Also of interest...in writing for children

Every Thing On It

by Shel Silverstein

(HarperCollins, $20)

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Shel Silverstein’s black-and-white illustrations and “wacky rhymes” have for decades been “winning over even the most poetry-averse of kid readers,” said Molly Driscoll in CSMonitor.com. Twelve years after Silverstein’s death comes this collection of unpublished works, which find the author in fine form. The final poem ends on a valedictory note: “When I am gone what will you do? / Who will write and draw for you? / Someone smarter—someone new? / Someone better—maybe you?”

The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man

by Michael Chabon

(HarperCollins, $18)

Novelist Michael Chabon has written his first book for “the mac-and-cheese crowd,” said Susan Carpenter in the Los Angeles Times. Like Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Awesome Man is “clearly inspired” by classic comic books. But beneath Awesome Man’s “square jaw, barrel chest, and epic battles with his archnemesis, the Flaming Eyeball,” he also comes across as winningly child-like. “Sometimes Awesome Man just wants to call his mom.”

Wildwood

by Colin Meloy

(Balzer + Bray, $18)

Colin Meloy, lead singer of indie rock band the Decembrists, has created a “fantastical, Narnia-esque pastiche of talking animals, precocious children, and swashbuckling adventure,” said Sharyn Vane in The Austin American-Statesman. Meloy’s inventive debut sends young Prue McKeel into a mythic Portland, Ore., forest to retrieve her baby brother, who’s been abducted by a murder of crows. No mere attempt by a celebrity to cross over, Wildwood is a “true contribution to children’s literature.”

The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman

by Meg Wolitzer

(Dutton, $17)

“The author of The Uncoupling and The Ten-Year Nap departs from gender politics and other grown-up obsessions” with this “pitch-perfect story” about kids in the world of competitive Scrabble, said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. Duncan Dorfman is no wizard, but he has a magical talent: His fingertips can “read” Scrabble tiles just by feeling them, making the outcast kid a sought-after teammate. His tale is studded with “sparkling dialogue, ingenious anagrams, and a daub of mystery.”