Rebecca Reads

In his narrative of life in slavery and what led him to escape, Frederick Douglass captured the chief dilemmas that slaves dealt with, including slavery of the mind. Douglass’s slavery in Baltimore and surrounding areas was horrendous, and yet it was, as he admitted, quite tame compared to those experiences that slaves on plantations in [...]

Yesterday began Black History Month in the USA! The Harlem Renaissance-themed Classics Circuit began yesterday as well, and I hope you follow along as bloggers unite in reading classic works by African-Americans.
Although this post is not for the Circuit, in preparing for that Classics Circuit, I did a lot of preliminary reading about the era [...]

My son is only 26 months old, but he’s beginning to learn at the speed of light (from my perspective). After twenty minutes of a Sesame Street “two” episode, for example, he knows he has two hands, two eyes, two feet, and that there are two apples, two spoons, and two bowls on the table. [...]

My son (almost age 23 months) insists on reading the same books every night, usually three or four or five times. I’m very glad he loves to read, but I’m getting a bit weary of picture books. I do think we’ve had some winners in our Library Loot the past two weeks, though, so I [...]

I wrote a “review” of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne in my pre-book blogging days (reposted on Rebecca Reads here) when I first read A.A. Milne to my son at age 4 months. I reread both books to him again over the last two months, now that he’s almost 2 [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed what my son (age 21 months) is reading, so I thought I’d jump in and mention some highlights. It’s so much fun to see my son loving reading. He’s also definitely developing preferences and favorite things in his life, so now his reading is becoming focused on what [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]