Silver Birch shortlists announced!

So pleased to have Monster Science nominated for the Silver Birch Award!

Forest of Reading Lists are Out!

The Forest of Reading, one of North America's largest children's choice award programs, has just announced its 2017 nominees.

I'm proud - and humbled  - to have two books nominated in the nonfiction category this year!

Worms for Breakfast: How to Feed a Zoo (Owlkids) is  a wacky cookbook-style primer packed with facts from experts at zoos and aquariums. Covering everything from regular animal nutrition to feeding babies to mimicking how animals hunt and eat in the wild, this book explores the eating habits of carnivores, omnivores, herbivores, and insectivores. Inside, you’ll also find real-life recipes from zoos around the world for meals like eucalyptus-leaf pesto, kelp tank goulash, and mealworm mush. Beware! You probably don’t want to eat any of it yourself.

Written in a plucky, conversational tone with delightfully wacky illustrations, a glossary, and tips for zoo animal care, this book is bound to appeal to picky readers.

Everything: Space (National Geographic Kids) blasts off into space to explore planets, stars, and beyond! Watch out! Giant swirling nebulae of fun will pull you in like gravity.  Megaparsecs of  facts, reports from explorers, maps and infographics, and more than 100 pictures will send you supernova.

For more information on the Forest of Reading, go here. 

For registration information - if you work in a school, library, community centre, after-school group, etc - you really should register!!! - here. 

Silver Birch Honour Award

I'm thrilled to announce that Zoobots was named a Silver Birch Honour Book at the Forest of Reading Awards ceremony last week. The program reached over 250,000 young people in schools, public libraries and at home, making it one of the largest, if not the largest, children's choice award programs in the world!

You can find the complete list of winners, as well as more information about this wonderful program here.

And the Shortlists are Out!

One of the highlights of the Canadian kidlit scene is the announcement of the OLA's Forest of Reading Awards shortlists. That was today. And it's sweeter than ever this year because Zoobots has made the Silver Birch Nonfiction Shortlist! Woo hoo Zoo!!!!!

It's an honour to be selected, and to be in such great company with such wonderful friends and colleagues like Frieda Wishinsky, Liz MacLeod, Tanya Lloyd Kyi, Hugh Brewster and Deborah Ellis, among others! I'm also holding up the fist bump for all the great folks - and stellar books -  nominated in all the other categories.

I am so looking forward to meeting kid-fans at the extra school visits the award will generate, and to meeting everyone at all the great Forest of Trees festivities throughout the year! I know how much fun it all is, since I've had the great good fortune to be nominated several times before. (Psst: I've even won a few times! Boredom Blasters and Secret Agent Y.O.U. won in 2006 and 2008; What's the Big Idea? won an Honour Award in 2011.)