We're sad to have lost Jill Paton Walsh yesterday. I only met her once, at a 1990s CLNE gathering at Radcliffe, but Jill was a longtime friend of the Horn Book dating back to the 1970s, when Paul and Ethel Heins were running things here, and they and Jill and her later-husband John Rowe Townsend and Betty Levin and Barbara Harrison and Gregory Maguire were pulling together the children's literature master's program at Simmons.

And, oh, her brilliant books. I first read her in library school -- actually I first read about her in cataloging class, where her name was used as an example of the "name and form of name" problem in the then-new AACR2 (is that still a thing?). A Chance Child is one of the great English timeshift novels, and A Parcel of Patterns, a story of the Plague in 17th-century England, would provide some interesting reading in todays pandemic times. I reviewed her novel Grace for the NYT, and I'd like to share with you Gregory Maguire's meditation on Unleaving and his long friendship with Jill. She will be missed.