What’s New

• Missing on Superstition Mountain was named a Publishers Weekly Best Children’s Book of 2011!
• Desert Crossing was selected as one of the Best International Stand-Alone Novels of 2011 by El Templo de las Mil Puertas in Spain.
• Masterpiece made the New York Times Bestseller List on 4/25/10, and again for a few weeks later in the spring! Regardless of whether it lasts for the blink of an eye and is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I am so excited that I am reduced to incoherent babbling. The other wonderful honor for Masterpiece this year was that it won the E.B. White Award for best read-aloud children’s novel in 2009 from the Association of the Booksellers for Children. I love E.B. White, love that award, love the ABC, so I was truly thrilled.
• My picture book Gumption, a jungle adventure story brought fantastically to life by the art of Richard Egielski, received the Parents’ Choice Awards silver medal for picture books for 2010.
• Snowflake Baby, a companion board book to Seashore Baby, with lovely, snowy pictures by Cori Doerrfeld, was published by Little, Brown in November.

What’s Next
Barnyard Baby, a third board book that chronicles a baby’s autumn adventures on a farm, will be published by Little, Brown in 2012.

Treasure on Superstition Mountain, the second book in the Superstition Mountain mystery series (for grades 3-6) that I’ve been talking about forever—my “Twin Peaks for kids,” I’ve been calling it—will be published by Henry Holt in 2012.  The series follows the adventures of three brothers who move to an area of Arizona that has a real-life history of strange disappearances; sort of like a land Bermuda Triangle.  With their new friend Delilah, they try to figure out the mystery of the mountain–which involves hidden canyons, ghost towns, and goldmines– without disappearing themselves in the process!

James Goes Away, an early reader companion to Masterpiece for grades K-2, featuring more adventures with James and Marvin, is also scheduled to be published by Henry Holt.

What I’m Reading
Picture book: Guess Again! by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Adam Rex. The right child (not too young—maybe 4 or 5, with a well-developed funny bone and a taste for incongruity) will find this book irresistible. The straightforward rhymes set up straightforward expectations, only to overturn them, with hilarious results. We see a silhouetted form in a vegetable patch and read: “He steals carrots from the neighbor’s yard. / His hair is soft, his teeth are hard. / His floppy ears are long and funny. / Can you guess? That’s right, my…” Then flip the page for the end of the sentence: “Grandpa Ned.” In the silhouette revealed, the “bunny ears” are actually Grandpa Ned’s feet dangling down, because he’s standing on his head. Okay, that doesn’t nearly do it justice. But apparently I am the right child for this book because I found it delightfully wry, goofy, and surprising.

Middle-grade: Anything but Typical, by Nora Raleigh Baskin, is the story of an autistic boy named Jason who is experiencing the challenges of early adolescence—friends, school, girls, intense interests—through the prism of his own difference. Baskin’s gift in this extraordinary novel is to show that we all experience these challenges through the prism of our own difference; that the most mundane verbal encounters can be fraught with double and triple meanings; that human relationships are complicated, unpredictable, and difficult to navigate for all of us. Jason’s meltdowns of stress and frustration are perfectly drawn. It would be an understatement to say we sympathize with Jason; Baskin makes his world feel like our own.

Adult: I just finished Mary Karr’s Lit, which I mistakenly thought was a memoir about her literary coming-of-age as a poet and writer, but which turned out to be a memoir about alcoholism and finding religion. Karr has a lively, engaging voice, but the story itself is fairly bleak and repetitive. What saved it for me was the occasional transcendent line like this one: “Maybe all any of us wants is to feel singled out for some long, sweet, quenching draft of love.”

I am re-reading Grace Paley’s Collected Stories and am in awe of her all over again. She has such a straightforward, natural style—you can sense her pulling up a chair and talking to you—that you believe every word, but there is still a kind of poetry to it, in the freshness of the images and her laser-sharp insights. Listen to this passage from the story “Wants”: “He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, half-way to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.”