Quite recently I noticed that one of my books, Eve and Adam and Their Very First Day, had attracted the notice of some people online. Not in a good way. The book is written in the time-honored Jewish tradition of midrash–re-examining a story in a new way, putting it in a different context to try…
A pair of recent studies concluded that reading for pleasure among children (specifically eight to ten year olds) has declined to 35% or 39%, the lowest rate in more than twenty years. At the same time, unsurprisingly, smartphone usage by children has risen sharply. Clearly, not a coincidence. This is very sad news. Some of…
For the thousandth time this morning, my husband gently removed something from the interior spine of a book I was reading and replaced it with a bookmark. “A pair of tweezers is not a bookmark,” he commented. We have an infinite number of bookmarks in our house. Many that I have made to promote the…
In my early days as an author, children’s book festivals were few and far between. But in recent years, they’ve been multiplying like weeds. (In my garden, that’s saying a lot!) They’re almost always superbly organized. Wherever you live, there may well be one near you. For a child—or a child at heart—these festivals are…
Another challenging year, come and almost gone. In spite of continued difficulties, there are many things I’m grateful for as 2021 winds down: Three book fairs this fall, with the chance to meet lots of enthusiastic readers, IN PERSON! Even masks couldn’t interfere with the joy of these events. Classroom visits, which I am very…
I am slightly obsessed with sloths. And I suspect that I have lots of company. First of all, these creatures always seem to be smiling. Maybe because they take their sweet time doing anything. Whatever the reason is, they’re pretty adorable. Second of all, they do everything upside down—sleeping, eating, mating, even giving birth. And…
One of the bright spots of the last ten months has been all the books I’ve finally had time to read. I have no particular criterion for picking my next read, and have read from picture books to adult fare, fiction and nonfiction. I read somewhere that in all the educational upheaval kids have gone…
My newest picture book is The Eight Knights of Hanukkah, with glorious illustrations by Galia Bernstein. It’s a medieval Hanukkah tale, complete with knights, dragons, and “deeds of stupendous bravery and awesome kindness.” The story is full of derring-do and silly knight-speak. But that’s not all, kind sirs and fair ladies. It also carries the…
We are living through strange and scary times. I keep waking up in the morning as if I’m living through “Groundhog Day,” waiting to wake up and discover that life is moving forward into sunshine again. In the middle of it all, three new books of mine came out this month. The first, Worse and…
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of E.B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan, a book though perhaps not as well known as Charlotte’s Web or Stuart Little is nevertheless brilliant. It tells the story of Louis, a trumpeter swan, who for some reason is born without a voice. Over the course…