• When Dinosaurs Came with Everything, with fabulous illustrations by David Small, came out in September, and has received three starred reviews!

• Discussion Guides for Shakespeare’s Secret and Desert Crossing are now available for classroom or book club use. Please click on the Novels link above.

• Desert Crossing is fourth on Amazon’s Best Books of 2006, Top 10 Editors’ Picks for Teens! (In truly humbling company.) It’s a Texas Tayshas selection for 2007-2008, and will be published in the U.K. by Walker Books in 2007.

• Shakespeare's Secret was a nominee for the Connecticut Book Award and has made the state reading lists for the following states: Arizona, Hawaii, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas (Lone Star), Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin. Holt published a paperback edition of the book in September, and it is also available from Scholastic's Trumpet Book Club. Phoenix Pictures has optioned the film rights to the book.

• Wet Dog! was a Children’s Book-of-the-Month Club and Scholastic Book Fair selection, and an audio version of the book is now available. Both Wet Dog! and Cousin John is Coming! will be published in Korean.

Masterpiece, Illustrated by Kelly Murphy, is an art-based mystery set in New York City, will be published by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers in 2008. Ages 8-12. What do a lonely ten-year-old boy named James, the great Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer, and a beetle with excellent night vision have in common? Find out in this middle-grade novel about art, forgery, and friendship.

Gumption is a picture book to be published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers. A brave boy and his grandfather must rely on their wits and determination to battle a variety of jungle dangers in their search for the elusive Zimbobo Mountain Gorilla.

Picture book: Traction Man is Here by Mini Grey. This exuberant tale of a beloved toy’s adventures is funny, suspenseful, and full of heart. The lantern-jawed Traction Man faces down one villain after another, from garden spades to kitchen sieves, but he’s no match for Grandma’s hand-knitted Christmas outfit. A wonderful evocation of imaginative play.

Middle-grade novel: Day of Tears by Julius Lester. Told in dialogue (and interior monologue) by a variety of characters, this is the brilliant, soulful, wrenching story of the largest slave auction in American history. With honesty and grace, Lester manages to capture both the horrors of the slave experience and the ambiguities of freedom.

Young Adult novel: The Boy Book by E. Lockhart. This is my favorite of the very versatile and talented Lockhart’s teen novels. Full of angst and charm, Ruby Oliver is an immensely likeable character, and her lists of everything from “Levels of Boyfriends” to “Neanderthals on the Telephone” are not only funny but insightful, like a field guide to an exotic species.

Adult memoir: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. In this memoir of a devastatingly strange childhood, part romantic misadventure, part outright neglect, a family careens from one outpost to the next under the influences of alcohol, poverty, and madness. The author is clear-eyed and free of self-pity throughout; she neither excuses her parents nor condemns them. The book is proof that if our secrets make us vulnerable, they also make us interesting.