I have been warned repeatedly about Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons, and for once forewarned was definitely forearmed, because I didn’t chuck the book across the room when the ending turned out to be both a cheat and deatherrific ( Read more... )

I have finished reading I, Juan de Pareja in Spanish! Because I am boss! And have therefore completed all the Newbery books from the 1960s!

And now I think I will take a break from Newbery books for a bit, even though I still have twenty-four left to go. (Why are there so many of them? Why?) It’s been interesting reading a lot of books that I ( Read more... )

You guys you guys, it is like the internet created a belated birthday present just for me, there is a brainstorming post for the Exchange at Fic Corner, which is a fic exchange for children’s and YA books, IT IS LIKE A DREAM COME TRUE.

A Little Princess! Crown Duel! Ella Enchanted! (SOMEONE LISTED THE CHANGELING. I would be terrified to write ( Read more... )

YOU GUYS YOU GUYS, TERRIBLE NEWS. Well, okay, mildly unfortunate news. AMERICAN GIRL IS RETIRING MOLLY ( Read more... )

Just finished reading Miss Buncle Married, which is the sequel to Miss Buncle's Book and quite as delightful as the first - and with the added draw of being a book about a house, rather as The Secret Garden is about Misselthwaite Manor or Rebecca about Manderley (although in a much lighter vein than RebeccaI'm looking forward to reading as many ( Read more... )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone, the first book in the Dark is Rising sequence, which I actually quite enjoyed. I went into it with such low expectations that I was pleasantly surprised to find it a family adventure story, a la Narnia or Swallows and Amazons or even the Boxcar Children. And with a magical twist ( Read more... )

More Newbery medal books! In case you don’t want to wade through it all, this entry contains: Marguerite De Angeli’s The Door in the Wall, medieval historical fiction novel about a youth who loses the use of his legs, Kate Seredy’s Hun epic The White Stag, and Eleanor Estes’s family adventure with dog, Ginger Pye (with bonus discussion of Estes’s ( Read more... )

Newbery books! I have been reading them, and naturally I have thoughts about them which must be shared.

First, Eric P. Kelly’s The Trumpeter of Krakow, which I expected to like, as it is an adventure story in Poland in the 1400s. Doesn’t that sound interesting and unusual? But although there are a lot of exciting happenings in this book - ( Read more... )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Elizabeth George Speare’s The Bronze Bow. I loved The Witch of Blackbird Pond so much as a child, why did I fail to read all the rest of Speare’s work? But perhaps it’s as well that I didn’t. The Bronze Bow is about Judaea in the first century AD and therefore unavoidably about Jesus ( Read more... )

A few memes ago, ladyherenya asked me which characters I wanted to save from their narratives, a question that it took me basically forever to answer because I kept getting distracted and writing BASICALLY AN ESSAY about Elsie Dinsmore. So I decided that I should share, because when I read this book for my nineteenth-century girls' literature project it ( Read more... )