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A Monster Calls Wins Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness was a 2011 Bram Stoker nominee for superior achievement in a Young Adult novel, a category that contained truly brilliant writing.  A Monster Calls was much different than the other books in the category, though, an experience as much as a powerful story, due to the dark and frightening world drawn in the margins and throughout the pages- the illustrations and text complemented each other perfectly,  packing an incredible and terrifying emotional punch. The chair of the committee, Rachel Levy(quoted in this article in Publishers Weekly), said it better than I can, when expressing why the book would win both an award for the text (the Carnegie) and one for its illustration (the Greenaway):

Jim Kay’s illustrations for A Monster Calls created the perfect synergy between the text and illustrations… Using only shades of black, white, and gray, he has beautifully, skillfully captured the atmosphere and emotion of the story and has produced a book that gives you a whole and satisfying experience.

 

That’s it exactly. This intense and emotional story was completely deserving of the double award it received. Congratulations to Patrick Ness and Jim Kay for their awards, and for bringing a new dimension to storytelling. Now go read the book.

Posted on June 14, 2012 by , Reply

Help a Reader Out: Home for the Holidays

Rachel writes:

Hi, I was wondering if you might know the name/author of a book. I only know a vague description of what it was about, but maybe you could help me, I’ve searched the internet far and wide and found nothing. The book probably came out between the 1980’s and 2000, short, about 100-180 pages, meant for kids ages 10-14. The premise is a boy and his stepsister come home from boarding school for the winter holidays, and find that things are strange in their house. The boys grandfather created a famous board game that is monster themed, the grandfather is dead now and a portrait of him hangs over the fireplace. So the boy and girl (probably ages 13-15) start to notices that their family members have become the creatures from the game, and the house is all spooky. So every night they plan to meet up and figure out what happened to their home. Eventually they figure out it has something to do with the portrait and the christmas lights. That is pretty much all the plot details I remember. Random other things I remember from the story is that the boy and girls room is connected with either a crawlspace/closet, the girls favorite color is mauve and the boy hates it, when the boys alarm goes off it’s always dogs barking christmas songs on the radio, and I believe the butler is a frankenstein, and the girls little brother is I think the werewolf. I don’t know if that helps, or if you can help me, but if you come up with something please let me know. Thanks a lot!!! Hope to hear from you soon -Rachel

The board game made me think of Jumanji, but that’s a picture book… the portrait over the fireplace reminds me of The Canterville Ghost, but I know that’s not it, either- it certainly doesn’t come from the 1980’s, and is problematic anyway. There are any number of books that have a boy and a girl coming home from school for the holidays, and haunted houses. I just can’t think of one book that has all of those details included!

Can anyone help Rachel out?

Posted on February 17, 2012 by , Reply

Angry Penguins, Anne Rice Returns, and Other Stuff.

Well, the drama from November, when Penguin pulled all their ebook titles from OverDrive (read: libraries) for dealing with Amazon, and then later decided it was okay for libraries to continue to check out ebooks they had already purchased but not new releases while they negotiated, has concluded for the moment, with Penguin choosing to stop releasing new ebooks to libraries at all and any Kindle versions to libraries at all. Instead of me summing it all up for you, I now present you with further reading: an article from Publishers Weekly that provides a basic summary, and some more information here. A bit of analysis shows that while this is extremely frustrating for librarians and library users,  it probably doesn’t do either Penguin or Overdrive much good, since it appears that now the only Big Six publisher making ebooks available to libraries is Random House, even though there is a huge demand for ebooks. So if you’re a small press publisher, willing to make it easy for libraries to work with you, this could be good news for you.

And a few tie ins to Women in Horror Month (kinda):

Anne Rice is back, this time with a werewolf book. Here’s an interview with her, published just a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal.

And this month Madeline L’ Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. You can argue that it’s science fiction or fantasy or both, and you’d be right, but it’s also terrifying. I liked this article that talked about how central women writers have been to the renaissance of science fiction and fantasy, especially for the young adult crowd. The author mentions extremely cool writers like Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Lois Lowry, all of whom came long before J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins ever hit the scene. Although it’s not addressed in the article, if you look at YA horror, I suspect you’ll find a number of women writers there too; Lois Duncan and V.C. Andrews were staples when I was growing up (although not as likely to be assigned reading in school). It’s interesting to note this, as these are frequently perceived as male-dominated genres… does that just happen when we grow up?

And Rose Fox, over at Genreville, notes that there are more starred horror titles (horror-ish, to use her exact wording) this year already than there were all last year. Woohoo!

 

Posted on February 13, 2012 by , Reply
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