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ALMOST AS SOON AS MANGA BECAME POPULAR OUTSIDE OF JAPAN, creators around the world started borrowing its stylistic and storytelling tropes for their own comics. Some simply incorporated manga techniques [...]

FAMED ROMAN ORATOR CICERO ONCE NOTED that friendship doubles our joy and divides our grief. Still, adults frequently underestimate the importance of friend groups in tween lives. As an educator, [...]

YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST, RIGHT? No, not that. First audiobookl I'm a later-in-life disciple, formerly adamant that only the printed page held the pure experience until two audiobooks converted [...]

July marks Disability Pride Month which first began as a single day of celebration in 1990, the year the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. The first Disability Pride Month [...]

THE REVIEWS TEAM at SLJ is just starting to put together committees for this year's Best Books list, our annual much-anticipated selection of the titles that spoke to us, sang [...]

THE IDEA FOR LUNAR NEW YEAR LOVE STORY, the critically acclaimed graphic novel written by Gene Luen Yang and illustrated by LeUyen Pham, sprang from the author's relationship with his [...]

IN GRAPHIC NOVELS, AS IN LIFE, GRANDPARENTS ARE COMPLICATED CHARACTERS. Some are simply kind and loving; others carry the trauma of their past lives. Some come bearing unfamiliar foods, such [...]

IN SISTER OUTSIDER, AUDRE LORDE WROTE, 'It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.' We encounter differences whenever we [...]

THE LIBRARY WORLD came to know and love Mychal Threets (left) through his social media posts centered on enthusiastically recounting library stories and celebrating library joy. While he shared patron [...]

Stories of children with parents behind bars are as diverse as the millions of real-life kids familiar with the experience. The parent may be guilty or innocent, be in touch [...]

Fantasy tales are as old as stories themselves, and many modern ones maintain an old-fashioned feel, with fairy-tale creatures, ancient magic, and plucky main characters fighting powerful monsters. Graphic novels [...]

In rural Oklahoma, a copy of Zonia's Rain Forest sits on the school librarian's desk. Caldecott Honor and Sibert Medal-winning author and illustrator Juana Martinez-Neal's story of a little girl [...]

Diverse stories on the page deserve authentic voices in the ears. For Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we gathered five women of Asian descent to talk about their aurally literary [...]

In Louise Fitzhugh's 1965 novel The Long Secret, a scared Beth Ellen asks her friends Harriet and Janie, 'Aren't there little rocks that come down and make you bleed and [...]

With muddy boots on their feet and sharpened pencils in their hands, young explorers will be inspired by the topics covered in this season's Series Made Simple. Curated and evaluated [...]

LAST YEAR, THE NEW YORK CITY Office of Library Services held a contest offering school librarians a chance to bring 'Artemis Fowl' author Eoin Colfer to their school. But Colfer [...]

GENRES HELP READERS MANAGE EXPECTATIONS--if they like scary stories, they can anticipate elements like ghosts, haunted houses, creepy puppets, and maybe even zombies in the books they're choosing. If they [...]

AMANDA CHACON WAS IN THE MIDDLE of her MLS program at Sam Houston State University in 2010 when she got hired for her first job as a school ibrarian at [...]

In Oklahoma, Missouri, and Tennessee, legislation has been introduced seeking to criminalize librarianship, all because librarians are trying to foster a love of reading in their students. If they dare [...]

SMITH, Cynthia Leitich. On a Wing and a Tear. 240p. HarperCollins/Heartdrum. Sept. 2024. Tr $18.99. ISBN 9780062870001. Gr 4-6--Drawing on characters that may be familiar to readers of Smith's other [...]

* POLONSKY, Ami. Every Story Ever Told. 256p. Little, Brown. Oct. 2024. Tr $16.99. ISBN 9780316570978. Gr 5 Up--In the wake of tragedy, a middle schooler wonders how she will [...]

REYNOSO-MORRIS, Alyssa. Gloriana, Presente: A First Day of School Story. illus. by Doris M. Rodriguez-Graber. 32p. Little, Brown/ Christy Ottaviano. Jul. 2024. Tr $18.99. ISBN 9780316366618. K-Gr 3--On Gloriana's first [...]

NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE OR WHERE YOU LIVE, the start of your day probably includes water. August is National Water Quality Month, which was started in 2005 by the [...]

These days, young children engage with so many different types of devices and e-toys that it can be hard for books to compete for their attention, but this collection of [...]

MOVE OVER, MANGA! With the burgeoning popularity of webtoons, K-drama, and K-pop, manhwa--comics from Korea--have made a big impact on English-language audiences. Chinese comics, manhua, are growing in number as [...]

MOST SCHOOL LIBRARIES HAVE A RELIABLE SOURCE of funding these days, but librarians need to overcome an increasing number of obstacles to access it, according to the SLJ 2024 School [...]

IN THE 2023 blockbuster movie Barbie, Gloria, a frustrated mother and Mattel employee played by America Ferrera, delivers a monologue about society's impossible expectations of women. 'We have to always [...]

RESEARCH SHOWS THAT 80 percent of autistic girls under the age of 18 go undiagnosed (bit.ly/3 SULtHt). Due to this, many girls with autism grow up not understanding I why [...]

Books have long had the ability to transport us. To spark our imaginations and call us to wonder. But sometimes, a book comes along that grants us the power to [...]

THE SUMMER OF 2023 WAS THE SUMMER OF POWERFUL WOMEN, from mega-concerts by monumental stars like Taylor Swift and Beyonce to the blockbuster film Barbie inspiring conversations about gender and [...]

THERE'S NOT ENOUGH MIDDLE GRADE MANGA. US. PUBLISHERS ARE CHANGING THAT. MANGA HAS NEVER BEEN MORE POPULAR, and the variety never greater. But there's one group of readers that is [...]

While writing books focused ON 19th-century African American subjects, historian Nikki M. Taylor says, 'The main challenge I encounter is the scarcity of historical resources about my subjects.' The Howard [...]

As a young child, I was utterly consumed by the boy adventurer and girl detective genres. Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, the Boxcar Children, Tom Swift Jr., and the Hardy Boys. [...]

Fall the magical story time moments I've witnessed as a librarian, the most mesmerizing was watching a yoga instructor quiet a room of 20 rioting, rambunctious toddlers with a glitter [...]

AMONG THE TITLES AT MY LOCAL LIBRARY that tentatively fall under the category of 'books about kindness' is a 1988 copy of Aliki's Manners, still on the shelf. It's a [...]

THE COMING YEAR will be consequential for the United States, with a presidential election, congressional elections, state legislative races, and important ballot questions. Why not start 2024 with a look [...]

KATE DICAMILLO HARDLY NEEDS AN INTRODUCTION. The beloved author of Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux, and Flora & Ulysses (all Candlewiek; 2000, 2003, 2013) has two Newbery Medals [...]

GROWING UP, KATHERINE SCHNEIDER struggled to find accessible books, not to mention ones with decent disability representation. Blind since birth, Schneider was the first child who was blind to attend [...]

* TABOR, Corey R. Ursula Upside Down. illus. by Corey R. Tabor. 4fip. HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray. May 2024. Tr $19.99. ISBN 9780063275560. PreS-Gr 2--Tabor realh does a number on readers [...]

MOONEY, Carla. Censorship: What Is It and How Does It Impact Society? 64p. Reference-Point. Jan. 2024. Tr $32.95. ISBN 9781678207267. Gr 7 Up--This is a well-organized and accessible text for [...]

'The Kids in Mrs. Z's class' began with an invitation to play. In July 2022, I was in the car with my husband and daughter when an email arrived with [...]

CULTURES MAY DIFFER, but kids are kids everywhere, says author Neal Shusterman, recipient of the 2024 Margaret A. Edwards Award, honoring a significant and lasting contribution to writing for teens. [...]

WHEN YOU IMAGINE A CHILDHOOD SUMMER, you may envision summer camp, fireside chats, s'mores, and ice cream. For middle grade kids, there's lots of fiction about summer at camp, with [...]

* MANN, J. Albert. Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States. 416p. Harper Collins. Jun. 2024. Tr $21.99. ISBN 9780063273481. Gr 9 Up--Contemporary, conversational, and sometimes profane, [...]

When well-chosen videos are components of educational lessons, they add novelty and visual stimulation that young learners crave. For older students, they contribute a hard-to-ignore spark to a lesson or [...]

* DANDRO, Travis & A. A. Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh. illus. by Travis Dandro. 248p. Drawn & Quarterly. Apr. 2024. Tr $29.95. ISBN 9781770466968. Gr 1-4--The sweet, round, honey-loving bear that is [...]

The 1947 Partition of India led to one of the largest migrations in human history, radically changing Southeast Asia's landscape. The area that was India under nearly 90 years of [...]

Amid all the challenges and disruptions that our youth face, we're releasing our 10th We Are Kid Lit Summer Reading List as a message to young readers: We see you, [...]

As reading instruction swings toward phonics-based practices, many educators will tell you that meeting the science of reading framework requires specific materials. Decodable books--also known as decodables, decodable texts, or [...]