Speaking of Journals: Children's Book Writers Talk about Their Diaries, Notebooks, and Sketchbooks

In this awkwardly framed compendium, Graham interviews 27 children's authors of varying degrees of fame, asking them to reflect on the role of journal-writing in their professional and personal lives. Recurring topics include the mechanics of keeping a journal or sketchbook, inspirations for journal entries and the often symbiotic relationship between the authors' private jottings and their published work. While some of the interviews ramble, the writers are often eloquent and their insights into the creative process will especially please fans of the individual authors, children's literature buffs and aspiring writers. However, Graham's plodding introductions to each writer unnecessarily--and gratingly--paraphrase or quote from the interview that immediately follows in its entirety, so that much of the material appears twice. Readers are better off going straight to the diverting tidbits embedded in the interviews: in high school, Judith Logan Lehne ""lied"" in her diaries when she wrote that a boy she never dated had asked her out and she ""almost fainted."" (""I worried about this lying until I decided to be a fiction writer,"" quips Lehne.) Jack Gantos recalls that he inserted the corpse of a ""roadkill mouse"" into his boyhood diary to keep his sister out; Gretchen Will Mayo's brothers once pulled pages out of her locked diary with tweezers and sold them to a neighbor for five cents. Other contributors include Jean Craighead George, Graham Salisbury, Bruce Coville, Jacqueline Woodson and Naomi Shihab Nye. All ages. (Feb.)