PROJECT with a major online social networking component. And Simon & Schuster is getting into the game this June with its multimedia venture SPACEHEADZ Written by Jon Scieszka, author of THE STINKY CHEESE MAN.
The question remains whether all these multimedia add-ons to the reading experience will pay off... we shall see.
In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, dragon blood is revealed to be an effective oven cleaner (I just cleaned my oven and wished I had some)
I, like countless millions, loved the Harry Potter series and one of my favorite magical objects was his Cloak of Invisibility. The cloak had the power to shield the wearer from sight, and could not be worn out by time or spells. Invisibility cloaks are not a new concept and have appeared in literature since the days of Brothers Grimm.
When I read about it, I wanted to go out and get one for myself and now it looks like they may be within our grasp! Scientists have taken a small but important new step toward making it into reality. Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology were able to cloak a tiny bump in a layer of gold, preventing its detection at nearly visible infrared frequencies. The cloak is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, sort of like a woodpile, that bends light, hiding the bump in the gold. In this case, the bump was tiny, a mere 0.00004 inch high and 0.0005 inch across, so that a magnifying lens was needed to see it.
In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it, a researcher stated. But, he added, developing a cloak to hide something takes a long time, so cloaking larger items with that technology is not really feasible. DARN. But I'll keep hoping.
Eddy Thomas copes with the noise and crowds of Drayton Middle School by reciting the periodic table of elements, memorizing Morse code, and jumping on the trampoline in the gym teacher’s office. His mind stores thousands of facts and the scientific names of animals and plants, but cannot decode the meaning of the expressions on faces or the definition of a friend. When the local school crossing guard is laid off, Eddy can’t stop thinking about the dangerous intersection and the possibility that someone could get hurt there. Marshalling his talents as a scientist and inventor, he builds a traffic – calming device out of his collection of old machines. Could Eddy’s invention help with more than just the safety situation?
Dark Ages -- a. The period in Europe from the fall of Rome in the fifth century a.d. to the restoration of relative political stability around the year 1000; the early part of the Middle Ages. b. The entire Middle Ages, especially when viewed as a troubled period marked by the loss of classical learning. No longer in use by historians -
The following clip has a few of my favorite things... history, a library and Sir Ben Kingsley. It also addresses what mainstream history has taught to be the Dark Ages -- it was for some, but for others it was quite Golden.
1.2 million prostituted children are believed to be currently enslaved throughout India, that's roughly the entire population of Dallas - Indian Government statistic, 2009
Born into Brothels is a documentary that follows the lives of several unforgettable children who live in the red light district of Calcutta, where their mothers are part of the over 10,000 women and girls who live and work as prostitutes. In the documentary, Zana Briski, a New York-based photographer, gives each of the children a camera and teaches them to look at the world with new eyes.
Her program, called Kids with Cameras was based on the belief that photography was an effective tool for igniting children's imagination and building self-esteem. The children's photographs were seen around the world and sold, allowing many to go to school and leave the brothels behind. Kids with Cameras has supported the education of several children from the original photography workshop. One of the children completed his secondary schooling in Utah and is now studying film at NYU Tisch School for the Arts. Another arrived in the USA one year ago to finish her secondary schooling and expects to graduate from a private boarding school in 2011. Many of the other children are excelling in private schools in India.
I watched the documentary when it first came out in 2005 and it had a lasting impression on me -- how terrible and beautiful life could be for children trapped in situation beyond their control. It went onto to win a well deserved academy award that year. Kids with Cameras believes that education provides a way for children to leave the red-light district ad are currently raising funds to develop Hope House, a safe haven specifically for the children of prostitutes to provide an opportunity for them to learn, thrive and lead future generations.
