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“My brother teaches an undergraduate writing course at a university in New York, and he recently shared with me a thesis statement from one of his students’ papers: “Words are very important in A Passage to India.”  It was, perhaps fittingly, a poor choice of words on the student’s part—it’s a novel, after all—but I think I see the point about word choice that the student was trying to make.  Words, after all, are not simply bricks in the path upon which an author is leading a reader, identical and interchangeable and valuable more for their sequence than for their individual qualities.  They are much more than that.  They have shades and contours.  They catch light in different ways.  They are meant to illuminate a pathway that already exists, and when enough of the right ones are strung together in a great novel, they are just as tangible as the things they represent.

One of the reasons I love working with Anne Ursu, and especially on her latest middle grade novel Breadcrumbs, which releases this September, is because she knows how important words are.  Anne is one of the most talented wordsmiths I know – her ability to turn a phrase is boundless, fluctuating so smoothly between humorous and heartfelt that the two almost seem to form one quantum state (“It was not the greatest insult ever, but one thing Hazel had learned at her new school was when it comes to insults it’s the thought that counts”).  But Anne takes things much further than that in Breadcrumbs.  It’s a contemporary fairy tale set in present-day Minneapolis which draws its structure and inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story “The Snow Queen.”  In Anne’s book, a young girl named Hazel and a young boy named Jack are best friends, and they’re both dealing with hardship, but it’s their friendship that holds them together.  They spend their days talking about Joe Mauer’s batting average and Batman’s utility belt and the Chronicles of Narnia, but what they’re saying with all of it is “I know you, and I am here.”  They’re just saying it with different words, and it’s the words that make the difference.

If you’re familiar with “The Snow Queen”, you know what happens next.  Jack’s heart is frozen by a broken piece of an evil mirror, and he decides to leave everything in his life behind – including his friendship with Hazel.  Jack is still there, he is still speaking English, but the language they had created is gone.  Now, baseball and comic books and talking lions are just baseball and comic books and talking lions.  As in the original story, Jack eventually leaves, taking off into an enchanted forest with a woman made of ice.  Hazel, of course, follows him, and under normal circumstances, this would be fine.  She has read Alice In Wonderland, The Hobbit, A Wrinkle In Time.  If she has to kill a sinister queen, slay giant spiders, or tesser, she’ll be good to go.  But how do you save someone you can’t talk to anymore?  How do you convince someone to come back home when no one there speaks the same language?  How do you connect when words have lost their meaning?

Part of the brilliance of Breadcrumbs is that it is so deeply concerned with the shades and contours and light-catching that make words much more than interchangeable bricks.  Hazel navigates the fantasy world in the book the same way the reader will – with the stories she’s brought in with her.  It’s finding the right words that will save Jack or lose him forever at the end, but Hazel thankfully has enough words and stories to light the pathway to him.  And we hope that readers will find a similar path lit for

Just because we work for HarperCollins doesn’t mean that we only read our own books – we frequently exchange books with our colleagues in other publishing houses.  That being said, there are some die-hard Potter fans here in our office (Me!  Me!  Me!) and we’re all completely psyched for the upcoming HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART II.

So while I’m waiting with bated breath for the last movie to come out (July 15th!), I have a few suggestions of Harry Potter read-alikes (click through to read synopses and additional info).  Feel free to share this with the kids in your library!

• FALCON QUINN AND THE BLACK MIRROR by Jennifer Finney Boylan (The second book, FALCON QUINN AND THE CRIMSON VAPOR is out now)
• THE FAMILIARS by Adam Jay Epstein and Andrew Jacobson (The second book, THE FAMILARS #2: SECRETS OF THE CROWN is on-sale this September – stop by our booth at ALA Annual to get a galley!)
• THE LAST PHOENIX by Linda Chapman and Steve Cole
• THE MAGIC THIEF series by Sarah Prineas
• SEPTIMUS HEAP series by Angie Sage (The latest book is DARKE)
• WARRIORS series by Erin Hunter

What do you recommend for kids who have devoured the Harry Potter series and are looking for more of the same?

Also, check out these Harry Potter Read Alike booklists from your colleagues in libraries around the country:

• Finger Lakes Library System
• Allen County Public Library
• Harris County Public Library
• Boston Public Library
• New Brunswick Free Public Library
• Cuyahoga County Public Library

And because we’re just THAT excited, here’s the preview for the last movie, HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART II:

Hosted by School Library Journal, it’s a fantastic day-long event filled with panels, author signings, lots of swag, and networking.  And it wouldn’t be a BEA event if it didn’t end with a cocktail event, of course!

Patty and I will be there along with Donald Crews, editor Virginia Duncan, Thanhha Lai, Cindy Pon, and Rita Williams-Garcia.  For a full list of events, check out the schedule.

We hope to see you there!

~ Laura

Next week (May 8-11) we’re off to another conference: the International Reading Association Annual Convention in sunny Orlando!  We have a stellar line-up of authors and illustrators – for a complete list of authors and signing times, click here.

One such author is Gail Carson Levine, author of some of the best-known books in children’s literature, such as ELLA ENCHANTED and WRITING MAGIC.  She’ll be featured on a panel called “Engaging Readers K-5″ with Kristin Clark Venuti, Laurie Friedman, and Ethan Long.  The fabulous Kate Messner will be moderating.  If you’ll be at the conference, this panel will be on Tuesday, May 10 from 11:00am-12:00pm.

Gail will also be signing her new book, A TALE OF TWO CASTLES, from 12:30-1:30 after her panel.  In its starred review, Kirkus said that this is a “thoroughly delicious romp” and we couldn’t agree more.  Stop by booth #1220 and say hi to Gail!

We hope to see you in sunny Orlando!

Additional resources:
ELLA ENCHANTED discussion guide
A TALE OF TWO CASTLES book trailer
WRITING MAGIC discussion guide

My name is Dan Gutman, and I love teachers and librarians!

Hey, the most amazing thing in the history of the world just happened.  But I’m not going to tell you what it is.   So nah nah nah boo boo on you.

Okay, okay, I’ll tell you.

I had to wait a million hundred years, but HarperCollins just started the My Weird Classroom Club!  It’s a club for classrooms, and it’s about My Weird School, so it has the perfect name.

My Weird Classroom Club is full of teaching guides, activity sheets, puzzles, games, comics, checklists, cards, Mad Libs, and other awesome stuff you can use in your classroom to get your kids excited about reading.*

“WOW!” (that’s “MOM” upside down)  This is the greatest day of my life.  If you ask me, HarperCollins should get the No Bell Prize.  That’s a prize they give out to people who don’t have bells.

The My Weird Classroom Club is cool.  So don’t be a dumbhead.  Go to www.myweirdclassroomclub.com today and  see it live and in person.

If you don’t, I’ll be so upset that I’ll have to go to Antarctica and live with the penguins.

*It’s gonna sell a lot of books too!  What a scam!

In HOW LAMAR’S BAD PRANK WON A BUBBA-SIZED TROPHY, 13-year-old Lamar is the maddest, baddest, most spectacular bowler at Striker’s Bowling Paradise but he seems to keep striking out with the ladies.  When an older kid talks Lamar into hustling at the bowling alley, he thinks it just may be his chance to get ahead.  Finding himself in trouble, Lamar realizes that sometimes the long way to success is better than the short cut.

In its starred review, Publishers Weekly said that “from the first sentence Lamar will have readers hooked.”

Speaking of gems, debut novelist Crystal Allen is one of them herself.  She recently joined us at the Texas Library Association conference, and we all adored her.  She is laugh-out-loud funny (much like Lamar) and her enthusiasm is contagious.  Want to know more about her?  Check out her website where you can get added to her mailing list and read fun trivia about her.  You can also friend Crystal on Facebook and read this great interview with Crystal at The Brown Bookshelf.

You know Dan Gutman’s books, of course.  He’s the author of the wildly popular My Weird School series and its offshoots, as well as The Baseball Card Adventures series as well.  When I was a librarian, we couldn’t keep these series on the shelves so I was thrilled when I heard about…

It’s Dan’s new series and the first book is THE GENIUS FILES: MISSION UNSTOPPABLE, which is available now.  The second book in the series, THE GENIUS FILES: NEVER SAY GENIUS is on-sale in January 2012.  Check out the book trailer:

Booklist says that “thrill seekers and Gutman fans alike will welcome the opening installment of the Genius Files series.”  Here are some other links to check out:

• Washington Post interview with Dan Gutman
• Pink Me’s awesome review where she says, “I love books like this – a funny mystery appeals to just about everyone, and when that funny mystery is written with this kind of ease and confidence you feel like you’re putting those kids into good hands.”
• Librarian Pirate says in her review that you’ll want this for your libraries.
• Monica Edinger (Educating Alice) has her students doing blog reviews and this review says the book is “fun, weird, and original”.

April: Texas Library Association Conference
May: International Reading Association Conference
May: SLJ Day of Dialog/BEA
June: ALA Annual Conference

It’s crazy…but we also have lots of fun.  First up is TLA in Austin where we have a phenomenal line-up of authors signing with us:

Wednesday, April 13th
10:15 am – 11:00 am Pat Mora (author aisles)
10:15 am – 11:00 am Rafael Lopez (author aisles)
11:30 am – 12:30 pm Lauren Oliver (author aisles)
12:30 pm – 1:30 pm Will Hobbs (author aisles)
12:30 pm – 1:30 pm Bettina Restrepo (author aisles)
1:30 pm – 2:00 pm Crystal Allen (Harper booth 1824)
2:00 pm – 2:30 pm Sophie Jordan (Harper booth 1824)
2:30 pm – 3:00 pm Tera Lynn Childs (Harper booth 1824)
3:00 pm – 3:30 pm Suzanne Harper (Harper booth 1824)

Thursday, April 14th
9:00 am – 10:00 am Diane Stanley (author aisles)
11:30 am – 12:00 pm Jason Henderson (Harper booth 1824)
2:00 pm – 2:30 pm Jennifer Archer (Harper booth 1824)
2:00 pm – 3:30 pm Kevin Henkes (author aisles)
3:00 pm – 3:30 pm Don Tate and Audrey Vernick (Harper booth 1824)

And don’t miss JAMIE LEE CURTIS as the Keynote Speaker on Wednesday, April 13th at 9:00 am!

Aside from our outstanding authors, we’ll have galleys galore at our booth (#1824) and we hope you’ll stop by to say hi to Patty, Robin, and me!

See you in Texas!

~ Laura

The school and library world is a-buzzing with accolades for Thanhha Lai’s debut novel INSIDE OUT AND BACK AGAIN!  Check out these reviews…and the shiny stars that accompany them:

“In her not-too-be-missed debut, Lai evokes a distinct time and place and presents a complex, realistic heroine whom readers will recognize, even if they haven’t found themselves in a strange new country.” ~ Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“An incisive portrait of human resilience.” ~ Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Based on Lai’s personal experience, this first novel captures a child-refugee’s struggle with rare honesty.” ~ Booklist (starred review)

“[...] the immediacy of the narrative will appeal to those who do not usually enjoy historical fiction.” ~ School Library Journal (starred review)

“Lai’s spare language captures the sensory disorientation of changing cultures as well as a refugee’s complex emotions and kaleidoscopic loyalties.” ~ The Horn Book

And here is what our teacher and librarian friends are saying:

• Monica Edinger at Educating Alice called this “a very moving verse novel.”
• Jonathan Hunt suggested INSIDE OUT AND BACK AGAIN as 2012 Newbery Reading at Heavy Medal!

INSIDE OUT AND BACK AGAIN (ISBN 9780061962783) is on-sale now.

You’ve read the first book in the INCORRIGIBLE CHILDREN OF ASHTON PLACE series by Maryrose Wood, right?  For heaven’s sake, I hope so!  It received four starred reviews and appeared on Kirkus’ 2010 Best Books list, among other accolades.  Not to mention that it’s extraordinarily clever and funny, of course!

The second book in the series, THE INCORRIGIBLE CHILDREN OF ASHTON PLACE, BOOK II: THE HIDDEN GALLERY will be on-sale February 22, 2011.  To celebrate, HarperCollins will be hosting a sweepstakes: grand prize, an e-reader with which to read all the sage words of advice from Agatha Swanburne.  And we’ll also have four first place prizes – a copy of the newly released paperback of the first book in the series, THE INCORRIGIBLE CHILDREN OF ASHTON PLACE, BOOK I: THE MYSTERIOUS HOWLING.

Want to enter?  Click here to get all the details and, hopefully, this will help quell your impatience until the next book comes out.  In the immortal words of Miss Agatha Swanburne: “To be kept waiting is unfortunate, but to be kept waiting with nothing interesting to read is a tragedy of Greek proportions.”

This past November I spent six action-packed days in Tokyo, lecturing about American picture books at the Japanese National Library and celebrating the November 30th release of the Japanese edition of DEAR GENIUS. What, you say, Ursula Nordstrom has Japanese fans—enough to warrant a full-dress translation of her letters to Maurice Sendak, E. B. White, et. al.? Indeed she does, and a great many of the books she published are beloved by Japanese children today. How did this happen?

Following World War II, Japanese librarians and publishers came to the U.S. to study our advanced methods for connecting children with books. Back home, they created scores of makeshift neighborhood children’s libraries and, to satisfy the growing demand, published a mix of children’s books drawn from foreign and homegrown sources. In time THE CARROT SEED, GOODNIGHT MOON, BEDTIME FOR FRANCES, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, and CHARLOTTE’S WEB—to name just a few of the classics Ursula championed—made their way to Japanese shores. Although Ursula herself was a walking caricature of the anxious, accident-prone traveler and rarely ventured far from New York, the books she was responsible for have circled the globe. Now, so have her letters.

Poster for the exhibition "The Golden Age of the Picture Book: History's Message to Children," in Ueno Park, Tokyo

Visiting Tokyo as the Japanese government’s guest is a very good way to go to Japan. I strongly recommend it! I was picked up at my hotel each morning and driven to a restaurant for lunch with a small party of guests: obento boxes one time, Japanese/French another. Then it was on to the day’s major event: tea and a conversation about digital publishing with the director of the National Library; a talk for the library’s staff about the state of American children’s book publishing and a library tour; a public lecture on the beginnings of the American picture book presented to mark the tenth anniversary of the library’s children’s literature division (which is known as the International Library of Children’s Literature). On view at the library just then was a major exhibition of picture books of the 1920s and 1930s from the United States, Russia, and Western Europe. The exhibition’s subtitle was a beautiful summing-up of why children’s books matter. It called them “History’s Message to Children.” I wish I had thought of that myself! Most of the displayed books came from the private collection of Tayo Shima, a past president of IBBY and a very Ursula Nordstrom-like figure herself—a shape-shifter and

Are you as big a Decemberists fan as I am?  If so, you probably know that today marks the release of their latest album The King is Dead.

But what you may not know is that Colin Meloy, lead singer of the band, has written a middle-grade novel, WILDWOOD.  Here is the exclusive cover reveal, as reported by Entertainment Weekly:

Isn’t the artwork gorgeous?  There are more illustrations throughout the book that are stunning – Carson Ellis is fantastic.

The book isn’t coming out until August 2011 so, in the meantime, check out The King is Dead (I love it so far).  And keep checking here for more news about WILDWOOD in the months to come!

~ Laura

I hereby present you with photographic evidence of the great time had in the HarperCollins Children’s booth at ALA:

"How Lamar's Bad Prank Won Him a Bubba-Sized Trophy

Lauren Oliver's upcoming DELIRIUM

Cynthia Hand's UNEARTHLY and hundreds of Inkpop bags

Our fun & fabulous new tween series!

Veronica Roth's debut dystopian novel DELIRIUM

the pageturn Post-Its

Robin, Laura, Stephanie, and Heather - the Harper team minus Patty the Photographer

And that doesn’t even begin to cover it!  Books on display, hundreds of galleys in cupboards, posters for upcoming books by Kevin Henkes and Mo Willems…just a taste of all the fabulous loot we brought to the conference.

Bummed to have missed ALA Midwinter?  We’ll be at Texas Library Association in April and the International Reading Association in May!

Believe it or not! -- Another massive volume, the seventh in the bestselling Ripley's Believe It or Not series, was just released on August 10th, 2010. Enter if You Dare has an eye-catching lenticular image on the cover and plenty of bizarre and strange new entries inside.

Just the other day, I took several books to the library to donate. Our librarian was especially excited to see one particular book in the stack, last year's Ripley's Believe or Not: Seeing Is Believing. Apparently the Ripley's Believe it or Not and Guinness World Records books are pretty popular at the library, and our children's librarian likes to take them with her on school visits. She's not the only one that has witnessed the popularity. The Getting Boys to Read website lists Ripley's Believe it or Not books on the Books For Boys - The 8 Most Popular Topics. Bizarre and gross win out with certain audiences.

What's inside Ripley's Believe It or Not: Enter If You Dare!? The question should be, what's not in the book? The Wisconsin entries always catch my attention. This years top WI honor goes to Ken Imhoff, a man who spent 17 years building a sports car in his cellar and had to remove part of his home's foundation to get the car out. There's the animal-themed oddities: a bright pink dolphin (page 59), calf with three nostrils (page 50), a spider with marking like a happy face (page 70), and a life-size buffalo made of pink chewing gum (page 184). There's people: a couple covered in bees for their wedding (page 158), a Pokemon collector (page 230) and an ice-breaking man (page 156). And then, of course, there's numerous stomach-turning, just plain graphic images that only adults and older children should view.

I always turn to the art pages first; the art chapter in this volume is titled, "Artistic License." The amazing and stunning creations always interest me. I especially like the page spread on Chinese Artist Liu Bolin, the "Invisible Man," who paints himself into the background (page 198). Patrick Acton, an Iowaian, is shown with his detailed model of Hogwarts school from matchsticks (page 205). I'd love to see Edgar Mueller's 3D pavement art in person (page 208), but I really could have done without the image of Leandro Granato shooting paint out of his eye (page 195).

Yes, it definitely is the "Yearbook of the Weird," and there's certainly a lot to take in. Not really a book you read cover to cover, but rather a browse and ponder kind of book.

If this sort of news interests you, according to the Ripley's website, today (September 7th), the world's smallest teen, Khagendra Thapa Magar, is set to visit New York. You can follow news related to his visit at