>To borrow a word from one of our reviewers, I am faced this week with a veritable panoply of book reviews to edit. As is increasingly usual, there is a lot of high-stakes fantasy, a genre that seems to grow ever more political in its themes (or maybe it's just the fantasies we choose to review), but there's also some entertainingly snarky realistic fiction, including that Rosy-Cole-channeling-James-Frey novel I mentioned previously, and some fresh nonfiction, like Stompin' at the Savoy (Candlewick), a uniquely inflected memoir of Harlem jazz dancer Norma Miller as told to Alan Govenar. And I'm loving Boston Globe-Horn Book winner (for Traction Man Is Here!) Mini Grey's The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon (Knopf), about just what happened after those two ran away together: "The Dish got a taste for the high life."

I frequently field questions from reporters wanting to know about "trends" in children's literature, but, honestly, once I swear I've spotted one, another comes along to displace it. So disregard what I said about high-stakes fantasy, I guess.