If you’re in the market for a new picture book, the gentle illustrator Elisha Cooper has two to choose from. Beaver Is Lost is a journey told almost entirely without words: Beaver hops onto a log, then onto a logging truck, and finds himself in a city. How will he (she?) get home? My 3-year-old nephew and 5-year-old niece tracked each step of the trip, picking up on the clues knit into the illustrations. "He found his friends!" they cheered in relief and triumph at the end. Just in case there’s any doubt, Cooper has written "Home" on the last page. Always the best destination.

The cover of Farm invited us in with a brilliantly colorful rooster. He proved to be our nephew’s favorite character, or rather characters: Inside are two roosters, named Breakfast and Biggie, except we decided that Piggie sounded better—in fact, as a pair, Breakfast and Piggie were riotously funny. Cooper’s text is mostly practical rather than lyrical, and after sitting through a page or two about tilling, my niece asked why this wasn’t a rhyming book. Maybe she missed the poetry of the Big Red Barn. But we did talk about the construction of a three-legged chair (in the barn) and how a field could go from the color of milk chocolate to dark chocolate without actually being made of chocolate itself. Like Farmer Boy for the youngest set.

Tags: children's literature, elisha cooper, picture books

—Conservative U.S. Christian group Focus on the Family prepares to roll out an abstinence education program in China’s Yunnan Province. [Washington Post]

—After the Los Angeles Times created a quantitative consumer guide to city teachers, policy experts are questioning whether this kind of test score-based accountability really helps children. [New York Times]

—Some say that the “I heart boobies” campaign reduces cancer victims to individual diseased body parts. Is it OK to objectify women in the service of breast cancer awareness? [Salon]

—According to a recent poll, two-thirds of New Yorkers want the planned Islamic community center and mosque to be built farther away from the World Trade Center site. [New York Times]

—Have British tabloids finally gone too far? Britain’s News of the World reportedly hacked into the voice-mail messages of Princes Harry and William. [New York Times Magazine]

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Whether or not you think Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner chose the proper target when they took on Jonathan Franzen and started the "franzenfreude" meme, it's undeniable that the two women writers have started what is an important—and now international—conversation. (The pair complained that the New York Times gives short shrift to women writers, particularly those who write popular fiction. We fact-checked their claims here.) Writing in the U.K. paper The Guardian, London-based, American-born novelist Lionel Shriver paints a pretty damning portrait of the way book publishers have treated her work, and by extension, the way those publishers treat women readers:

With merciful exceptions, my publishers constantly send prospective covers for my books that play to what "women readers" supposedly want. Take the American reissue of my fourth novel Game Control—a wicked, nasty novel about a plot to kill two billion people overnight. The main character is a man, the focal subject demography. Yet what cover do I first get sent? A winsome young lass in a floppy hat, gazing soulfully to the horizon in a windblown field—soft focus, in pastels. Dismayed, I emailed back: "Did your designers read any of this book?" When I proposed a cover photo by Peter Beard of sagging elephant carcasses—perfectly apt—the sales department was horrified. Women would be repelled by dead animals. We settled on live elephants, but it was pulling teeth to get girls off that paperback.

Shriver's German publishers had similar issues with the presentation of her work. Again, most of this has barely anything to do with Franzen himself—It has to do with the publishing industry as a whole. As it happens, the cover of Franzen's incredibly cranky nonfiction book of essays How to Be Alone depicts an attractive young woman in gauzy lighting standing in the middle of a warm-looking book store. So even books by the great J. Franz get the "floppy hat" treatment.

More American publications are jumping into the Franzenfreude fray as well. The Louisville Courier-Journal has some push-back on Weiner and Picoult. C.E. Morgan, a fiction writer who is one of the New Yorker's 20 under 40, thinks that the reaction to Franzen is just insecurity. She tells the Courier-Journal: "This issue will die when women produce more and more work of indisputable genius and, until then, we need to stop championing mediocre female work out of defensiveness, stop firing spitballs at male work and stop dissolving the line between high art and pop art."

A worthwhile point, to be sure. But let's let Lionel Shriver, who is very far from mediocre, have the last word: "By stereotyping my work's audience as self-involved and prissy, women-only packaging also insults my readers, who could all testify that trussing up my novels as sweet, girly and soft is like stuffing a rottweiler in a dress."

Tags: franzenfreude, Jennifer Weiner, jodi picoult, Jonathan Franzen, lionel shriver