Rebecca Reads

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 [...]

(I know it’s not April 5 anymore. I wrote this post a few days ago and I was going to add pictures before I clicked “publish.” But I’ve been miserably sick since Saturday morning, so it’s going as it is!)
I haven’t reviewed my son’s reading since January. This is partly because I’ve been busy moving, [...]

In A Caldecott Celebration: Six Artists and Their Paths to the Caldecott Medal, Leonard Marcus illustrates the long road six Caldecott illustrators followed to produce to an award-winning book. This book is a combination of biography and art history as it looks at how six artists approached children’s book illustration over the last six decades.
I [...]

I loved reading The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkein (thoughts here), mostly for its beautiful and flowing language, so I thought I’d next pick up The Hobbit, which is a children’s story and takes place chronologically before The Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, I didn’t like it. I found the story tedious and the writing stilted.