In 2004 the Japanese filmmaker Hirozaku Kore-eda released Nobody Knows, a feature film based on the story of five children in Tokyo, abandoned by their mother and forced to fend for themselves. The film gained widespread attention for its depiction of a hidden social problem in a supposedly developed country, but it also attracted criticism…
Last December I reviewed A.S. King’s excellent young adult novel Everybody Sees the Ants for my local newspaper and interviewed the author on the novel’s central theme of bullying. Since then, several more books have come out on the subject, including Holly Thompson’s Orchards, which I reviewed for The Pirate Tree last month. Dear Bully,…
The small country of Malawi, in south-central Africa, rarely appears on children’s authors’ radars, but two books published in 2012—Shana Burg’s middle grade novel Laugh with the Moon (Delacorte) and the picture book version of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (Dial), written by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer and illustrated by Elizabeth Zunon—take place…
This month, author Shana Burg has visited a number of blogs as part of her blog tour for her newly-released middle grade novel Laugh with the Moon (Delacorte). The novel, set in rural Malawi, portrays 13-year-old Clare, whose father has brought her there as part of his work as a doctor, but both Clare and…
This weekend I’m headed to Montpelier, Vermont for my final residency and graduation from the Vermont College of Fine Arts program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. One of my MFA requirements is to deliver a lecture on an issue related to the craft of writing. My lecture, titled “Dimensions of Difference: Applying the…
The recently released video of middle schoolers tormenting a 68-year-old bus monitor in Greece, NY, near Rochester, has prompted national outrage aimed at the young bullies. Last week in a post titled “Where Have All the Manners Gone,” my sister (Albany) Times-Union blogger Valerie DeLaCruz, aka Boomergirl, called on parents to teach the values of respect…
This past weekend, the Fifth Annual Horace Mann Upstanders Book Award was given to G. (Greg) Neri for his middle grade novel Ghetto Cowboy. The ceremony took place at the Wildwood Elementary School in Los Angeles, and along with Neri two other people were honored. Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries and author of…
We’re back after some technical difficulties, and as promised, I’m following up Ann’s eloquent review of Never Fall Down with a report on the Children’s Rights Panel from this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, which featured Patricia McCormick, Arn Chorn-Pond, Debby Dahl Edwardson, and Wojciech Jagielski. The moderator was PEN Children’s Committee chair Susanna Reich…
Last summer I reviewed the young adult novel In Trouble by Ellen Levine, about two teenage girls in the 1950s who find themselves pregnant and make different decisions about whether to undergo what was then an illegal and dangerous abortion. I subtitled my review “The Past That May Become Our Future” [http://www.thepiratetree.com/2011/08/01/in-trouble-the-past-that-may-become-our-future/] because attacks on…
One of the major appeals of the KONY 2012 campaign to capture brutal Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony by this December is that, in a contentious election year, it is a nonpartisan effort. The poster to advertise the campaign illustrates that theme, with a Democratic donkey and a Republican elephant coming together in the white dove…
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