Yes, yes. I am currently at my writing residency. But I have put a LOT of words on the page today, and I always try to keep up the blog. So, this is my “break.” Fresh reviews. I have admired, sometimes at a bit of a distance, Chris Van Allsburg since I was a kid.…
When I write a novel, or basically anything, I keep the volume around me at zero. Or at least at white noise, like the dull roar in a cafe. If I’m home though, there is no music that I listen to when I write. When I get asked that question, I just answer honestly: I…
A book like this hardly needs a review, let alone an introduction. In the dream library that I made for my future grandchildren–in my head–classics like this one will always find a place. Still, there is no telling with kids, especially very young ones. With them, there is no accounting for taste, for reals. They…
I had this whole list of novels that we were going to cover in fourth grade. About halfway through the year, my husband and son were wandering a bookstore when Eamon saw the cover for a Fablehaven novel and said, “I think that one looks cool.” My husband, bless his heart, ran to the library…
This is the second book that I have read in my learning-culture-through-fiction, China kick. I am going to China in July. Perhaps I can get four more books read. I already have three waiting on the shelf and one of them is a bit enormous. There are similarities between this novel and the previous, The…
If you are looking for comparison reviews, you will not find them here. I am just going to review the books that we used for fourth grade. For most subjects, we used whatever I had decided upon when I was researching material in the spring of 2017. There were a few times we switched, midway.…
When I made the Best Books list and started on the adventure of reading to children as they grew, I did not realize that so many of the “classics” of children’s chapter books come from the 50s. Even if they weren’t written in the 50s, many of them take place in or around the 50s.…
