In Brief: March 17

Last week, members of the Macmillan Children’s Books marketing team ventured up to Rockefeller Center to promote Tom Lichtenheld’s new picture book, Cloudette (Holt/Ottaviano, Mar.), about a small cloud with dreams of doing something big. Amid the crowds that gather each morning for the Today Show, the team hoped to snag some attention for Cloudette, but the presence of some other clouds (the rainy kind) kept the Today Show’s anchors inside. Luckily, the MacKids team was prepared with plenty of Cloudette-themed umbrellas on hand. Seen here, l. to r. are Macmillan’s Liz Kerins, Emily Waters, Lucy Del Priore, Joy Dallanegra-Sanger, Kathryn Hurley, Liz Hartman, Jessica Zimmerman, Jackie Jou, and Kate Farrell.

Automaker Subaru has teamed up with the American Association for the Advancement of Science to donate 1,250 science books to schools in Washington, D.C. As part of the “Subaru Loves Science!” campaign, four titles have been chosen for distribution: The Hive Detectives by Loree Griffin Burns, photos by Ellen Harasimowicz (Houghton Mifflin); The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge by Joanna Cole, illus. by Bruce Degen (Scholastic Press); The Book of Potentially Catastrophic Science by Sean Connolly (Workman); and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Crown).Here, Hive Detectives author Burns poses on the hood of a special edition “Subaru Loves Science!” Forester, which features the covers of all four books, in a photo taken by Harasimowicz.

Debut author Kim Harrington recently celebrated the release of her YA novel Clarity (Scholastic/Point, Mar.) at a launch event at Tatnuck Bookseller in Westborough, Mass. Westborough is less than 100 miles from Cape Cod, where Clarity takes place; the book stars 16-year-old Clarity Fern, who gets drawn into a murder investigation because of her psychic ability to register emotions and memories by touching objects. (In a starred review, PW called Clarity “a teen detective for the 21st century.”) Here, Harrington (center) is joined by fans wearing “Fern Family Readings” T-shirts—the name of the psychic business Clarity operates with her mother and brother.