Dear friends,

Beverly Sills famously opined that she wasn’t happy, she was cheerful, a sentiment that could perhaps serve us all well now. (Although if you want to hear Bev being beautifully sad and despairing, try her “Addio del passato” from La Traviata.)

We do have some stuff to be both cheerful and happy about. The Supremes gave everybody a gift just in time for Pride. Enjoy the party (safely and distantly); my own Pride reading is currently running beautifully sad and despairing, Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer, a novel based on E. M. Forster’s hopeless love for his friend Syed Masood, dedicatee of A Passage to India. I’m guessing that a little Pride might have done these young men some good. For more LGBTQIA+ reading, head over to our Family Reading blog where Kitty shares some Pride resources and to the Guide/Reviews Database with recently updated booklists of picture books, middle grade, and YA. 

I’m also very, extremely, happy that the July/August 2020 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, a.k.a. The One with the Speeches, is almost done. But don’t go looking for Stephen Gammell’s, because it still isn’t there. (If you get that joke you are old.) You can read this year’s Coretta Scott King, Newbery, Caldecott, and Legacy speeches in our digital edition (still free!) on June 29th, the day after they’re given. To watch the speeches, here are the details.

You may know that we generally ask the year’s Caldecott Medalist to create a cover for this annual issue, and, God bless him, Kadir Nelson came through, two award acceptance speeches, a COVID painting, and New Yorker AND Rolling Stone covers notwithstanding. Look at it:

Get it? Martha had to clue me in.

The happy, the cheerful, the sad and despairing alike: may you make it through next week while doing your bit to make a better world. Keep reading. 

Love,