More Great Reading I Just Have To Talk About

I knocked off the March/April Horn Book today. My favorite article was An Interview with George M. Nicholson by Leonard S. Marcus. I had never heard of George M. Nicholson, and the interview was all about the history of children's paperback book publishing. Doesn't sound riveting, does it? Well, it was. Redefining the Young Adult Novel by Jonathan Hunt (a name Adbook listserv members will certainly recognize) was also interesting. He has a lot to say about crossover novels. He places The Book Thief and Octavian Nothing in that category, though I thought a book had to be published as an adult novel (as Book Thief was in Australia) in order to "cross over" to YA. A few of this issue's interesting reviews: Margo Rabb's Cures for Heartbreak. Penni Russon's follow-up to Undine, Breathe. Cynthia Leitch Smith's Tantalize. Geraldine McCaughrean's The White Darkness, which was published a couple of years ago in England and shortlisted for the Whitbread Children's Prize and the Carnegie Medal. I was particularly interested in this title because McCaughrean wrote Peter Pan in Scarlet, which I loved. And, I just learned, she also wrote A Pack of Lies, a book I liked very much except for the ending. Perhaps I'm becoming a McCaughrean fan.