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I recently had the good fortune to see a brilliant production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel at the Chicago Lyric Opera. Directed by Richard Jones and designed by John Macfarlane, it was not intended as a production for children; nevertheless, it neatly focused the work using its most child-compelling theme:...
Despite my dedication to the cause, I never thought a children’s book would have me voluntarily up and out at four-thirty on a frosty November Sunday morning. But the heavens and the forecast were so arrayed that I wanted to take my chance to watch the Leonid meteor shower light...
L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, commemorated in this issue by Michael Patrick Hearn, has more in common with J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series than just a population of assorted fantastic beings. Other assorted beings, no more fantastical than you or I, have worked hard to keep both...
While Gregory Maguire was assiduously working away, with a less-than-generous deadline, on his review of Philip Pullman’s long-awaited The Amber Spyglass (see page 735), I was enjoying a busman’s holiday on Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown, reading the Horn Book’s other preview copy of the same book. Perhaps more than...
As an occasional adjunct instructor in children’s literature, I’ve taught Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting three times. While the students have sometimes been contemptuous of my other reading assignments (my beloved Tom’s Midnight Garden in particular seems to reveal a generation gap), they tend to get along quite well with Tuck,...
On this occasion of our 75th anniversary issue, I’m reminded what a constant presence the past is at the Horn Book offices. When, as we do here with some regularity, we invoke past editors of the Horn Book, we don’t bother with chronology. They aren’t Back Then but (with the...
“Why is there no YA equivalent to the Newbery Medal?” When I asked that question fifteen years ago (School Library Journal, December 1983), it was hardly its first hearing. As far back as 1962, the Young Adult Services Division (now the Young Adult Library Services Association) of ALA had proposed...
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