Just got back from a trip to the Czech Republic with photos and more prints (though a distinct lack of wall space). Anyhow Jim Steel, reviews editor at Interzone, let me know that Jesse Bullington has commented on my review of his book on his blog.
Jesse, I’m glad you liked it and, to be honest, [...]
The latest Children’s Literature and Youth Culture Colloquium (CLYCC) talk was given by Bill Gray on George MacDonald and the influence of English Romanticism on his writing, called “At the Back of George MacDonald: Romanticism, Fairy Tales and the ‘Redemptive Child’”. Most approaches, including my own, tend to be from the German Romantics whose agenda [...]
The Guardian have a piece on Maurice Sendak’s rebuttal to parents fear of Where the Wild Thigs Are. I heard him on an archive piece on Radio 4 where he said that he thought that parents ought to go to Hell if they are worried about the Wild Things. It reminds me about The Observer’s [...]
I’ve raved about Michelle Zink’s Prophecy of the Sisters before on the blog as one of those really pleasant surprises. She kindly answered some questions about the book and future plans having just come off tour in the US.
What inspired you to write Prophecy of the Sisters?
Many of my ideas begin with an old myth [...]
Edward Eager’s (1911 - 1964) quartet of books for children about time are strange and uneven. So far, I’ve not been able to find out much more about Eager than Wikipedia mentions but I might be looking in the wrong places. He was a playwright and lyricist but appears to have written the books to [...]
Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels is a remade fairy tale which explores and updates the Snow White and Rose Red fairy tale. In the Brothers’ Grimm tale, Snow White and Rose Red, daughters of a widow, look after a bear during the Winter and encourage it into the house. They do this for a couple of [...]
Michelle Zink’s debut novel, Prophecy of the Sisters, is an intriguing debut which certainly promises a lot for the rest of the series. I picked this up as a curiosity to see what it was like and found that I couldn’t put it down.
The Milthorpe sisters, Alice and Amalia (better known as Lia), have just [...]
Julie Hearn’s Rowan the Strange is, at once, a fairy tale and also a riff of One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or, perhaps, the Bell Jar.It continues her exporation through questions of identity that she has explored in books like Ivy and what adults can do to children. It is becoming a wider question [...]
The final day of the DWJ conference saw a great paper from Jenni Tyynela which applied David Lewis’s theory of modal worlds applied to the worlds of Chrestomanci. She explored the idea of them questioning possibility and determinism and how various characters can move (although not to where a copy of each other is) to [...]
Day one of the Diana Wynne Jones conference, held at the University of West England at Bristol, had two papers and the first keynote speech given by Nicholas Tucker, who grew up with the DWJ’s family.
Deborah Kaplan presented a great paper about the theme of disguised age and age confusion. As part of it, she [...]