This article on Children’s Movies Push the Boundaries of PG comes after I had a run-in with Millions, the movie version of the book by Frank Cottrell Boyce. I adored the book and loved the movie. Due to the PG rating, I chose it as a movie for the library’s family movie series. Luckily, I found time to watch the film the night before we showed it, because I had a mother show up with two very small children, ages 4 and 6 and I gently recommended that they not stay and watch. PG doesn’t mean what it used to.
I am not saying that the movie shouldn’t have been shown as part of our series. But it does mean that I have to be on my toes about what kind of PG movie it is, so I can help parents understand that times are changing. Our most popular film in this most recent film series was Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants where I had a gaggle of preteen girls all enjoying the movie immensely. Some boys came in to meet their sisters and walked out in disgust because there was kissing!

Teens across the country voted for their favorite book of the year and created the 2005 Teens’ Top Ten:
1. Girls In Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares
2. The Truth about Forever by Sarah Dessen
3. Looking For Alaska by John Green
4. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
5. Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick
6. Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment by James Patterson
7. The Gangsta Rap by Benjamin Zephaniah
8. Teen Idol by Meg Cabot
9. The Garden by Elise Aidinoff
10. How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater by Marc Acito

Bartography is a blog by Chris Barton whose first book will be released in 2007. The blog chronicles his writing as well as a general look at children’s book publishing.

The CCBC (Cooperative Children’s Book Center) in Madison, WI has Reading to Understand: Children’s Books to Use with Comprehension Strategies, a bibliography for reading comprehension. There are eight strategies for comprehension in the bibliography with matching books.

Canada.com reports on Indigo bookstores’ technique of using a ten-member teen advisory panel to screen prerelease books. The teens are essential to deciding what is stocked on the shelves.
“Indigo’s junior advisory board, in its second year of operation, is what a focus group would look like on steroids. The kids have more influence, a greater hand in the business, and get more compensation for their time — in this case, a $1,000 gift card, an iPod Mini, a trip to Toronto and their own personalized section in Chapters and Indigo stores across the country.
A youth-oriented retail website is also in the works to help meet the needs of this growing audience.
This year, retail of kids books is up 37.6 per cent, with the biggest growth showing up in the nine- to 16-age segment.
Remove Harry Potter from the equation and sales in that category are still up an impressive 21 per cent.”
Whoa! That is impressive! I wonder how libraries are reacting to this boom in teen publishing. Are they boosting their purchases in that section? I know that for me there have been a lot more books for me to choose from, so I end up purchasing more for the teens. Teen advisory boards have been a part of teen services in public libraries for awhile, but again, I wonder how much of their advice is taken on purchasing questions rather than programming.

According to Variety, Walden Media is working on turning the teen novel, Holes, by Louis Sachar into a sitcom. I’m not sure I follow how that would work with the story, since for me the book was one of those puzzle books where I suddenly heard a loud click when the pieces fell into place. Sitcom doesn’t seem to match or deal with the complexity of the story.

The Seattle Public Library has a great collection of staff-created Reading Lists that cover children, teens and adults. The children and teen lists are broken into broad categories, making browsing easier. They also offer links to other lists from the Washington Center for the Book.

VOYA presents the VOYA 2005 Nonfiction Honor List of the best teen nonfiction written in 2004 and early 2005.

The Library of Congress has a website just for children: America’s Library kids.us. They have selected parts of their vast collection to present in a child-friendly format: Amazing Americans, history, exploring the Capitol, and America at play.