TwentyByJenny Offers Great Book Picks for All Ages

If you know a few parents or educators in need of great book recommendations for kids this summer, send them over to TwentybyJenny, a new Web site that lists some of the best board books, picture books, chapter books, and YA novels for kids.

Launched yesterday by Jennifer Brown, children’s editor of the e-newsletter Shelf Awareness, the goal  is to help educators and caregivers build a child’s library one book at a time by guiding them to 20 books in each of four age groups (0–3, 4–7, 8–12, and teens).

Visitors can also sign up for Jenny’s weekly newsletter to receive a new book review for each age group, as well as read Jenny’s Twenty blog, which explores book-related themes such as the importance of reading aloud.

The idea for the site came about when friends, family, and others kept asking Brown to recommend good books for their kids or to suggest titles that would make good gift ideas and “there was no one place to send them,” Brown says. “Mostly, people seem overwhelmed by the sheer volume of books being published, and are looking to teachers, librarians, and booksellers to give them guidance. My hope is that not only will the titles I recommend on the site be helpful, but also the resources page, which suggests other places they can go for additional ideas.

Jenny Brown  Photo: Kate Weiman

How did Brown come up with her lists? “I tried to find a mix of books people might be familiar with, alongside titles they might not have come across before,” as well as include a mix of books that would appeal to girls and boys, and different interests and sophistication levels. “I really am thinking of these as libraries, that if you're collecting a group of books for a child's room, these might be the ones you'd use as the starter blocks, and then they're off and running.”

Not surprisingly, choosing the teen books posed the most challenge “because adolescence is a time of radical differences in physical and emotional development.” So with this list, Brown says she “erred on the side of younger teens, and tried to flag for parents any issues that they might have concerns about,” such as sexuality and drug use in Ron Koertge's Stoner and Spaz (Candlewick, 2002) or violence in Sunrise Over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers (Scholastic, 2008),” Brown explains, adding that “teens are being exposed to much more much sooner, and literature allows them to make sense of the issues they're exposed to from a safe distance."
 
Books such as Feed by M. T. Anderson (Candlewick, 2002) and Scott Westerfeld's So Yesterday (Penguin/Razorbill, 2004), for instance, allow them to analyze how they are being targeted by advertising and the media, and how to think critically about the flood of information and images they receive.