Three new childrens best books list have been released since our last roundup, the New York Times Book Review‘s Notable Childrens Books (25 titles), Horn Book Fanfare 2015 (25 titles), and Kirkus Middle Grade (50 titles). Below is the updated downloadable spreadsheet:

2015 Best Books Childrns and YA V2

With selections from six review sources, we can now assess the leading titles by number of picks in the Middle Grade and Picture Books categories (we’ll be able to assess YA when Kirkus releases their Teen picks on Dec. 14).

There’s very little agreement among the critics. Of the 217 titles, none were picked by all of the sources and over 86% were picked by two or fewer.

In Middle Grade titles, two of the finalists for the National Book Award were also hits with review editors, picked by 5 of the 6 sources (the Award winner, Brendan Shusterman’s Challenger Deep, a YA title, was picked by 3 sources).

In Picture Books, there is total disagreement between the New York Time Book Review’s Best Illustrated judges and the editors, as demonstarted by thier choices of the Most Notable Picture Books. None of the titles appear on both lists.

Middle Grade Leaders

Ali Benjamin, The Thing About Jellyfish (Hachette/Little, Brown) — The Amazon’s editors rated this National Book Award Finalist as not only a Top Childrens Book, but one of the Top 100 overall. It was also picked by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal and the New York Times Book Review, which calls it, “A shattering debut novel about a grieving, lonely girl, stung by the treachery of middle-school social alliances, who tries to use the scientific method to explain her former best friend’s death by drowning.”

Steve Sheinkin, Most Dangerous, (Macmillan/Roaring Brook) — In addition to being a National Book Award Finalist, this title also received 5 more picks. The NYT  BR calls it, “A riveting and remarkably effective account of Ellsberg’s life, his release of the Pentagon Papers and America’s tragic history in Vietnam.”

Rebecca Stead, Goodbye Stranger (RH/Wendy Lamb) — Five picks, including the NYT BR, “A seventh grader recovering from a near-fatal accident navigates changes in herself and her tight group of friends in this moving novel, which our reviewer, Meg Wolitzer, called ‘masterly.”

Victoria Jamieson, Roller Girl (Penguin/Dial) — Five picks. Says the NYT BR, “In this spiky, winning graphic novel, a summer at roller-derby day camp helps a 12-year-old girl learn to rechannel her anger and let go of her former, more uncertain self.”

Leading Picture Books

Kevin Henkes  Waiting (HarperCollins/Greenwillow) — Six picks, including the NYT BR Notable, (but not the NYT BR Best Illustrated);  “Five toys wait on a window ledge, each for something different, in this profound and beautiful take on patience and perspective from the matchless Henkes.”

JonArno Lawson and Sydney Smith,  Sidewalk Flowers (Groundwood) — Five picks, including the NYT BR Best Illustrated (but not the NYT BR Notable).

The movie is nearly a year away, but the first trailer for the live-action feature based on Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls, (Candlewick, 2011) has just been released.

The growly voice-over is by Liam Neeson. The movie stars Lewis MacDougall (Pan) as a boy whose mother, played by Felicity Jones, is dying. Sigourney Weaver plays his grandmother.

The book is based on an idea by YA author and activist Siobhan Dowd, who died before she could complete the project (read Ness’s tribute to her in a sample from OverDrive).

A trade paperback edition with the words on the cover,  “Soon to be A Major Motion Picture” was released in August.

To occupy kids and their parents during the Thanksgiving holiday Pixar’s animated movie, The Good Dinosaur opens today. It’s not based on a book, but it comes with a range of tie-ins.

The title cuently rising on Amazon’s sales rankings is the Little Golden Book version, which most libraries do not buy, The Good Dinosaur by Bill Scollon and illustrated by Michaelangelo Rocco (PRH/Disney/Pixar). It is currently at #32, putting it close to best sellers The Martian and The Day the Crayons Came Home.

Penguin Random House also offers a novelization, The Good Dinosaur Junior Novelization (OverDrive Sample), and two beginner readers, The Journey Home by Bill Scollon and Crash, Boom, Roar! by Susan Amerikaner.

DK gets in on the action with The Good Dinosaur: The Essential Guide, filled with images and movie “fun facts.”
 

For adults and kids there is The Art of the Good Dinosaur with text by John Lasseter and Peter Sohn (Chronicle Books).

For our full list of current and upcoming movie and TV tie-ins, link to our tie-ins collection.

Noelle Stevenson, NIMONA, HarperTeen

Philip C. & Erin Stead, LENNY & LUCY, Roaring Brook Press

Steve Sheinkin, MOST DANGEROUS, Roaring Brook Press

JonArno Lawson, & Sydney Smith, SIDEWALK FLOWERS, Groundwood Books

School Library Journal ‘s editors unveiled their best books picks on Monday, 63 titles in all.

We’ve collated all the selections to date into one downloadable spreadsheet (the four titles with the most selections, above(:

Best Books, Childrens and YA, 2015

Updates to come as new lists are released. Also available is our collation of the Best Adult Fiction. Coming soon, Best Adult Nonfiction.

Director Todd Haynes’s film Carol, based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt, about a Lesbian love affair (more on the novel from the NYT), debuts in limited release this Friday and is expected to generate Oscar nominations for stars Cate Blanchett  and Rooney Mara.

The director turns to different material for his next adaptation, Brian Selznick’s Wonderstruck (Scholastic, 2011). When the project was announced in May, Haynes already had several other projects in the works and it wasn’t clear which he would do next. Today, it was announced that Julianne Moore will star, indicating Wonderstruck may be next on his list.

This will be Selznick’s second book adapted by a celebrated director, after Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning Hugo, based on  The Invention Of Hugo Cabret.

Selznick’s most recent book,  The Marvels (Scholastic), published in September, has been on the NYT Children’s Middle Grade Hardcover  best seller list for 6 weeks.

CBS Films is adapting James Patterson’s bestselling children’s series Middle School.

Directed by Steve Carr (Paul Blart: Mall Cop), the cast will include Lauren Graham (Parenthood, Gilmore Girls) and Rob Riggle (22 Jump Street, Hotel Transylvania 2).

The series have won the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards and several titles in the series have been selected for ALSC Summer Reading Lists.

The newest title in the set is Middle School: Just My Rotten Luck (Hachette/Little, Brown; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample)

Patterson will serve as an executive producer and is co-financing the film. According to the Hollywood Reporter, it is expected in theaters on October 7, 2016.

Shortly after A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat  (RH/Schwartz & Wade, Jan.) was selected as one of the ten Best Illustrated Book by the NYT Book Review, NPR’s Code Switch reported on the simmering controversy over the book’s portrayal of an enslaved mother and daughter in a story titled,”The Kids’ Book A Fine Dessert Has Award Buzz — And Charges Of Whitewashing Slavery.”

The story comes full circle with an article in the New York Times, online Friday (in print on Saturday), “A Fine Dessert: Judging a Book by the Smile of a Slave.”

The book portrays history through the making of a single dessert, blackberry fool, in four different centuries, 1710, 1810, 1910, and 2010. The section from 1810 portrays an enslaved woman and her daughter making the dessert for a white family, then licking the remains from the bowl while hidden in a closet. Many objected that the mother and daughter appear to be enjoying the process of creating the fool, feeding the myth of the “happy slave” and that the closet scene, while stark in contrast, needs more context (see the NYT story for images of the pages).

The reactions have caused a soul-searching on the part of the books’  creators as well as at least one reviewer.

As the NYT notes, author Emily Jenkin has posted an apology online, saying that she will donate her writing fee to the campaign We Need Diverse Books.

Illustrator Sophie Blacknall, however, defends the book, as she did on Tuesday, responding to direct criticisms from author Daniel José Older at the Fall Conference of the New York City School Library System (section begins at time stamp 21:15).

The book received four starred reviews (the only holdout and the only prepub reviewer to raise a flag about the issue was Publishers Weekly). The Book Review Editor for School Library Journal, Kiera Parrott, wrote that publication’s starred review. She has posted comments on Twitter, and published them on Storify as “Reflecting on A Fine Dessert,” saying that at first she first felt the book’s depiction offered “a great opportunity to talk to [children] about America’s dark and painful history.” After reading what others have had to say, she says that she now realizes she was wrong and that, “It may feel odd for those of us who want to see more diversity to realize that sometimes NO representation is better than bad representation.”

For those who want to dive deeper into the issue,  SLJ, has published a bibliography of discussion.

Disney has just premiered the first full trailer for their next Alice movie, Alice Through the Looking Glass scheduled for release in late May 2016.

All the main actors reprise their roles from the first movie, including Mia Wasikowska as Alice, Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen.

Like the first movie, the sequel departs from Lewis Carroll’s original. According to the plot summary on YouTube:

“Alice Kingsleigh (Wasikowska) has spent the past few years following in her father’s footsteps and sailing the high seas. Upon her return to London, she comes across a magical looking glass and returns to the fantastical realm of Underland  … The Hatter has lost his Muchness, so Mirana (Hathaway) sends Alice on a quest to borrow the Chronosphere, a metallic globe inside the chamber of the Grand Clock which powers all time. Returning to the past, she comes across friends – and enemies – at different points in their lives, and embarks on a perilous race to save the Hatter before time runs out.”

Tim Burton produces the film but does not direct this time, leaving that to James Bobin, known for his work on the recent Muppets movies.

Tie-in editions:

Alice Through the Looking Glass
April 12, 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 9781484729595
$16.99 USD, $17.99 CAD
Described as a “deluxe novelization.”

Alice Through the Looking Glass: A Matter of Time
April 12, 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 9781484729601
$12.99 USD, $13.99 CAD

Described as a “unique illustrated novel” based on the movie.

A TV adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is in the works by the BBC with New Line cinema producing. Pre-production and casting will not begin until next year and  no date has been set for the series debut.

The first book in the series, The Golden Compass, was made into a movie in 2007, starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, with plans for it to become a franchise.

According to Deadline, “Critical reception was tepid, and it failed to match the box office expectations domestically of New Line and Warner execs hoping for another Lord of the Rings.”

The Guardian, sees it differently, ” It was a success, taking £230m around the world, but some fans were upset about departures from the original storyline and planned sequels never materialised.” They also dismiss claims from cast member Sam Elliot that New Line was scared off by opposition from the Catholic church to its themes of atheism.

In a separate article, the Guardian writes “Why TV could be perfect for Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.”

This is not the first time a movie franchise has switched to TV. The 2013 movie City Of Bones based on Cassandra Clare’s popular YA series made a similar move and will debut on Jan. 12 as a TV series titled Shadowhunters.

The live chat has now ended, Read the transcript below.

In news that might overshadow her PR push for the newest Cormoran Strike novel, JK Rowing said during an interview on BBC Radio 2 Book Club that she is going to write another children’s book:

“I’m not going to give you an absolute date because things are busy and I’ve been writing a screenplay as well. But I will definitely write more novels under JK Rowling. I’ve written part of a children’s book, which I really love. I will definitely finish that. I have ideas for other adult books.”

Let the watch begin.

UPDATE: The U.K. trade publication, The Bookseller, followed up with Rowling’s agent. You can almost hear the sigh in his voice as he replies, “J K Rowling has talked previously about writing a children’s book and, as she said to Simon Mayo in the interview, it is on-going, with no plans to publish as yet.”

She is also gamely promoting her latest adult title, Career of Evil (Hachette/Mulholland), the third in the Cormoran Strike mystery series.

She has much to say on that same BBC interview but she also talked with David Greene for NPR’s Morning Edition, discussing how her research into the feelings and motivations of killers gave her nightmares and why she chose to disguise herself as a male author.

“… there was a phenomenal amount of pressure that went with being the writer of Harry Potter, and that aspect of publishing those books I do not particularly miss. So you can probably understand the appeal of going away and creating something very different, and just letting it stand or fall on its own merits.”

Netflix is adapting Jay Asher’s multi-award winning 2007 YA novel about teen suicide into a 13-episode series. The news caused the book to jump up Amazon’s sales rankings (#355 from #719).

According to Variety, Selena Gomez will serve as an executive producer and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Brian Yorkey will write the pilot. Back in 2011, Universal acquired rights for a big-screen adaptation, but it seems those plans have changed.

Asher’s novel, with the stylized title TH1RTEEN R3ASONS WHY, (Penguin/RazorBill; Listening Library; OverDrive Sample), is about a high school student who commits suicide and leaves behind several tapes, each addressed to one of her classmates, explaining how they contributed to her decision.

Deadline reports that Gomez will not star in the show herself and the leads not been cast. An air date has yet to be set.

A YALSA Best Books of 2008, it was a NYT best seller  in hardcover for over two years and continued as a paperback best seller until two weeks ago.

A harbinger of the holidays, the New York Times Sunday Book Review‘s selection of the ten Best Illustrated Books of 2015 is available online today. It will appear in print in the upcoming issue.

The titles range  from several that have already received wide acclaim, such as Leo: A Ghost Story, by Mac Barnett, illus. by Christian Robinson (Chronicle), and Sidewalk Flowers, JonArno Lawson illus. by Sydney Smith (Groundwood), to a couple of under-the-radar picks. Both of those are coincidentally, about the same famous Parisian edifice), Tricky Vic: The Impossibly True Story of the Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower, Greg Pizzoli (Penguin/Viking Young Readers) and the only translated title on the list,  Madame Eiffel: The Love Story of the Eiffel Tower, Alice Brière-Haquet, illus. by Csil  (Little Gestalten; 978-3899557558; Nov).

For a list of the titles, with ordering information, download our spreadsheet, NYT BR Best Illus. Books, 2015

Readers longing for more from the world of Harry Potter can rejoice – sort of.

J.K. Rowling announced that the eighth Potter story will take place on the stage in London’s West End in the form of the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

The Pottermore website offers this teaser of a summary:

“It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn’t much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children … While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.”

According to Entertainment Weekly, the play is based on “an original story by Potter scribe Rowling, English TV writer Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany who won a Tony Award for Broadway’s Once.”

USA Today reports the play follows events set directly after the epilogue in Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, 19 years after Harry defeated Voldemort. It is scheduled to begin its run the summer of 2016 at London’s Palace Theater. Similar to the final HP movie, the play will be in two parts.

Another extension of the HP universe, this one a prequel, will be coming to movie theaters next year, in the form of an adaptation of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them. It is planned as the first of three movies.

Tickets go on sale for the show on Oct 28. No word yet on a tie-in book edition.

Ten years ago Rick Riordan got kids interested in reading about Greek mythology with the publication of The Lightning Thief. Since then he has also written series based on Roman and Egyptian mythology.

Now he is turning his attention to Norse myths with his newest book Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Book One, The Sword of Summer (Disney; Listening Library; OverDrive Sample).

It debuts this week in the #1 spot on USA Today’s Best-Selling Books list, a list that includes all ages and formats as well as in the top spot of The New York Times’ Children’s Middle Grade Hardcover list.

In and interview with Entertainment Weekly Riordan says that Norse myths present a special challenge because are gruesome and he had to figure out how to “present this accurately but also in a way that’s not completely terrifying”

Below is the book trailer.