This summer our town’s youth theater company performed the musical Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (I still have the Oompa-Loompa song stuck in my head). Soon after, I left for vacation to spend time with family. One of my nephews (who lives two states away from us) happens to be on a Roald Dahl [...]

Neil Gaiman provides my favorite description of Beatrix Potter’s work: [Her] stories are fine, dark things. Odd little tales of anthropomorphic pigs and squirrels, of kittens and mice, foxes and rabbits, each story illustrated by gentle, precise watercolours. There’s nothing warm about Beatrix Potter’s world: it’s a dangerous, horrid place. Peter Rabbit runs for his [...]

 I love this picture book:     By Jim Tobin; illustrations by Dave Coverly   It is so cleverly done.  The reader sings along to the tune of Old MacDonald had a farm, singing “Sue MacDonald had a book, AEIOU.”  It is a great way to introduce children to vowels.  I love how each vowel [...]

Today is the official release date for Come Fall. I’m very excited. The novel has gotten great reviews from Publishers Weekly (starred!) and Horn Book Magazine. I’ll be throwing a book party on August 28 at the Alphabet Garden Bookstore to celebrate its release. But today, nothing much happens. There won’t be confetti. Or a [...]

I loved poetry as a child. My father read us picture books written in rhyme; my siblings and I read to each other Hilaire Bellock’s The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and Cautionary Tales for Children; and we studied Struwwelpeter to keep us appalled. But the poetry books I kept coming back to were A.A. [...]

When my kids were small, and each evening required several bedtime stories, a perennial favorite was Steven Kellog’s Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind Crockett. She could outrun, out swim, out arm wrestle, out tug-o-war any man in creation. She chopped trees with her teeth, tamed eagles, skinned bears, whipped up tornadoes, and out wrestled the [...]