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Library Card Sign-up Month~ USA

National Poetry Week~ ongoing until Sep 7, Australia

Singapore International Storytelling Festival~ ongoing until Sep 9, Singapore

Children Should Be Seen: The Image of the Child in American Picture-Book Art~ ongoing until Sep 14, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Beijing International Book Fair~ Sep 1 – 4, Tinjian, China

National Literacy and Numeracy Week~ Sep 1 – 7, Australia

New Zealand Book Month~ Sep 1 – 30, New Zealand

Christchurch Writers Festival: Getting Between the Covers~ Sep 4 – 7, Christchurch, New Zealand

Shanghai Conference On Children’s Publishing~ Sep 5 – 6, Shanghai, China

Cape Clear Island Storytellling Festival~ Sep 5 – 7, Cape Clear, Ireland

31st IBBY World Congress~ Sep 7 – 10, Copenhagen, Denmark

Hans Christian Anderson Awards Presentation~ Sep 7, Copenhagen, Denmark

International Literacy Day~ Sep 8

UNESCO Literary Prize Awards Presentation~ Sep 8, Paris, France

29th Manila International Book Fair: Words Without Borders~ Sep 12 – 16, Manila, Philippines

Bath Festival of Children’s Literature~ Sep 19 – 28, Bath, United Kingdom

Brisbane Writers Festival~ Sep 17 – 21, Brisbane, Australia

CYA later, Alligator – Children’s and Young Adult Writers And Illustrators Conference~ Sep 20, Brisbane, Australia

6th Annual Houston Latino Book and Family Festival~ Sep 20 – 21, Houston, TX, USA

International Day of Peace~ Sep 21

9th Annual Hog Wild About Reading: A Motorcycle Ride For Literacy~ Sep 21, Port Moody, BC, Canada

Raise-a-Reader Day~ Sep 24, Canada

International Children’s and Youth Literature Festival~ Sep 24 – Oct 4, Berlin, Germany

National Book Festival~ Sep 27, Washington, D.C., USA

Kidlit Bloggers Conference~ Sep 27, Portland, OR, USA

SCBWI Illustrator Day~ Sep 27, San Francisco, CA, USA

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read~ Sep 27 – Oct 4, USA

Word on the Street Book and Magazine Festival ~ Sep 28, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Entry Deadline for the Noma Concours for Picture Book Illustrations~ Sep 30

It’s hard to believe that a month has gone by since my first update on our rising to the PaperTigers Reading Challenge but it has and we are just about managing to keep up! Our three books this month are all very different and once again Big Brother and Little Brother have prepared their own reviews. It is quite coincidental that both their ‘solo’ books are illustrated by Ed Young – and that they both feature piercing eyes on their front covers!

Meanwhile our joint choice has been The Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray. We still have quite a long way to go and I suspect we’ll be dipping into it right to the end of the Challenge: you can’t rush Nonsense Poetry! Each poem has to be savored and the sounds enjoyed. Sukanta Chaudhuri’s translations from the original Bengali are truly amazing – lots of delightful rhymes and rhythms; and nonsense that is both nonsensical and convincingly English. Sukumar Ray’s own sketches and silhouettes sometimes give a visual lead into the poems and it hasn’t worried my two that some of the language is archaic: they expect to be baffled because it is, after all, nonsense! I think the word porcochard from “Hotch Potch” is set to become a new family word. But of course this is a translation – and here is another version, equally virtuoso, of the same poem, this time translated by Sukumar Ray’s son, Satyajit Ray. Here the extraordinary combination of a pochard/duck and a porcupine has become a “Porcuduck”…. Which of course leads into all sort of questions about translations… but that’s for a later date!

Big Brother’s book was Sadako in the picture book version by Eleanor Coerr, illustrated, as I said, by Ed Young. I said how much I was looking forward to seeing this book in a post for World Peace Day; here’s what Big Brother (aged 9 ½ exactly!) has to say: (more…)

Yesterday was Peace Day – thousands of people around the world stopped to stand together for a world without conflict, for a world united:

PEACE is more than the absence of war.
It is about transforming our societies and
uniting our global community
to work together for a more peaceful, just
and sustainable world for ALL. (Peace Day)

There is an ever-increasing number of children’s books being written by people who have experienced conflict first hand and whose stories give rise to discussion that may not be able to answer the question, “Why?” but at least allows history to become known and hopefully learnt from.

For younger children, such books as A Place Where Sunflowers Grow by Amy Lee-Tai and illustrated by Felicia Hoshino; Peacebound Trains by Haemi Balgassi; and The Orphans of Normandy by Nancy Amis all focus on children who are the innocent victims of conflict. We came across The Orphans of Normandy last summer. I was looking for something to read with my boys on holiday, when we were visiting some of the Normandy World War II sites. It is an extraordinary book: a diary written by the head of an orphanage in Caen and illustrated by the girls themselves as they made a journey of 150 miles to flee the coast. Some of the images are very sobering, being an accurate depiction of war by such young witnesses. It worked well as an introduction to the effects of conflict, without being unnecessarily traumatic.

The story of Sadako Sasaki, (more…)