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So I caught a rerun of the SyFy Channel’s 2010 adaptation — true fans of the novel might use the word “desecration” — of the first two Riverworld novels by Philip Jose Farmer. To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971) and The Fabulous Riverboat (also ’71) are set in the same world, but they’re not especially [...]

Since we can’t all be in San Diego, we’re bringing the Youth Media Awards to you. This morning some of the most prestigious awards in youth literature were announced at the Midwinter Meeting. Here are the 2011 award winners: Newbery  Medal Moon Over Manifest, by Clare Vanderpool (Delacorte) Caldecott Medal A Sick Day for Amos McGee, by Philip C. Stead, Illustrated by [...]

ALA’s Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) announced a roster of winners last night in San Diego, thus beginning the onslaught of “notable books” lists for 2010. Amid all the festivities and list-revealing, we received some especially good news. Bill Ott (for those of you under a rock, he is the esteemed and beloved Publisher and [...]

Craig Johnson, author of the top-notch Wyoming mystery series starring Sheriff Walt Longmire, has a great holiday tradition. Every year, he e-mails his fans a brand-new, unpublished short story. This year, he cut it a little bit closer to Christmas Eve than usual, and so I was away on vacation by the time it arrived. Now [...]

The Scott O’ Dell award committee, which includes Booklist’s own Laura Tillotson, chose One Crazy Summer as the 2011 winner. The annual $5000 Award is given for a distinguished work of historical fiction for young people, published by a U. S. publisher; the setting must be South, Central, or North America, and the author must [...]

Dracula, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, has spawned a plethora of movie adaptations, homages, rip-offs, and spin-offs. Its literary progeny are fewer, but there are some interesting literary spin-offs. First and most obvious is Dracula: the Un-Dead (2009), a direct sequel written by Dacre Stoker, Bram’s great-grandnephew, and Dracula scholar Ian Holt. It’s an imaginative and [...]

According to this story at Cinema Blend, there’s going to be a remake of the 1984 Drew Barrymore movie Firestarter. Firestarter is a fair-to-middlin’ (mostly middlin’) adaptation of one of my favorite early Stephen King novels. The book, published in 1980, concerns a young girl who can set fires just by thinking about it. It’s [...]

The Booklist hallway. Where are we?  Off writing our 2011 manifestos. It is entirely possible that we in the Booklist youth brigade read more YA books than anyone else in the freakin’ world. You can’t do this and not start to feel a pang of despair when you’ve seen the same plot device, character quirk, [...]