Three new pages have been discovered from an earlier draft of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (Macmillan/Square Fish; OverDrive Sample).

The pages feature Meg, Calvin, and Mr. Murry at the point Meg has just escaped from Camazotz. Meg asks her father how the Black Thing captured Camazotz and Mr. Murry launches into a lecture on freedom, totalitarianism, and the dangers of security.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, L’Engle experts agree with her decision to cut the pages pre-publication and they will not be included in any new editions.

The found pages are just an example of the many edits L’Engle had to make to find a publisher. In 1960 she wrote in her journal about the demands of one publisher who rejected the book and suggested its length be reduced by 50%:

Today I am crawling around in the depths of gloom … I’m willing to rewrite, to rewrite extensively, to cut as much as necessary; but I am not willing to mutilate, to destroy the essence of the book.

As we reported earlier, a film version by Disney is in the works, with Jennifer Lee (Frozen) set to direct.

The hit of this year’s Sundance Film Festival was a teen rom com about a girl with cancer, adapted from a book, Jesse Andrews’ Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, (Abrams, 2012). The screening won a standing ovation, the Audience Award for best drama, as well as the Grand Jury Prize, over-the-top reviews and Oscar predictions (see our list of other book adaptations in the early Oscars pool).

Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, the movie opens in limited release on June 12.

The trailer, released yesterday, gives a sense of what the excitement is about.

Official Site: meandearlmovie.com

Tie-in (note: we recently added dozens of new titles to our tie-ins listing; our full list of upcoming movie and TV adaptations is here).

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Movie Tie-in Edition)
Jesse Andrews
ABRAMS/Amulet Paperbacks: June 9, 2015
9781419719462, 1419719467
Trade Paperback, $9.95 USD, $11.95 CAD

The first images from a new fully illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to be released Oct. 6, 2015, are hitting the interwebs.

The publishers, Scholastic here and Bloomsbury in the U.K., plan to release one illustrated HP title a year over the next seven years. The illustrations are by Jim Kay, who also illustrated Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls, (Candlewick, 2011).

Entertainment Weekly has the “exclusive” on the cover and several of the interior images but the the British site Imgur (via Tor.com) offers views of the illustrations as they appear on the actual pages. Below is one of the spreads:

Based on Adam Rex’s chapter book, The True Meaning of Smekday, (Disney/Hyperion; Listening Library), the animated Dreamworks movie Home, opened this weekend and outperformed expectations. Variety speculates, “Jeffrey Katzenberg must be breathing a huge sigh of relief after the embattled DreamWorks Animation chief scored a much needed box office win with the release of Home.”

Critics are also fans. The New York Times calls it “a charming concoction with positive messages for younger children about conquering fears, understanding outsiders and knowing yourself.”

Unfortunately, the film reviews don’t mention the original book, which enjoyed a rapturous reception in The New York Times Book Review when it was published in 2007; “a story so original, so absorbing and so laugh-out-loud funny that the minute I read the last page, I want to start at the beginning again … [it] will captivate fans of the wordplay and characters in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and of the outrageously entertaining satire of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

It happens that rave review is by EarlyWord Kids Correspondent Lisa Von Drasek, who went to see the movie on opening day to see how the book translated to the screen. She reports, “I laughed aloud and enjoyed the reactions from the kids in the audience. One of my favorite book talk moments, in the MoPo (7eleven/WaWa), it is beautifully portrayed. The plot is very different from the book, but it’s a great opportunity to bring an even great audience to the original.” Further, Lisa, an avowed dog person says, “Tip’s cat Pig is one of the best animated characters, ever!”

Written in the form of a time capsule essay by an 11-year-old girl nicknamed Tip (her real name is Gratuity), it begins after aliens called the Boov, have invaded the earth and changed the name Christmas to Smekday (to honor one of the Boov leaders). It was illustrator Adam Rex’s first novel (the sequel, Smek For President, came out in February).

The main character, Tip,  is voiced by singer Rihanna and the Boov alien, named Oh, by Jim Parsons (star of The Big Bang Theory). Fans of the book will remember that character was originally named J.Lo In a twist worthy of the wordplay of the book, the real J.Lo, Jennifer Lopez, voices a different character in the movie.

Tie-ins (for a full list of tie-ins to current and upcoming movies, check our collection on Edelweiss):

Tip’s Tips on Friendship
Thies Schwarz
S&S/Simon Spotlight: February 10, 2015
Trade Paperback: $3.99 USD, $4.99 CAD
Ages 5 to 7, Grades K to 2

Home : The Chapter Book
Tracey West
S&S/Simon Spotlight: February 10, 2015
Trade Paperback: $5.99 USD, $6.99 CAD
Ages 7 to 10, Grades 2 to 5

The Story of One Super Boov
Ellie O’Ryan, Pierre Collet-Derby
S&S/Simon Spotlight: February 10, 2015
Trade Paperback; $3.99 USD, $4.99 CAD
Ages 3 to 7, Grades P to 2
NOTE: This is a 24-page 8 by 8, but it’s sticker-free

This month’s YA & MG GalleyChat has ended. Join us for the next one, Tuesday, April 21, 5 to 6 p.m. EDT (virtual cocktails served at 4:30).

#ewyagc Tweets

The trailer for Paper Towns is on its way, as John Green announced on Twitter today:

I’ll be debuting the #PaperTowns trailer live on-air on The @TODAYshow next Thursday 19th March!

The movie’s release date has been changed from early June to July 24.

Nat Wolff, who had the supporting role of Isaac in The Fault in Our Stars, stars as Paper Town‘s Quentin “Q” Jacobsen, with Cara Delevingne as Margo.

On his weekly VlogBrothers video this Tuesday, Green says he has seen the film and thinks it’s great because it is “faithful to the themes of the book … learning to accept others’ complexity,” (as an executive producer on the movie, he may not be entirely unbiased). He also reassures fans that a Looking for Alaska movie “might actually happen.”

The tie-in has also been announced (cover, top):

Paper Towns, John Green
Penguin/Speak: May 19, 2015, Ship Date: April 14, 2015
9780147517654, 0147517656
Trade Paperback

The author of over 70 books for children and adults, including the popular Discworld series and many other novels has died at 66.

Terry Pratchett, who had early onset Alzheimer’s disease, died at his home according to the announcement,  “with his cat sleeping on his bed, surrounded by his family.”

The Guardian offers a tribute to the author in the form of reviews by young fans, as well as a selection of his most inspiring quotes.

A collection of 14 stories for children, many of which were written when Pratchett was in his teens,  Dragons at Crumbling Castle: And Other Tales (HMH/Clarion; Listening Library) was published in February. The fourth in the Long Earth series, written for adults, The Long Utopia (Harper; HarperLuxe) is scheduled for publication this June.

Coming to HBO on March 23rd, the documentary, It’s Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise produced by Lena Dunham.

ALL of Dunham’s tattoos are from children’s books as she reveals in the following interview:

In early December, Rainbow Rowell promised fans that a new Simon & Baz novel is on its way.

Now we know she wasn’t trolling us; it’s listed in distributor catalogs.

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
Macmillan/ St. Martin’s Griffin
October 6, 2015

Publisher summary:

Rainbow Rowell continues to break boundaries with Carry On, an epic fantasy following the triumphs and heartaches of Simon and Baz from her beloved bestseller Fangirl.

Simon Snow just wants to relax and savor his last year at the Watford School of Magicks, but no one will let him. His girlfriend broke up with him, his best friend is a pest, and his mentor keeps trying to hide him away in the mountains where maybe he’ll be safe. Simon can’t even enjoy the fact that his roommate and longtime nemesis is missing, because he can’t stop worrying about the evil git. Plus there are ghosts. And vampires. And actual evil things trying to shut Simon down. When you’re the most powerful magician the world has ever known, you never get to relax and savor anything. Carry On is a ghost story, a love story, a mystery and a melodrama. It has just as much kissing and talking as you’d expect from a Rainbow Rowell story — but far, far more monsters.

She recently spoke to Time magazine about it,  declaring that the book is not fanfiction for her own book, “I don’t think it’s fanfiction, I think it’s more like canon! Because even though Simon Snow is fictional inside of Fangirl, I still had to make him up. He still feels like he’s my character.”

A sneak peek will be featured in a new “collector’s edition” of Fangirl, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Griffin) coming in May, described as including “Fan Art, a ribbon bookmark, an exclusive author Q&A, and an excerpt from her upcoming book Carry On.“

Rowell is scheduled to appear at BookCon in May, which follows Book Expo America.

Veronica Roth, author of the hugely popular Divergent series (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and the companion book, Four), just announced a deal with HarperCollins for a two-book YA “duology,” set for publication in 2017 and 2018.

The HarperCollins press release states that the books will be “in the vein of Star Wars” and will explore “the story of a boy who forms an unlikely alliance with an enemy. Both desperate to escape their oppressive lives, they help each other attain what they most desire: for one, redemption, and the other, revenge.”

Roth has just begun working on the new books and is, according to the Associated Press, taking her time with their development. In the meantime, the second title in the Divergent trilogy, Insurgent, hits movie screens on March 20^th.

The second and final trailer was released last week.

It seems manuscripts are turning up all over. On the heels of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman comes the news that a few new Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) books have been found as well. The newly discovered What Pet Should I Get? (Random House Books for Young Readers; July 28, 2015; ISBN 9780553524260) is receiving the most attention right now, but Geisel’s wife and his long time secretary announced yesterday that they also found material for at least two other books as they were cleaning out Geisel’s office.

The New York Times reports that What Pet Should I Get?, believed to have been written between 1952 and 1962, features the same characters as the beloved One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.

Ron Charles, book reviewer for The Washington Post, composed a poem in tongue-in-cheek disbelief.

The 2015 Newbery Committee filed into the packed hall at Chicago’s McCormick Convention Center on Monday morning wearing t-shirts that proclaimed “Trust the Process.”

This is a profession not prone to trusting the process (as you’ll know if you’ve ever been through an ALA Council meeting) and there’s inevitably a lot of second-guessing after the awards are announced.

But I have to say that I do trust the Awards process. I trust that Children’s and Young Adult librarians KNOW the criteria. We “get” what a distinguished book is. We listen to all the discussions and read all of the reviews and read and read and read. Then, in our heart of hearts we wish, we pray, we hope. Is it any wonder that on the morning the awards are announced, we scream, we whoop and we cry?

My personal reactions to the Newbery and Caldecott winners, below.

John Newbery Medal

The Crossover, Kwame Alexander, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, (also a Coretta Scott King Honor Book)

It was easy for me to “trust the process” in this case because I love this book. In the video below, Kate DiCamillo, last year’s winner, and I picked our favorite books, new and old, to read aloud for a film that went to Paris for the IFLA conference. I sprung my ARC of  Crossover on Kate, because I couldn’t get enough of its engaging sustained voice and juicy language that begs to be read aloud. An added benefit is its high interest subject matter. The conversation we had was organic, not scripted and illustrated how great books bring us joy (pick it up at time stamp 21:43. Note: the galley cover shown in the video is different from the final).

John Newbery Honor Books

El Deafo, Cece Bell, Abrams/ Amulet

I think I was screaming the loudest when this book was announced. I have been an evangelist for “graphic format” or comics and am thrilled that one of the best books of 2014,  comic or otherwise was recognized. The text is a cross between Judy Blume and Baby Mouse with a little Joan Bauer thrown in. Its a school story, a friendship story, a family story about a girl who just happens to be deaf.

Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson, Penguin/Nancy Paulsen (also winner of the Coretta Scott King Author Award, a Sibert Honor and of the National Book Award for Young Peoples Literature).

Not sure there is much to more to be said about Brown Girl Dreaming as it leaves with a Coretta Scott King Award, a Sibert honor as well as a Newbery honor after already winning the National Book Award. The only negative is that all those shiny seals now obscure the exquisite cover. On each reading it is richer with meaning and the story strengthens like tempered steel.

Randolph Caldecott Medal

The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend, Dan Sentat, Hachette/Little, Brown

Some thought this was the dark horse of the group (the only best books list it appeared on was NPR’s), but it’s been on my “best pile” all year. It is a great read aloud with subtle humor and compelling illustrations. Dan Santat has brought a sweet but not saccharine child-centered world to life. It was a big year for great picture books (six honors!), making this a thrilling AND unexpected surprise.

Caldecott Honor Books

This One Summer, Jillian Tamaki, Mariko Tamaki, Macmillan/First Second

I am huge fan of this author/ illustrator team since Skim (Groundwood, 2010), came out. A coming-of-age graphic novel with mature content, Skim made the Bank Street Best Books of the Year list by the “skin of its teeth” due to passionate advocacy in the face of some opinions that the content was too mature for our audience of fourteen and under.

There IS going to be controversy regarding this title. It DOES have mature content. The Caldecott Committee selected it as one of the best illustrated books of the year. There is an assumption that “picture book” is defined as an illustrated book that is 32 pages long and for elementary school students, but the Award is for a book “for children”and  ALSC’s “scope of services” is ages 0 to 14. This book isn’t for every kid in that age range but it certainly is relevant for some. I trust the process.

And as I look at the rest of Caldecott Honors, there is not one that doesn’t make my heart doesn’t swell as I imagine gathering them in my arms and sharing them with children.

Nana in the City, Lauren Castillo, HMH/Clarion

The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky’s Abstract Art, Mary GrandPre, Barb Rosenstock, RH/Knopf

Sam & Dave Dig a Hole, Jon Klassen, Mac Barnett, Candlewick

Viva Frida, Yuyi Morales, Macmillan/Roaring Book Press, (also the winner of the ALA Pura Belpré Illustrator Award)

The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus, Melissa Sweet, Jen Bryant, Eerdmans  (also the winner of the ALA Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award)

Graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier tweeted her excitement about today’s ALA Youth Media Awards,  “Graphic novels can win the most distinguished American book award, it’s official. The game is ON. I am so happy.”

Graphic novels have won major ALA awards before (Brian Selznick won the 2008 Caldecott Medal for The Invention of Hugo Cabret), this is the first year that  one graphic novel took home both a Caldecott and Printz Honor. This One Summer, by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki, (Macmillan/First Second), is a graphic novel, qualifying it as a “picture book for children” (Caldecott).  Since it is written for children ages 12 to 18, it also qualifies as a young adult title (Printz). In addition, El Deafo, by Cece Bell, (Abrams/Amulet) won a Newbery Honor.

Even more significant, just months after the formation of the We Need Diverse Books campaign, the medalists and honorees represent a wide range of backgrounds.

Disney’s live-action musical of Beauty and the Beast has found its Belle; Emma Watson, who began her movie career at age eleven playing Hermione in the Harry Potter movies, has signed on for the lead.

It is set to be directed by  Stephen Chbosky, who also directed Watson in the adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, (S&S/MTV Books, 2012).

No news on whether she is still committed to star in Warner Brothers’ adaptation of Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen (Harper, July, 2014).