A sad week

What a sad week it's been for children's literature.

Siobhan Dowd died. At age 47. What a tragedy. A Swift Pure Cry is one of the books I read while traveling this summer and it is currently sitting in a 10-book-deep to review pile. Damn. I can't find an obituary yet, but here is a link to Jonathan Fryer's blog entry. He's written the obituary for the Guardian.

Magdalen Nabb, author of the absolutely wonderful and true Josie Smith series, also passed away this week. At age 60. Again, damn. When my daughter was 4 years old, I picked up Josie Smith, the first in the series, at Heathrow right after we landed. We spent the next month collecting all the Josie Smith books we could find. One of my very first blog entries was about the series and the fact they haven't been published here (and are fetching quite the sum on Amazon).