Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
There was no doubt that John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (reviewed here) was written to teach both children and adults lessons about Christianity and life; there was little attempt to veil the message behind the story. While the message in modern children’s literature may not be so thinly veiled, to me it seems obvious that authors
I was looking for something else light to read before Christmas when I found, via the Book Review Blog Carnival on Maw Books, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum, reviewed at The Movieholic and Bibliophile’s Blog. Best of all, because it is in the public domain, I could jump over
If you like Harry Potter’s world, you’ll like J.K. Rowling’s latest edition to the cannon: The Tales of Beedle the Bard. After each tale, which has been carefully “translated” from the ancient runes by Hermione Granger, we read Dumbledore’s commentary/critical analysis of the tale, with Rowling’s special notes for Muggle audiences. The Tales of Beedle
I was putting together the list of Newbery Medal winners a few weeks ago, and I saw Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon by Dhan Gopal Mukerji on the list as winner in the 1920s. A novel about a pigeon? I pictured New York City, Central Park. I pictured the “Feed the Birds” scene in
Charles Dickens wrote one book that never appears on his “collected works” lists. That is The Life of Our Lord, a “child’s new testament” that he wrote for his own children for Christmas one year. It was first published in 1934, 64 years after Dickens’s death. In The Life of Our Lord, Charles Dickens retells
When I heard the concept of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! by Laura Amy Schlitz (monologues given by medieval children), I thought it would be horribly boring. Monologues? I thought. What is fun about monologues? I thought children would be bored by these “Voices from a Medieval Village.” To my delight, I found Good Masters! Sweet
My Thoughts Most people in the blogging world have already commented on this series. But, nevertheless, I will add that I enjoyed Rowling’s amazing creativity in writing this series, although I think her writing was pretty generic and nothing special; especially in the later volumes, Rowling could have fine tuned the novels a lot more.
The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling contain much more than the story of the adopted wolf-boy, Mowgli, who is probably the most familiar of Kipling’s characters. Kipling’s Jungle Books are collections of stories about animals and people from around the world. Each story seems to be rooted in traditional facts
The Arrival by Shaun Tan is the story of all immigrants. By relying solely on pencil illustrations, Shaun Tan attempts to capture the emotions and the story of not just one man leaving his family to enter a new world but the story of all immigrants entering a new life. I was not completely convinced
I didn’t understand The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at all. I guess I’m not a child. A pilot has crashed his plane in the desert. While striving to repair it, he meets a young boy from a asteroid-star planet. The little prince’s planet has 44 sunsets a day, and the little prince is
While I loved the gorgeous illustrations in Brian Selznick’s Caldecott-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret and I was entertained by the story, I found the writing amateur and the developing plot overdramatic. In the end, however, I liked this children’s novel, as “unbalanced” as it felt. The Invention of Hugo Cabret is an illustrated
I read Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories because I wanted to read this Nobel-prize winning author and also because I remembered the imaginative premise of his magical world and wanted to experience his world as an adult. I very much enjoyed reading them again, although there are some “politically incorrect” stereotypes in them I hadn’t
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