Dear friends:

Welcome to March and Women’s History Month! A few years ago, I wrote about our founding editor Bertha Mahony Miller; in this month’s Horn Book Magazine I call attention to new nonfiction, mainly picture book biographies, about women who have made their mark. Off the clock, I’m reading about Axis Sally, but I don’t imagine we’ll see a picture book biography of her anytime soon. Other antiheroines I encountered this week: Elizabeth Holmes, whose bad behavior is detailed in John Carreyrou’s gripping Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup; and the fictional Marla Grayson in I Care a Lot, which just won Rosamund Pike a Golden Globe Award. Her hair: As an anonymous wag wrote on a message board I frequent, “Whenever Rosamund sports a bob in her movies, you know shit is going down and you should avoid her at all costs.” Terrible title, though; like When You Reach Me (which I LOVE), it’s too easy to misremember. I Care About You? I Don’t Care? I Care Too Much?

Speaking of the world’s ever-constant need for copyeditors, it was Read Across America Day on Tuesday, which meant that Dr. Seuss was in the news along with his evil(er?) twin Dr. Suess. When debate raged back in 2017 on our website when librarian and eternal FOHB Liz Phipps Soeiro publicly queried Melania Trump’s unsolicited gifts of a passel of Seuss’s books to school libraries around the country. I could discern no correlation between any commenter’s opinions about the author and an ability to spell his name correctly.

The March/April issue of The Horn Book Magazine is now live and well and still free via our website. Go read it.

Love,

Rodger