Rebecca Reads

In Chapter 6 of my history of children’s literature textbook, Children’s Literature, Seth Lerer indicates:
Almost from its original publication in 1719, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe had an immense impact on literature for children and adults. It has been widely seen as one of the first major novels in English; as the stimulus for a range [...]

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is a magical friend to children, with her upside-down house and delicious cookies that are always waiting for you. She’s also a wonderful help to parents, who often don’t know how to solve the problems of parenthood.
When I was young I loved learning Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s “cures” for naughty children’s problems, such as not [...]

I’ve got a winner to my contest!
No one guessed the most popular book searched for on Rebecca Reads. The book that I get the most searches for is a children’s book. It is one that I think almost everybody has read at least once: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. I wrote a post about [...]

I enjoyed The Midwife’s Apprentice by Karen Cushman, a Newbery-winning novel. Cushman believably created a 1300s scene, and I liked learning about midwifery and superstition in the middle ages. While modern girls won’t face trials as extreme as the girl’s in the novel, they still must develop self-confidence and determine what their own dreams are. [...]

Poetry for Young People: William Shakespeare (edited by David Scott Kastan and Marina Kastan and illustrated by Glenn Harrington) goes beyond Shakespeare’s sonnets. In just 50 pages, the editors have also included some of the key speeches from Shakespeare’s repertoire.
As with other volumes in the series, each page has a bit of explanation about the [...]

Green Knowe is a medieval castle in the English countryside, and it is full of enchantment and ghosts. L.M. Boston’s chronicles about the manor house are full of child-like delight.
And yet, describing the series as a whole is challenging. They all, but one, involved magic of some kind. They all, but one, focus on a [...]

Simms Taback has an illustration style all his own. His children’s picture book illustrations are often a blend of watercolor, gouache (an opaque watercolor painting), pencil, ink, collage, and I even observed some crayon illustrations. His colors are bright and his books have subtle jokes in the illustrations (for the parents to find). So far, [...]

The Poetry for Young People series provides classic poets in a slim illustrated volume, complete with vocabulary glosses or background information as needed.
I enjoyed how the Poetry for Young People: Lewis Carroll (edited by Edward Mendelson and illustrated by Eric Copeland) volume included background information about each poem so I knew who and what Carroll [...]

The Once Upon a Time III Challenge has a “Short Story Weekend” mini-challenge, so I thought I’d visit some fairy tales. To my surprise, the copy of Charles Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales that I found was less than 200 pages and written for children, so I breezed through all of them very quickly. Many of [...]

The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi is almost a fairy tale. There is a magical fairy, there are talking animals, and of course, there is talking marionette who wants to be a real boy. And yet, Collodi’s tale fell just a little short of fairy tale status because of the obvious moralizing lessons: the [...]