Category: Young adult/children’s

Florrie, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of this book, is pleasingly quirky. She only wears gray, and she loves history: not the history of wars and laws, but social history, daily history: the sense of the past of a place. She collects old postcards and wanders San Antonio, where she lives, noticing architectural details, riding hotel elevators,…

Amalee, who has just finished seventh grade, meets a grandmother she didn’t know she had, inherits a very large champagne bottle full of coins from said grandmother, and uses her inheritance to make a short documentary about endangered species. For her movie, Amalee interviews a cast of characters ranging from the “tai chi people” who…

A time-travelling magical book, set in Wales, full of a sense of place and a sense of history and altogether pleasing because of that. At first, I wasn’t sure if I could get past the sometimes stiff dialogue, but the story soon grabbed my attention, as did the landscape, the sea and the rivers and…

Raskin’s books are always smart and lots of fun, full of wordplay and absurdity. This one, which is about a teenager who’s embarrassed by her eccentric vaudevillian family, wasn’t as endearing to me as The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) or The Westing Game, but it was still quirky and pleasing. Also, I…

Adventures in time and in space, this time: ancient Egypt, Babylon, Atlantis. In this book, Nesbit’s politics are more obvious than in the previous two (the children visit a future utopian London, where the Thames runs clean and children choose their own areas of concentration in school, and workers are no longer poor and miserable).…

This is the second book of the trilogy that begins with Five Children and It, and this one is my favorite. The children find an egg wrapped inside a cheap carpet that their mother’s bought, and the egg turns out to be a phoenix, and the carpet turns out to be a magic carpet. Adventures…

Part of what is so pleasing about E. Nesbit’s books is the way that her children navigate through the world, and the world they navigate through: in this book, a summer-holiday-world of adults and sand-fairies and magical events and not very many other children. And, of course, I’m smitten with the British-ness of this story,…

This story of small-town narrow-mindedness is unsettling, upsetting, but also well worth reading. Growth & progress & learning to be real.

When eight-year-old Lucy Rose’s parents separate, she and her mom move to Washington D.C., where her grandparents live. What follows is a pretty standard story, told in the form of diary entries, of getting used to a new place, making friends, and having child-sized adventures. Lucy Rose is smart, and her voice is really endearing,…

Intense & amazing; one of those books I liked too much to say anything intelligent about.