Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Spiderwick: Gothic Lite


An article by Jacqueline Blais, USA TODAY reports on the popular children's series The Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black.
[They are] "more cozy than chilling" says Roger Sutton, editor in chief of The Horn Book Magazine, which covers children's books.

Nice bits about the team and the future of the books.
The five Spiderwick books are a little more than 100 pages each, invitingly illustrated and small enough to hold easily. But, as DiTerlizzi told one fan: "Dude, when you're done, you've read a 500- to 600-page book."

That fan would be Alexander Carr, 10, of Alexandria, Va., who once was what is called euphemistically a reluctant reader. Reading was "evil," he says, his hand chopping downward. He started the first in the series, The Field Guide, one night, woke up in the morning, found the book at his side and started reading more.

The END?
Black and DiTerlizzi say this [The Wrath of Mulgarath] is the end of the Grace children's story: They don't want to put Jared, Simon and Mallory through any more torture.

But it is not the end of tales from Spiderwick. Coming next summer: The Spiderwick Chronicles: Notebook for Fantastical Observations, an illustrated journal for children to record their own spritely creatures - "strange occurrences in their yard, playground, so forth," DiTerlizzi says. And next fall: Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You, an illustrated replica of the field guide that the Grace kids discover in their haunted home.

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