Editorial

Dear Bookbird Readers,

While it's true that there is something immensely satisfying about Bookbird's themed issues, about the way issues such as the recent Multilingual Issue and the upcoming Queer Issue form a cogent "whole" in the manner of a solid collection of critical essays, I have to say that I also enjoy our "open" issues. They may end up with an eclectic mix of articles and columns, and even of reviews, but they also have that "something for everyone" aspect. In this issue, I was happy to revisit some of my favourite books for children through new critical analyses of them, and to learn about children's books I now want to read (and read to my granddaughter) and/or to study. In the case of the former, this issue's lead article by Lesley Clement asks questions about how books can help children move past the familiar and deal with those boundaries that the fear of the unknown imposes, particularly the boundary between life and death. One of the books Clement analyzes is Wolf Erlbruch's Duck, Death, and the Tulip, a book that I have used for years to help family members, children and grownups, deal with death. In the case of the latter, Vivian Howard introduces us to three recent Canadian picture books that offer insights into community, power, prejudice, and identity within Nova Scotia's African-Canadian community. Similarly, Enkelena Qafleshi discusses a body of books for children produced in Albania during the Communist regime, and William Boerman-Cornell offers a compelling reading of various types of irony in George O'Connor's graphic novel adaptation of Harmen Van den Bogaert's Journey into Mohawk Country. The final two articles offer overviews of a fascinating South African project in which classroom teachers wrote stories for children in order to achieve their pedagogical (and citizenship) goals, and of the theme of migration in contemporary Portuguese children's literature.

This issue's columns are also an eclectic and satisfying mix. In the Children & Their Books section, Yara Miguel discusses reading programs in Brazilian schools that foster a family-based reading culture, allowing children to make connections through literary experience. Joanne Hillhouse discusses her experiences as an author of fiction, and the influences of aspiring authors on her writing career. In 2004, she began the Wadadli Youth Pen Prize for young Caribbean writers, which recognizes young authors' fiction grounded in Caribbean culture, geography, and history. In the final Children & Their Books column, Fieke Van der Gucht discusses "The Challenge," a reader-centered programme run by Stichting Lezen Vlaanderen (the Flemish Reading Association), in partnership with a broad network of teachers and librarians, that aims at reluctant readers of fifteen years and older in vocational schools.

The Letters columns in this issue begin with Heidi Boiesen's overview of the IBBY Documentation Centre of Books for Disabled Young People, now housed in the North York Central Branch of the Toronto Public Library. Then Crystal Hurdle offers a discussion of Massachusetts author Jane Langton, and laments the fact that Langton's classic novels for children are not more widely available to the public. In the final Letter, Rachel Johnson discusses her experiences with the International Forum for Research into Children's Literature at the University of Worcester, and outlines the challenges of developing the forum with little-to-no funding.

Reviewers of secondary literature in this issue look at books on children's literature from France, Belgium, England, and the USA, featuring textual analyses of Tintin and other comic strips, of national identity in a variety of texts and British identity in texts from England, and of the pedagogical uses of historical children's fiction in the USA. There are also postcard reviews of books for children from China, Iceland, Spain, Germany, Iran, Italy, Turkey, and the USA.

Our final two columns offer something new to our closing standard. The first is our inaugural column from the International Youth Library. Director Christiane Raabe and her staff will update Bookbird's readers on the IYL, its activities and programs, on a regular basis, and they will continue to provide us...