Want to know what the new year holds for children’s literature?
Keeping in mind this is just one publisher–albeit a big one–here are Scholastic’s trends for (presumably American but probably Canadian as well–don’t know about other countries) children’s literature.
That was a very complicated sentence. Sorry. Here are the trends:
1. Books on “kindness in an uncertain world.”
2. Reintroducing some of the classics.
Like Magic Schoolbus (which is 30 years old, if you can believe it) and Goosebumps (20 years old).
3. Humour
Yay!
(See Disclosure, below.)
4. Nonfiction and biographies that help kids learn how to do research.
Well. I must say this bodes very well for our sister website, TeachingKidsNews.com — we publish free, kid-friendly news with curriculum material to help kids work on their critical thinking skills so they can sort out real news from fake news and know what’s going on in the world. (This was my sidebar about TKN, btw, not Scholastic’s.)
5. Twisted-up classics
“Meet Little Red Riding Hood, but this time as a superhero.” Wow, I did not see that coming. Interesting. (By the way, along these lines, my friend–hey, is it my fault I have a lot of author friends on Facebook?–just published a take on the Cyrano story. It’s called Crushing It and it’s for middle-grade readers–about grade 7/8. You can read the first three chapters free. I read an early version of it (as a beta-reader) and I loved it.
Here’s Scholastic’s whole list, along with book recommendations for each one — again, keeping in mind that all the recommendations will be for Scholastic books (not that there’s anything wrong with that…).
Disclosure: Really, I just want to brag that I did extra-extra research for this post. I asked Marcie Colleen (who I do know from Facebook–that’s the disclosure part for ya) for a copy of Super Happy Party Bears before I used it as the featured photo because I wanted to be Super Thorough (that was a Party Bears use of capital letters). My one-line review: In a world of seemingly never-ending bad news and strife, this book just wants you to be happy and it wants your kid to be happy and it really does feature super-happy bears partying all the time, and in the end *spoiler* they defeat the grumpy ones. Ha!
