• Masterpiece, illustrated by Kelly Murphy, is on Publishers Weekly’s list of the Best Children’s Books of 2008 and is currently #2 on this fall's Booksense/Indie Next List for kids! It is being translated into five languages.

• Time Magazine named When Dinosaurs Came with Everything, illustrated by David Small, the #1 Children’s Book of 2007, and the book recently won the E. B. White Read Aloud Award of the Association of Booksellers for Children, a particularly wonderful honor for someone who is as obsessed with E. B. White as this author. :)

• You can now find tiny paperback copies of When Dinosaurs Came with Everything in boxes of Cheerios at your local grocery store, as part of General Mills’ partnership with First Book, a wonderful organization dedicated to placing children’s books in the homes of low-income families all over the country. Dinosaurs is one of five picture books featured in the General Mills-First Book partnership, with one million copies printed of each. It seems fitting that a book about the ultimate freebie has itself become a freebie!

• Shakespeare’s Secret has been published in Denmark and Italy, and will be published in Korea. Phoenix Pictures has renewed its film option on the novel.

• Desert Crossing will be published in Denmark and Germany.

Seashore Baby, a board book about a baby’s experiences at the beach, will be published by Little, Brown in 2010.

For Henry Holt, I’m currently working on a young chapter book mystery series (for Grades 2–4) that I call my “Twin Peaks for kids” (supernatural elements, a creepy town full of secrets, three brothers looking for adventure). I am also thinking about a sequel to Shakespeare’s Secret.

Picture book: I think sequels are very difficult to pull off, since they inevitably carry the burden of a first book's successes and its readers' heavy expectations. Readers don't want the same story over again, but they do want the same FEELING… so the challenge is finding the balance between something new enough to gain fresh enthusiasm, and familiar enough to evoke warm recognition. Two picture book sequels that do this wonderfully are Olivia Saves Christmas, written and illustrated by Ian Falconer, and Diary of a Fly by Doreen Cronin, illustrated by Harry Bliss. I love both these books—droll and affectionate, with all the charms of the originals, but fresh twists and delights.

Middle-grade novel: I re-read Ramona the Pest recently and found it purely brilliant. Beverly Cleary captures childhood without the least hint of condescension or cuteness. Ramona’s tantrums are perfectly choreographed, and the classroom scenes are so real I can smell the purple mimeograph ink from the worksheets!

Young Adult novel: My younger daughter and I just finished Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. It is a truly riveting read—you won’t be able to put it down. A future dystopia is intriguingly shaped by the society’s obsession with reality t.v., with fatal results for many characters. Some Day This Pain Will be Useful to You, by Peter Cameron, is the first YA I’ve read that can legitimately be compared to Catcher in the Rye; it manages to be at once jaded and achingly vulnerable, world-weary and rubbed raw by life's vicissitudes. Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is funny, fresh, and heartbreaking; it shows that what appears to be a betrayal can be the ultimate act of faith.

Adult Fiction: Again, so many good ones recently. Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses is a lovely, spare book about the devastating consequences of a long-ago childhood tragedy. Later, at the Bar by Rebecca Barry, a novel in stories, is a dark but searingly-funny look at adult relationships; it scrutinizes its characters’ flaws with microscopic intensity, but with a warm dose of understanding and forgiveness, too.