Rather than being a straight-forward biography, the sweet graphic novel Wildflower Emily: A Story About Young Emily Dickinson by Linda Corry (Godwin Books, October 2024) captures her uniqueness, her passion for botany and nature, and her different way of looking at the world. Teenage Emily learns botany at her school desk, but with her dog

Read Post

Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley (Doubleday, March 1976) is a truly powerful book. It follows the life of one man’s descendants, beginning in the mid-1700s, and following through to the author himself. The most amazing thing is that all of it was based on a family story passed down for

Read Post

A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park (Clarion Books, 2011) is a fictionalized version of two related stories in the recent history of Sudan. It tells two parallel stories, one in the 1980s and the other just a few years ago. In the early story, a young boy is caught in the crossfires of the Southern

Read Post

Alice Have I Been by Melanie Benjamin (Random House, December 2010) is a fictionalized historical biography of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the woman who was as a child friends of Charles L. Dodgson (the man who later wrote under the pen name Lewis Carroll). It was young Alice Liddell who begged Mr. Dodgson to write down

Read Post

Neftalí is a dreamer, always looking for objects to treasure. When special things happen to him, his imagination takes him away on a wave or a cloud. But his father constantly berates him, calling him an absent-minded idiot. As Neftalí grows, he finds that the poetry he sees in the world around him must escape

Read Post