what I’ve been reading lately:

Welsh place-names, lessons in pronunciation, hills and lakes and grey mist. This book felt less sinister than some of the others in this series, perhaps because it’s more about preparation than open conflict between the Dark and Light, perhaps because there is more of High Magic in it, perhaps because the Grey King and his

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This book was written nearly a decade before the first manned space flight, three years before Sputnik was launched, at a time when space must have captured kids’ imaginations in a somewhat different way than it does now. The sense of possibility that fills this book makes it a pleasure to read, as do all

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Wonderfully fast-paced and filled with plot twists, from curses to potions to romantic entanglements.

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Back to Trewissick, to fish and the sea, history & tradition. In this book, Jane made me think of Chihiro in Spirited Away—both girls know to treat things-of-magic with kindness as well as respect, and it’s somehow really pleasing to watch a character engage with the world that way.

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I liked this book for all the echoes of superstition and tradition and history: the way it’s set in the time from Midwinter’s Eve to Twelfth Night, the idea of the past being so very present, the way that Will and Merry and the Old Ones can travel through time and step outside it.

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I read this book (and the rest of Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence) as a child, but I didn’t remember anything about the plot: not the English-ness of them, not the Arthurian context, nothing, in fact, aside from a few lines of poetry from one of the later books. Re-reading Over Sea, Under Stone,

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(I read an advance copy of this several months ago, but didn’t want to write about it ’til it was actually out there to be read.) This book is really lovely, never strained or cheesy or simplistic or didactic or any of the bad things that young adult books can sometimes be. It’s filled with

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Sometimes this book is annoyingly meta-textual, like when the narrator refers to things that are going to happen, or calls other characters “characters,” but mostly it’s a quirky and cute story about a group of seventh-grade kids who are the class outcasts. I like how matter-of-factly everything is handled, how having divorced parents or a

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