National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature

I'm really so pleased that Katherine Patterson has been named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. The Bridge to Terrabithia is her most famous work. My favorite is The Great Gilly Hopkins. That book got me through some middle of the night feeding and pumping sessions with my first babe when he was so very hungry and I was so very stressed. When I think of that time I think of Gilly and how I could pull myself out of bed to wake my sleeping babe every two and a half hours all night (night after night) to keep reading that book, which was so redemptive and gave a very stressed mama a bit of hope. But, despite my emotional attachment to that book, everything I have read of hers is so real and so redemptive. She has a profound grasp on what it means to be human.

Here is a bit from an article from the horn book this month; there is also an interview with her in the side bar links.

"It sounds like a fairy tale, but nothing about Katherine Paterson is that black and white. She writes novels in which terrible things happen to her characters (and, occasionally, in which her characters do terrible things) but closes each book not in despair but in hope. She is a committed Christian whose characters have been known to take the Lord’s name in vain. She’s a successful author who still walks into a room in the company of herself as a timid, insecure nine-year-old. She reaches deep into her own heart to lay bare the souls of her characters, and readers of both her fiction and her essays (collected in Gates of Excellence and The Spying Heart) may find themselves fighting back tears mere paragraphs after whooping with laughter. In short, Katherine Paterson is too human for a happily-ever-after fairy tale."