Children’s authors and booksellers met at mealtimes and on the show floor at the California Independent Booksellers Alliance Fall Fest, held September 27–28 in South San Francisco.
Everyone came with a few fall picks. Maureen Palacios of Once Upon a Time Bookstore (Montrose, Calif.) expressed enthusiasm for Oliver’s Great Big Universe by Jorge Cham (Abrams). Palacios said Cham, who has a Ph.D. in robotics and is co-executive producer of the PBS animated series Elinor Wonders Why, specializes in communicating complex topics to middle graders. “I was just in schools with his book, and I haven’t seen kids so excited” about science, she said.
Carol Doup Muller of Hicklebees named several graphic narratives she likes for fall, notably Pedro Martin’s Mexikid and Thien Pham’s Family Style (“it’s very San Jose”). Muller also recommends Erin Bow’s Simon Sort of Says, about a seventh-grader whose family moves to a town without wi-fi or even a radio signal. Simon tells his story in an observant, witty voice, even as readers learn he has survived a school shooting. Muller called Simon Sort of Says “a challenging handsell” but an astonishing read.
Author–illustrator Jane Mount salutes favorite titles in her forthcoming Books Make Good Friends (Chronicle, Nov.), which depicts the brimming stacks of a bookworm named Lotti. Booksellers will spot the spines of well-known kids’ books, and Chronicle is sending a broadside to authors whose work Mount featured.
Bookstore owners, too, are increasingly adding value by promoting children’s literacy in-house. Claire Bone of Wild Sisters Book Co. in Sacramento said she’s in the process of moving to a more walkable location, expanding into a much larger space, and adding a tutoring center, in an appeal to families and young readers.
Change and Complexity
Children’s book buyer Ivy Quirk of Bookshop Santa Cruz was excited to hear about Mason Deaver’s fourth novel, Okay, Cupid (Scholastic/PUSH, Jan. 2024), during a Scholastic-sponsored lunch. Brein Lopez, manager of Children’s Book World in Los Angeles, moderated the panel of four authors and noted that their forthcoming books share a common thread of activism or pushing conventional boundaries.
Deaver’s YA rom-com Okay, Cupid, which features trans characters, is set in a world where matchmaking cupids really do exist. As Deaver told it, one cupid “breaks the number one rule” by falling for the person they’re supposed to be setting up—bring on the hearts and arrows. Booki Vivat detailed her new graphic novel, Meet Me on Mercer Street (Scholastic Press, Apr. 2024), about a girl whose best friend moves away. While writing, Vivat herself relocated from Brooklyn to Oakland, Calif., and recalled her complex feelings after a childhood best friend left for a new town. She found “there was so much to be said” about change, personal identity, and shifting communities.
Ali Terese overcame embarrassment to write Free Period (Scholastic, Mar. 2024), a middle grade novel about menstrual equity. “Sometimes when it’s difficult to talk about an issue, [an author can] talk about it through a character,” Terese said. She imagined two unruly friends, one outspoken and the other shy, bonding over obnoxious pranks and “craftivism”—activism that includes crocheting uteruses and making period-themed desserts.
Whereas the other authors shared fiction, Joanna Ho detailed her picture book biography On the Tip of a Wave: How Ai Weiwei’s Art Is Changing the Tide, illustrated by Cátia Chien (Orchard, Oct.). Weiwei is a Chinese dissident and former political prisoner who spent part of his childhood in a labor camp. Ho was inspired by his 2015 exhibition about political prisoners, installed at Alcatraz, and his 2016 display of life jackets discarded by refugees on the Aegean shore.
Ho compared photos of Weiwei’s work to Chien’s illustrations, in which highly visible “safety orange” complements the saturated blue of Chinese porcelain. Although Ho did not talk about her new picture book on culturally diverse monikers, Say My Name, illustrated by Khoa Lee (HarperCollins, out now), she previewed her historical picture book, We Who Produce Pearls: An Anthem for Asian America, illustrated by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya (Orchard, Apr. 2024).
The lunch doubled as a celebration of the career of sales representative Roz Hilden, who’s retiring after 30 years with the company. After the author panel, the organizers screened a video with well wishes from children’s authors and booksellers, the audience participated in a[singalong to Hilden, and the guest of honor stepped onstage to thank the crowd.
Diverse Representation
Another authors’ panel, moderated by Connie Lin of Books Inc., emphasized the importance of intersectional and diverse representations for teen readers. Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s The Siren, the Song, and the Spy (Candlewick, out now) is a sequel to The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea. Tokuda-Hall, a former Books Inc. bookseller, called her LGBTQ–positive books “high fantasy with dismantling of colonialism and maybe a little destruction of capitalism.”
Educator Carolina Ixta aims for socially relevant content and authentic Latino and Latina voices in her YA debut Shut Up, This Is Serious (HarperCollins/Quill Tree, Jan. 2024). A bilingual fourth-grade teacher in San Leandro, Calif., Ixta grew up reading from what she called “the school of John Green,” and she initially wrote fiction about white characters. “I felt so much shame about it, because both my parents came from Mexico,” Ixta said. After thinking about the voice and character in Jason Reynolds’s Ghost, and the reasons she assigns that book to her own students, “I flipped the story,” creating a Latina protagonist “who narrated as a 17-year-old would speak, to hook kids into reading.”
Lambda Literary fellow Dale Walls, a graduate student at Stanford University, didn’t set out to become a novelist. Their novel The Queer Girl Is Going to Be OK (Levine Querido, Nov.) started as an undergraduate project about queer stereotypes in cinema, accompanied by a draft film script intended to undo tired formulas. Although the project “started to collect dust,” Walls said their friends kept asking about it. Walls revised the script into a manuscript about Black, Latina, Asian American, and queer characters. Being “fresh off the teen experience,” they said, gave them insight into the YA cast.
Comics writer Jasmine Walls (no relation to Dale Walls)—who has a side gig in receiving at Barnes & Noble—wrote Brooms, illustrated by Teo DuVall (Levine Querido, Oct.), because she “wanted to read a story about people with magic that wasn’t set in Europe” and wasn’t predominantly white. Her Black and Choctaw characters live in 1930s Mississippi, and the book explores cultural diversity as well as disability. “I love the comics medium—it combines all the visuals from a motion picture and all the fun of reading into the perfect medium to tell a story,” Walls said.
Lin asked the panelists about representation, notably about being a person of color writing to people of color. Tokuda-Hall, who earlier this year defied Scholastic’s request to excise references to white supremacy and racism from her afterword to Love in the Library, said that “I will never center white people in my books because there are enough [books with white main characters]. I can do new things that feel exciting and relevant to me.”
Tokuda-Hall added that it’s “not often that you see a panel that is all people of color.” She reminded booksellers that they play an essential role in “creating the environment that allows our books to exist. You have the ability to look at your sales reps and ask, ‘Are any of these people of color touring?’ or ‘Do you have ARCs for this?’ ” Booksellers “hold a lot of power” in getting books on shelves and into the hands of readers, Tokuda-Hall said, and their requests influence “who gets tours, who gets ARCs, who gets marketing support.”
Baylee Van, director of Drag Story Hour’s San Francisco chapter, led a session around best practices for hosting a controversial event, protecting patrons, and supporting performers. DSH’s mission is to provide “glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models,” Van said, and to deflect hostility directed “against people in cute makeup, reading lovely books.”
Van talked about refusing to let protestors trespass on private businesses (“Your greatest tool is saying no”), working with law enforcement (“the stickiest part” of keeping everyone safe), and restricting photos, videos, and social media (“do not use a performer’s real name and do not link to their social media accounts”).
Bookstores hosting DSH events and other events that attract protest must consider how presenters get calmly to and from transportation—that means no cheering them outside the event space—and must ensure that there’s a “buffer” around the stage area. “You want the kids and the performer to feel like they’re in a space of joy, even if that space of joy is surrounded by chaos,” Van said. A pamphlet for “defenders,” with more information on hosting, is available from DSH.
