Note: This post is full of spoilers. On the off chance you have never read Charlotte’s Web, stop everything and go read it, then come back. *
Note: This post is full of spoilers. On the off chance you have never read Charlotte’s Web, stop everything and go read it, then come back. *
Girls who have the audacity to be the heroes of books are likely to be labelled, or at least scrutinized, in two ways. In chapter books or middle-grade books, they will inevitably be described as “spunky,”and “feisty.” Those really are the two favorite words in the English language for describing the elementary-school protagonist. It is usually …
I generally don’t write about topical events because (a) everybody else is doing it, (b) those articles age badly, and (c) it feels like exploiting tragedy for page views. And yet the story about [famous person] who took a switch to his child has been on my mind since I first heard the news. I was a fan …
When I was a kid there was no children’s writer bigger than Beverly Cleary. Everybody read her books, even the kids who didn’t read. And it was quite all right for boys to read the Ramona books because plenty of boys started with Henry Huggins and simply kept going as the series transitioned. Survey a …
It can be surprisingly hard to describe your own book. As Neil Gaiman wrote (I’m pretty sure it was Neil Gaiman), the only way to describe a story is to tell the story. That’s true, but you can’t always pull out a manuscript and read the whole thing when somebody asks, “what’s it about?”