This week’s Friday Five honors Children’s Book Week, celebrated since 1919.
Children’s Book Week Website
The Children’s Book Week website offers information about the event’s history and ideas for children, teens, and parents and teachers for how to participate. Also, be sure to check your local library and books stores for any special events this weekend.
David Almond
If you love David Almond’s Skellig as much as I do, you’ll be excited to know that he is releasing a prequel to Skellig titled My Name Is Mina, that focuses on Michael’s free-spirited, homeschooled, Blake-reading friend:
“There’s an empty notebook lying on the table in the moonlight. It’s been there for an age. I keep on saying that I’ll write a journal. So I’ll start right here, right now. I open the book and write the very first words: My name is Mina and I love the night. Then what shall I write? I can’t just write that this happened then this happened then this happened to boring infinitum. I’ll let my journal grow just like the mind does, just like a tree or a beast does, just like life does. Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line?”
Sign up at Almond’s website to receive updates on the publication of My Name Is Mina, and read an interview with Almond on the Art of Transformation.
Katherine Paterson
For a short time, you can download a free copy of Katherine Paterson’s first essay for her project Read for Your Life: Speeches and Writings of Katherine Paterson:
“When I’m talking with young readers, someone nearly always asks: ‘When did you know you were going to be a writer?’ I look at the ten- or eleven-year-old asking the question and I feel sure that he or, more often, she already knows that she is a writer.” ~ Katherine Paterson
Paterson is the current National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Learn more about her extensive list of works at www.terabithia.com, and watch this delightful interview conducted by a young reporter:
Jeanne Betancourt
Author of the Pony Pals series and My Name is Brain Brian, Jeanne Betancourt is an inspiration for young writers with learning differences:
“I believe that being dyslexic has helped me as a writer. Since learning to read and write was difficult for me growing up, I paid more attention to the world around me. I took clues to what people were thinking and feeling from their speech and body language. Today, as an author, it is easy for me to imagine what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes…” Read More at Dyslexic Advantage
Visit Betancourt’s website for more on her experience with dyslexia and her books, including Ten True Animal Rescues.
Cynthia Rylant
Finding high quality short stories for very young, sensitive readers is a challenge, but Cynthia’s Rylant’s story collection, Every Living Thing, is a perfect fit for many animal lovers and emotionally intense children (browse inside the book here). Rylant has said that animals “bring out the truth in people.” Each story in the collection shows how animals can change lives: “You can see what’s inside a person by the way they talk to their animals…. so I use animals to show what my characters are about” (quoted in Cynthia Rylant, by Alice B. McGinty, Rosen Publishing Group, 2004).
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