Author: Meg Cabot

This week I spent the better part of an afternoon and evening with Entling no. 3 at the Pre Area All-State Choir Audition where to my delight I met and visited with another choir member who was reading Meg Cabot's Big Boned. She was down to the last 50 pages and told me she couldn't wait to finish her sight reading so she could get back to the book.

"I just love the way she writes. She writes the way I think!" she told me. I told her about Meg's blog.

Honestly, I was so THRILLED to meet another highschooler (besides Entling no. 3) who had packed a book I was overwhelmed. (It might also have been the resigned misery and fear on the faces of all the kids as they marched off for their sight reading auditions that was moving me to tears.)

Thanks to Bookshelves of Doom for this delightful video of Meg Cabot retelling moments from Little Women. I love the "Masterpiece Theater" background and the picture over the fireplace.

Foxtrot

Bill Amend is only doing one strip per week nowadays but this Sunday's (Nov. 25) was excellent for a children's lit tie-in. Brilliant, again.

Rider, Alex Rider

Oh, good.

Author, Anthony Horowitz has announced that Alex Pettyfer will NOT be in the next Alex Rider movie because he is too old now. The character, Alex Rider, is 14 years old and will be for the rest of the books. I think Horowitz said Alex will turn 15 at the end of the series.

I never understood why Stormbreaker was shown in such a limited release in the U.S. When I fnally saw the movie on DVD, I liked it. The only thing that didn't quite jell for me was Alex himself. Pettyfer's restrained and rather elegant Alex Rider did not fit my image of the character.

Horowitz showed us the first preview of Stormbreaker during his talk at TLA two years ago. As the trailer opened, we saw a shot of a classroom with a teacher calling Alex Rider's name. As the camera passed by the faces of the students I recall thinking "Oh there's Alex!" only to see the camera continue and finally land on Pettyfer. "That's not Alex!" I thought.

Now, I realize that in the annals of cinematic history, this probably does not rank up there with the casting of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind did but I booktalked these books today and heard the cheers of the kids who have read them and saw the keen interest of those who have not yet. Kids get excited at the idea of a movie so, to me, this is important.

So, Anthony, I want you to know that I will be happy to help you review the screen tests.
I will know Alex when I see him.

The Trailblazing Life of Daniel Boone

The Trailblazing Life of Daniel Boone: and how early Americans took to the road, painstakinglyl written and illustrated by Cheryl Harness, National Geographic Society, 2007

For folks a certain age, there is a fair amount of confusion between Daniel Boone and another American iconn, Davy Crockett, due to the late 1960s television program about Boone which starred Fess Parker (a.k.a. Davy Crockett. ) The TV folks clapped a coonskin cap on Daniel (no doubt trying to tie-in to the success of Parker's earlier series) and forever melded the two men in the mind of a generation.

Harness takes-on that issue early in the book by describing Boone's headgear.

...some frontier folks like the look of a jaunty striped tail, dangling from the back of a "coonskin" cap, but not Daniel. He generally wore a wide-brimmed felt hat.

She includes a full page illustration of Daniel with his gear, powder horn, tomahawk, buckskins britches, leggins etc. all clearly labeled. Life on the Kentucky and Missouri frontier is richly described with its need for self-reliance, the brutal Indian wars, hunting and trapping, pelt theft, and land disputes . Daniel and his family scratched out a living on the outposts of civilization and held on to that life tenaciously. At one point the Shawnee kidnapped Boone and held him so long that his wife Rebecca thought he was dead.

The fragility of human life in the wilderness is underscored by a poignant story of Daniel's brother in law, John Stewart who disappeared while hunting. His body was found years later only identifiable by his powder horn carved with the initials J.S.

I enjoy the style of Cheryl Harness's books. She provides a very high rate of information per square inch through her use of engaging artwork and text. A timeline of world events runs across the bottom of each page. I loved knowing that while Daniel was trapping for pelts in the wild, Handel was composing "Music for the Royal Fireworks." There is also an excellent list of resources, other reading, "places well worth visiting" and an index. Harness also describes the process she uses to create the pen and ink pictures through out the book.

Daniel Boone's life is the stuff of legends and this book tells his story in the context of the times with depth and detail.

Movie: Pictures of Hollis Woods

Nice casting for next Sunday's Hallmark Hall of Fame broadcast (CBS) of the Newbery Honor winner, Pictures of Hollis Woods: Sissy Spacek and Alfre Woodard for starters.

Patricia Reilly Giff discusses the experience of watching the movie based on her book for the first time.

"It was wonderful. . . . In the book, there is a truck . . . and the truck is going to crash and I'm watching the truck come down the mountain (on TV) and I'm thinking, 'It's going to crash.' Then I think, 'You idiot! You wrote the book.' And every once in a while I'd hear my own words."

Beowulf

This is the way to experience Beowulf. Two years ago Treebeard and the youngest entling and I saw bard, Benjamin Bagby perform his one man show and it was a transforming experience.



Bagby has a DVD now. I hope schools are sharing this with their students.

Music: Lord of the Rings

It only took a few notes and people came running from every corner of the house to listen to this podcast about the LOTR film score.


A small bit of fun: Some interesting alternate versions of Howard Shore's themes, Peter Jackson's meddling and more information on the book about Shore and his magnificent film score.

Like the folks in the podcast, I wonder if this family's fascination with this subject will ever end?

Nope.



Film Score Monthly Podcast.

Basal Readers...er ...Comics

This new series called Toon Comics, described in this Publishers Weekly article, sounds very interesting. Françoise Mouly (New Yorker art director and wife of cartoonist Art Spiegelman) is behind the effort.

“Comics are the gateway to literacy for young kids,” said Mouly who expects Toon Books to transform books for early readers the same way RAW influenced indie comics. “RAW showed that comics can be taken seriously,” she said. Little Lit, a comics line for older kids launched by Mouly and Spiegelman in 2000, “was an intermediate step using the RAW model. Now there are more comics for kids 10–12 years old but not for very young kids.”

Turkey Daze

Movie: Inkheart

A trailer is out for Inkheart: the movie!