Kids New Title Radar: Week of Oct. 21
As you undoubtedly already know from the eager lines of kids waiting for it, tomorrow is Allegiant Day, with the release of the final volume in Veronica Roth’s YA dystopian series (HarperCollins/Tegen; Dreamscape Audio). Amazon reports that it is selling 5:1 more copies than did Mockingjay (Hunger Games Book 4) in the month prior to its release (an encouraging comparison for Summit, which is producing both as movie franchises).
Midnight release parties are being abetted by an online reading by Roth of a chapter on the Divergent Web Site, beginning just before midnight tonight. Entertainment Weekly is the first with a review, giving it just a B+, revealing that, “Barely six chapters in, Roth brutally offs a character who’s been around since the first book. The message: In this dystopian universe, nobody is safe” and that the novel has a “shocking ending.” The reviewer rightly adds “None of this will matter to Roth’s fans, who thrill to the heart-pounding immediacy of her writing and swoon over Tobias, the damaged dreamboat who co-narrates Allegiant with his true love, Tris.”
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Tomorrow is also Mac Barnett and Jon Scieszka Day, with the release of Battle Bunny (S&S/Atheneum). The creators, joining forces for the first time, have gone all meta-cognition on us, first producing one of the most insipid picture books in recent history (Birthday Bunny— a faux Golden Book illustrated by Mathew Myers), then transforming it via the magic marker of a fictional boy reader into the far less saccharine Battle Bunny.
This creates some cogintive dissonance for me as a librarian. I believe that defacing books is wrong, even though there is a long tradition of creating art from old books. Should I buy a book for my library that celebrates such defacement?
Definitely. I need multiple copies AND will want to print out the original for programing.
[See our downloadable spreadsheet, Kids New Title Radar, Week of Oct 21, for other titles coming out this week]
