Here’s the thing—I created this blog as a resource to help parents find good books for their kids. And then… I was a very bad parent to this website. You can still find a lot of great recom...
How good is Lane Smith’s Grandpa Green ? I brought this up when I wrote about Mo Willems a while back, but there are a few children’s book creators who are so consistently good that their con...
http://www.buildingalibrary.com/picture-books/grandpa-green-by-lane-smith/123
I’ve never been a big fan of lists like “50 Books Your Kid HAS to Read” or “The 100 Best Children’s Books OF ALL TIME.” Typically, they make my blood pressure spike, tossing me betwee...
April 2nd is International Children’s Book Day, an annual event that celebrates reading, literacy, and the million-and-a-half wonderful things about children’s literature. So, as I was trying...
http://www.buildingalibrary.com/articles/the-under-appreciated-art-of-bedtime-reading/1114
I just had a 20-minute conversation with my daughter about who would win in a fight between Darth Vader and Yoda and it was, honest to god, part of her homework. (Let’s give it up for public sc...
I’ve got big news for Harry Potter fans. Some of you may have read my earlier post (“Why Detroit Is the Perfect Home for Ilvermorny”), which collected my arguments for why I thought that th...
Last week, Pottermore, the official website for all things Harry Potter, announced the existence of FOUR previously unmentioned, international wizarding schools. We learned about the Brazilian sc...
I have a nine-year-old daughter, so every time I go into a bookstore, I am on the lookout for strong female protagonists. I spend an inordinate amount of time flipping through books that have bee...
With Father’s Day hitting this Sunday, it inevitably got me thinking about my dad, specifically about my dad and reading. My dad died when I was ten. A huge portion of my memories of my father ...
A few months back, I got a very unusual invitation. I was asked to contribute to an anthology titled A Letter to My Mom, a book of letters written by celebrities and normal folk (like myself) in ...