This is the first book I’ve read by Walsh. I think she’s best known for a children’s time travel novel, A Chance Child, and official Lord Peter Wimsey fanfic ( Read more... )

An odd, beautifully written re-telling of "The Snow Queen" as a children's book ( Read more... )

Pamela, a lonely little girl, lives in an isolated house with her two aunts (one nice, one distant and strict). Her absentee father visits occasionally, and her mom is dead. But her life gets a lot more fun when she gets a magic amulet that enables her to meet a mysterious boy her own age and his herd of pastel ponies ( Read more... )

This is a book I liked as a child, which I lost and then re-read as an adult ( Read more... )

Audiobook read by Glenn Close. In this sequel to Sarah, Plain and Tall, a drought strikes the prairie. The family hangs on as long as they can, but after a destructive and terrifying fire, the father stays on the land and sends Sarah and the kids back to Maine ( Read more... )

Audiobook. I liked the narrator.

Stead wrote an excellent, complex children’s novel, When You Reach Me
( Read more... )

Audiobook read by Glenn Close. I would not have recognized her voice if I hadn’t known. Excellent reading, though the little boy’s dialogue is a bit shrill ( Read more... )

Since I now have a substantial commute, I have been listening to audiobooks from the library. I checked out Redwall because it’s a semi-classic kids’ series which I never read when I was the right age for it ( Read more... )

My quest to read more self-published books is mostly demonstrating to me that there is often no difference in quality between them and traditionally published books. In fact, in certain genres, it is much easier to find more ambitious or unusual books, of equal literary quality, in self-publishing ( Read more... )

Lovely British children's books about a family of eccentrics. The mom is an absent-minded painter who named her children after paint colors, the hilariously insensitive father is nearly entirely absent, and the four kids are up to assorted hijinks involving keeping hamsters in pockets, stowing away to Italy, and searching for Saffron's inheritance ( Read more... )