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Heaven to Betsy (1945), Betsy in Spite of Herself (1946), Betsy Was a Junior (1947), Betsy and Joe (1948) by Maud Hart Lovelace. From the library. What with all the editions, etc., available, I'm linking to Amazon's most recent ones but read much earlier ones.

The Plot: Betsy Ray's high school years, from 1906 to graduation in 1910.

The Good: I continue to love everything about this series. Betsy is hysterical; I love how she affects a stoop, er, droop, because she thinks it makes her look alluring. I love how Betsy isn't a star student in every subject; realistically, she shines in some areas, not so much in others.

I love how Betsy is obsessed with boys; and to any modern parent shaking their head, thinking that is a modern concern, reread Heaven to Betsy. Betsy may think of most of the boys she knows as just friends, but she still wants them to walk her to and from parties and to come calling at her house. She yearns for a boyfriend -- cries over it, even.

Did I mention the fanfiction? I mean, Betsy's fanfiction? In the article Carlie and I wrote for SLJ, we didn't get into RPF, aka Real Person Fanfiction. In Heaven to Betsy, Betsy takes an assignment to write an essay about the Puget Sound and turns it into a travel adventure story about herself, her friends and sister, and Enrico Caruso.

I'm also impressed with how Betsy views her writing as more than a hobby. She isn't perfect; she drifts away from it, neglects it, gets over confident -- but ultimately never hesitates in viewing it as important. Her family also sees it as important; in fact, her family supports all their daughters that way. Julia wants to be an opera singer? They do what they can to make that dream a reality.

In other things, Betsy is a teenager, a typical teenager, trying on different personas, not always honest about her own likes (books) or dislikes (skating), talking on the phone, worrying about her hair and clothes. As a matter of fact, while some of the references are delightfully turn of the century (shirtwaists! pompadours!), remove them, add a cell phone, and you find a girl and her friends who would fit into today's world.

Betsy gets in trouble for passing a note in class, and the teacher first humiliates her in class by reading it out loud and then sends her to the Principal's office. Her mother's reaction? The school was wrong. Yep; all those "oh noes" news articles about how parents today don't support the school and their darling is never, ever wrong and the good old days were better... Mrs. Ray proves you cannot make any assumptions about the "good old days" versus today.

I almost forgot -- the Crowd! Betsy's mix of friends, boys, girls, some her class, some older, some younger. They're fun; I would love to hang out with them. And they're not perfect, but Lovelace doesn't preach about their missteps (the sorority), but allows them (and the reader) to come to their own conclusions. Plus, whatever the downside of the sorority flirtation, it also has its fun moments. Very true to life.

I love that this is one story -- the story of Betsy's path from childhood to woman, figuring out her role in family, her relationships with boys, her own dreams -- told in four volumes.

I love historical fiction; but I also love reading fiction written during the time period it is about, because I find a book written in the 1910s is more authentic and historical than the one written in 2009 about the 1910s. What is interesting about books like Betsy-Tacy is it's about the early 1900s written in the 1940s. When Betsy visits Tib (a trip Tacy's family cannot afford), she encounters on the train a "porter, a colored man in a white jacket". Later on, he brushes off her hat and travel coat before she departs the train. Today, in addition to not using the word "colored," there would have been more made of race. Also, the mysterious brushing off the clothes leaves the modern reader scratching their head. What the heck? A book written today would have over-explained that. And there is the scene where Tony sings in blackface; a modern book would explain it, if it was included at all. Lovelace just has it happen, revealing just how standard a practice this was; and how unobjectionable it remained in the time period it was being written.

Much is told about the German immigrant experience and their contributions when Betsy visits Tib in Milwaukee. It's a beautiful and loving look at a pre-World War I America, when the immigrant experience was such that the immigrant's primary language remained the language of their home county. There is the modern (today) lesson here, for all those who say "learn to speak English, our grandparents did!" No, not always; Tib's family, second generation, spoke German. I cannot help but believe that Lovelace was also writing from the perspective of a person who had lived through World War I and II and seen how "the enemy" was treated and often demonized, and included the information about Milwaukee's German population not only because it was factual but also to inform readers that German Americans were Americans and "German" didn't mean "enemy."

The Little House books have had much written about how the books were written, including a recent New Yorker article. As I further explore the world of Maud Hart Lovelace, I'm looking forward to learning the same things about her and her books (tho, honestly? While I love the LH books, I think I'd rather hang out with Maud than Laura and Rose).

I like to wonder about what goes into the writing process of turning childhood into fiction. Compare Betsy Tacy, for example, to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Betty Smith includes details that would not have been included in a book written for children. (BTW, one of my (many) pet peeves is people who think A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is a children's book.) I'm especially intrigued by the inclusion of Joe Willard in these books. Just a cursory look at the Internet shows that Willard was based on Lovelace's husband and his boyhood; yet Lovelace didn't meet her husband in High School. So I can't wait to read her biography and learn more of what she included, what she did not, what she changed, what she did not. If you have a particular biography or journal article to recommend, let me know.

Like Little House, Betsy Tacy doesn't flat out point to negatives but rather the positives show the negatives. Nothing in the first four books mentioned bathrooms, toilets, outhouses, baths in tubs in the kitchen. When Betsy moves to a new, grander house with an indoor bathroom, we find out for the first time that in the old house there wasn't a bathroom.

Betsy's family is "not rich" but it is clearly upper middle class. Like today's kids, who think of themselves as "not rich" but always have the money for a movie and ice cream and new clothes. And there are references to the bigger world with different lives. Betsy's father grew up poor. Joe Willard, Betsy's age, is living on his own, working, paying his own way and going to school full time. A friend's father dies, putting his schooling in jeopardy, making Betsy realize just how fortunate she is. As Betsy gets older and more aware of the wider world, we see a family that suffers huge losses. The music teacher's sister dies, leaving behind four children, three of whom die of an unspecified sickness (probably TB). Part of Betsy's growth is her growing awareness of people and lives beyond her own; so we don't learn about this family until Betsy is older.

Vera Neville illustrates these books; loved them; disappointed I couldn't find more about her online.

Next reads: the remaining two Betsy books and a biography of Lovelace. I also want to get my hands on Carney's House Party and Emily of Deep Valley, neither of which my library owns, so I'll be using their ILL for the first time.

© Elizabeth Burns of A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy

Betsy-Tacy (1940), Betsy-Tacy and Tib (1941), Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill (1942) and Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown (1943) by Maud Hart Lovelace. Library copies.

The Plot: Betsy Ray wants a friend; Tacy Kelly moves in across the street. At first it seems like they won't become friends. But, it turns out, Tacy is simply shy and a friendship forms during Betsy's fifth birthday that will last a lifetime and inspire the well loved Betsy-Tacy books. At the end of the first book, Tib Muller moves to town, and the three girls achieve a perfect triangle of friendship. These four books follow the friendship of the three girls up to age twelve.

The Good: I had never read these stories before! I know!

Betsy, Tacy and Tib age and grow. Lovelace perfectly captures the mindset of the children at each age, and doesn't allow a grown ups view to pollute it. In the first book, Tacy's baby sister dies. Betsy comforts her friend, awkwardly yet touchingly, as a five year old would. Later, Betsy gets a new baby sister, Margaret. Betsy sobs that she is no longer the baby; it is Betsy who is more troubled, and heartbroken, over the loss of her status as the baby of the family than either girl is over the death of Tacy's baby sister. (Admittedly, this is all through Betsy's POV. But point remains. Betsy's grief over her loss of status is greater than her grief over the death of a baby). Tacy explains, matter of factly, how that is something that just happens; one moment you're the baby, then you aren't, life goes on.

And what is great is that yes, to a child, no longer being "the baby" is horrible. It's an entire shift in a child's world and in their identity. In a way -- to that child it is much more horrible than the death of a friend's actual baby sister, who you didn't really know anyway. Is that cold? Selfish? Self involved? Yes; but that is childhood. And Lovelace doesn't let her own adult views (and losses; her first child died as an infant) cloud the baby's death with sentimentality.

Some of the girls adventures are from a different time; but just as many are timeless, involving picnics, crushes on celebrities (instead of a Jonas brother it's the young King of Spain), going to plays, making a playhouse out of piano box. Today, though, the playhouse would be less sturdy as the delivery box would no doubt be cardboard!

While book four makes a big deal of Betsy's going to the library by herself, even before then the children have a great deal of freedom. It's a world of going out on the street to play, without grownups and play-dates. It's a world not so much of the past, as a world of the past of a certain class. Much as I loved these books, part of me is already wondering if Lovelace's childhood was as perfect as she presents in these books (the characters and events are based on Lovelace and her childhood friends). Yet, there are hints of other things, less than perfect, that are not as "in your face" as they would be in today's books. Betsy's family has less money than Tib's; boys bully an immigrant child and no adult punishes them or interferes; Tacy's baby sister dies; Betsy has an uncle who ran off because of an unpleasant stepfather. I'm not trying to find the bad; I'm just saying, much as I adore these books and cannot wait to keep reading, let's not glamorize the past or view old-fashioned books such as this as "clean."

Do I adore these books? Yes. Would I give them to kids today? Yes.

What about things that are dated? These books were written in the 1940s, about growing up at the turn of the century. There are things one has to realize were modern at the time; for example, the three little girls are each a different religion (Baptist, Catholic, Episcopalian). That was a big deal at the time. In one book, the girls are friendly with an immigrant child from Syria (modern day Lebanon). While the girl's culture and language is clearly seen as "other" and "different", she and her family are also clearly depicted as "American." At the same time, one book mentions a play of Uncle Tom's Cabin and one of the girls casually says, "I could black my face [to play Topsy]." The reality of the time is that white actors would play those roles.

My library copy was a four-in-one volume (The Betsy-Tacy Treasury, 1995) illustrated by Lois Lenski. God, I loved Lois Lenski's books and illustrations as a kid.

The Betsy-Tacy books are, like All of a Kind Family and Little House, part memoir and part fiction. Like those others, the characters grow and age. I wonder, will we be seeing any similar series soon? Is there another like these that I've missed?

On to read the rest of the books!

© Elizabeth Burns of A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy

Copyright 1972, Judith Viorst and Ray Cruz

I had to read this statement about a dozen times before I could believe it really said this.

What planet do these people live on? Have they never heard of Winnie the Pooh? The Wizard of Oz? Peter Pan? Alice in Wonderland? Peter Rabbit? Charlotte and Wilbur? Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann? I could go on for quite a while.

Maybe, my son suggested, they were referring to the physical book, that volumes wear out after 20 years. Except that's equally asinine. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that there are millions of copies of children's books published and printed before 1989 that are still in excellent, completely useable condition, with content still just as capable of stirring the souls of children or tickling their funny bones or teaching them something interesting. Otherwise, there'd be no one out here making a stink about old books, but there are tons of us.

Well, maybe, said my Devil's Advocate, they were referring to library copies which can get some pretty tough wear and tear. True - but libraries are still sweating bullets about having to purge the pre-1985 books from their collections, which makes me think those old books are surviving at a pretty high rate. Doesn't surprise me, when you consider the industrial strength of some of those bindings and the fact that past the age of 2 or 3 kids start to treat their books with a little more respect.

In fact I recently finished reading a truly outstanding library book, Mine for Keeps, by Jean Little (Little, Brown, 1962) and although after 46 years the cover art looked faded, there weren't even any ripped pages or significant stains or anything else that would make this book unusable. And the content, about a girl with cerebral palsy who struggles to fit in at her local school after returning from a special boarding school was timeless and universal. I really cannot recommend a book more highly. I read it first when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade and when I rediscovered it I was overjoyed. What's really wonderful about this book is, despite my initial description, is that it's not so much about a girl and her disability as it is about the typical kid challenges faced by a girl who also just happens to have CP. That's an important distinction, and it's only part of what makes this book so great. (It's a great dog story too.)

Illustration copyright 1962, Lewis Parker

I'm now reading my way through all of Ms. Little's sensitive, moving books (thanks to the many amazon sellers who haven't yet been forced to remove their inexpensive non-collectible copies of vintage kids' books), including her memoirs, which I also strongly recommend. In the first volume, Little by Little, there is a hilarious scene in which Jean, who is blind from shortly past conception, subs for a last minute scratch in a championship college intramural basketball game. Today that scene would have been videotaped, become a viral youtube video and been re-broadcast on ESPN and all the morning talk shows.

No, the CPSC's completely ignorant statement is the equivalent of saying that we have no need of Rembrandt, Matisse, or da Vinci paintings since some perfectly nice ones have been made in the last 20 years. No need of Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Dickens when you can read John Grisham or Janet Evanovich (not that I have anything against those latter authors - fine beach reading. In fact, Grisham could write a pretty good thriller featuring an evil congressman in cahoots with the consumer lobbyists and aided by a nefarious CPSC enforcer as they pursue a beautiful crafter fleeing with his movie-star beautiful fiancee, the vintage bookseller.)

I had started a completely different post about the impact of CPSIA on literacy programs (I've been collecting info from several prominent ones), the economics of binding, and the research on the link between lead poisoning and exposure to books and educational toys (which I have a feeling will surprise Congress). But I'll save it for tomorrow.

Let this sink in meanwhile: Mary Poppins: irrelevant. Pippi Longstocking: useless. Babar, Ferdinand, Curious George, Frances, Corduroy, Harriet the Spy, the Very Hungry Caterpillar, Madeline, the Borrowers, Little Tim, the Runaway Bunny, Max in his wolf suit, Horton and the Whos, the Grinch, Sam-I-Am, Amelia Bedelia: who needs them?

Now this book above you might argue is an example of why a children's book is "useless" after 20, well, more like 40-some years. As you can see from the cover, this volume has had a long, rough life. The Trolley Car Family by Eleanor Clymer (David McKay, 1947 - my copy is from the late 50s or early 60s) was one of the many books in my family's collection of "bathtub books." The house we moved into when I was 10 had a huge claw-footed bathtub on the third floor, and my sisters and I spent substantial chunks of our moody teens in it reading and re-reading our favorite childhood books. But even though this book's cover is rather the worse for the wear and it's a bit wrinkled from too much hot water and Calgon, it still has all its pages. Twenty years after its bathtub duty, my own kids enjoyed sharing the old-fashioned adventures of the family who was forced to move into the trolley car their dad drove until the trolleys were replaced by more modern buses, Pa lost his job, and the family was forced out of their home.

Come to think of it, a story about job loss, home foreclosure and useful things deemed obsolete doesn't sound so old-fashioned these days, does it?

As I finish my preparations to return to Bangkok, I find myself thinking about this month’s Tiger’s Choice. The Happiness of Kati depicts a lifestyle that I have never seen in Thailand, and I find myself wondering if it is a realistic depiction.

Kati and her grandparents live as people in Thailand have for centuries–up until the present day. Their world is clean and quiet and filled with the blessings of nature. When Kati and her grandfather go out in their boat, they row through unpolluted waterways that Kati can dabble her toes in after she and her grandfather finish their picnic lunch. They live in a world untarnished by satellite dishes, cable TV, or mobile phones. There’s not a fast food venue or a 7/11 convenience store in sight. It is a world of the past that all Thai people yearn to return to, and it is portrayed in loving and idealized detail in Jane Vejjajiva’s novel.

And yet within this ideal world, harsh truths intrude and are handled fearlessly. Death, disease, desertion–these are examined carefully and unshrinkingly, through the eyes of a little girl and the family who loves her. It is the softened world that Kati lives in that makes it possible to look at grief and loss with a feeling of acceptance and hope. And it is the well-constructed characters who take life within a matter of sentences who take this book well beyond the realm of moral instruction into the enduring community of classic children’s literature.

The Mark of the Horse Lord
Author: Rosemary Sutcliff
Publisher: Front Street; 1 Reprint edition (February 2, 2006).
ISBN-10: 1932425624
ISBN-13: 978-1932425628

The Plot: Phaedrus is a gladiator in second century Britain; a bloody, violent fight to the death in the arena results in Phaedrus killing his best friend, winning his freedom, and having no idea what to do next. What does a slave know about living as a free man?

Phaedrus is approached with a scheme involving the tribes to the North, in Scotland; the king died seven years ago. His son, Midir, went missing; and Levin's half-sister, Liadhan, seized the opportunity to bring back goddess worship and set herself on the throne.

The thing is, Phaedrus looks exactly like the missing Midir. Why not put him on the throne instead, and remove Liadhan from power? So Phaedrus pretends to be Midir -- pretends to be King -- and gets more than he bargained for as he begins to realize what it means to be a King.

The Good: Non stop action. Chapter One, we get a mother's suicide, gladiator fights, freedom; Chapter Two, a drunk night on the town resulting in fights, stabbings, and fire; Chapter Three is prison and the Midir plan. There's barely a place for Phaedrus or the reader to breathe. Yet, within all that action, Sutcliff includes many details about the second century Britain.

Once Phaedrus agrees to the plan, there's a lot he has to learn. And he keeps finding out that that there is even more involved than he thought.

Since this was written in 1965, I was a bit concerned about how the goddess religion would be treated. To be simplistic, it seems like all books about it written before a certain time depict it as Evil; and all written after a certain time depict it as The Golden Age. Silly me; Sutcliff does almost the impossible by making no modern judgments. Yes, the faction that Phaedrus sides with wants the sun centered god religion, rather than the moon centered goddess; and the goddess religion shown involves human sacrifice. But it's done rather evenhandedly; and the religion dispute is more a side issue, with the real dispute being about power, and who has it.

What else? There's a map! I love maps; and a brief historical note intro, letting the reader know a bit of the historical context and clearly stating that this is fiction, but here's the true history part.

As for the true history part, I love that Sutcliff looks at a bit of history that does not get much written about it. Seriously, how many other books set in second century Scotland are there about the Dalriad?

The brutality of the time is genuinely shown; what really happened to Midir, for example. My clues; he's alive; and remember, that a maimed man could not be king. If you don't want to murder a child but do want to make sure he never becomes king, what do you do?

Age: I think today, this would be a YA book or an adult book. Phaedrus is about nineteen; there are wars, bloody battles, even a bit of a romance. Part of what Phaedrus has to face is the difference between the best choice for himself; and the best choice for his people. But are they his people -- isn't he just pretending to be King?

The cover: isn't that cover great? I read the original hardcover, boring black, but there is a mark on the cover that is supposed to be the mark of the horse lord that Phaedrus gets tattooed on his forehead.

Quotes: "[Essylt, Phaedrus's mother] had used the slim native hunting dagger that had served Ulixes as a papyrus knife; but there was not much blood because she had stabbed herself under the breast, not cut her wrists as a Roman woman would have done." In one sentence, Sutcliff tells us how Phaedrus's mother killed herself, also revealing how the native / Roman cultures mixed yet did not mix.

On fighting to the death as a gladiator: "Like the sudden opening of a cavern in his head, reality burnt upon Phaedrus, and in that ice-bright splinter of time he understood at last that this was a fight to the death, that he was fighting, not his comrade Vortimax, whom he had fought scores and hundreds of times before, but death -- red rending death such as the stag's had been, and the hooks of the mercuries in the dark alleyway." Again, awesome detail; and lovely how Sutcliff creates a world where you "know" what it is those mercuries do without her ever really saying.

While I liked how Sutcliff had the opening note, I would have loved to have the titles of her actual source material. I wonder if the marriage ceremony shown is accurate, and the same for the Women's War Dance.

Finally? Amazing, amazing ending. Entirely true to the book and the characters, yet still unbelievable and almost shattering.

Now all I want to do is read all of Sutcliff's other books.

Links:
Wikipedia article on the Dál Riata
Interview with Rosemary Sutcliff
Rosemary Sutcliff: An Appreciation blog, with The Mark of the Horse Lord review
Teacher Resource File for Sutcliff
Rosemary Sutcliff: blog by godson (here, also)
I Speak of Dreams blog review
1985 Phoenix Award Winner

Originally published at AmoxCalli.

From tomorrow's London Times:

BBC hopes youth of today will thrill to Swallows and Amazons
by Ben Hoyle, Arts Reporter

It’s as far from a toxic childhood as you are likely to get. Captain John, Able Seaman Titty and Ship’s Boy Roger are to set sail again in a big-screen adaptation of the Arthur Ransome classic Swallows and Amazons.

Inspired by the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys, the BBC is betting that camping, fishing and messing about in dinghies will seem as thrillingly exotic to modern children as any special-effects-laden superhero movie.

The producers believe that the resourceful young heroes of Swallows and Amazons and the book’s idyllic Lake District setting possess an allure that they did not have when the tale was last filmed in 1974, before childhood hobbies became as sedentary, solitary and technology-driven as they are today.

It is a hope backed by the National Theatre, where a musical of Swallows and Amazons is in the pipeline, and at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, where an exhibition on Ransome’s work will open later this year.

There are 12 Swallows and Amazons adventures and BBC Films is close to acquiring options on all of them. Jamie Laurenson, executive producer for BBC Films, is hoping for a cinema release next year. He said: “It’s a great story and a fantastic adventure.”

If Swallows and Amazons is to work, Mr Laurenson said, it also needs to make the natural world genuinely frightening. “For a modern audience you need to bring out that feeling of danger. It’s only implied in the action because of when it was written, but it’s about children taking on adult responsibilities. The youth of today are cosseted. We rail against couch potatoes and obesity in children but ban conker fights [see aforementioned Dangerous Book], so I think this is very timely.”

Ransome would have agreed. He was a charismatic man with a love of the outdoors. In a life packed with adventure he married Trotsky’s secretary and may have spied for the Bolsheviks before settling down in the 1920s to work as an occasional foreign correspondent and angling columnist for the Manchester Guardian. He made his breakthrough as an author with Swallows and Amazons, which was published in 1930. ...

Purists should be reassured that they will still be set in the prewar years, he added. “I think that period feel is part of their charm.”

Geraint Lewis, chairman of the Arthur Ransome Society, said that the modest nature of the stories themselves was an important element of their appeal. “Ransome was a very good writer and his deceptively simple style has endured. They have never gone completely out of fashion but there does seem to be a welling of interest in them now,” he said.

No Duffers
Don’t just watch Swallows and Amazons — be them

From an ancient farmhouse on a peaty fellside, into the jump-cut mayhem of X-boxes and preteen blockbusters, come John, Susan, Titty, Roger and a gaff-rigged dayboat called the Swallow. They’ll fill her up with bread and cheese and tents stitched by their mother. They’ll sail her from a Peak in Darien to an island in the “great lake in the North”. They will find a secret harbour and the perfect campsite. Nearby, still warm, there will be embers. Undeterred, the Swallow’s crew will unroll their sleeping bags and wake to the hearstop-ping sight of an arrow in the gnarled bark of the great tree at the high end of the island.

Oh, to be under surveillance by a faceless enemy armed to the gunwales and master of the timing of her attack! Yes, hers, because the Amazons will soon reveal themselves, not just to the Swallows but to a global audience of millions courtesy of BBC Films. The rights to Arthur Ransome’s books may not be in the bag but they’re being hotly pursued. A feature is planned, and possibly a franchise. Time’s wheel has alighted on the most wholesome of all parallel children’s universes as the best bet for a filmic expression of everything that Nintendo is not.

Good luck to the producers. What greater thrill can there be for any child, in any age, than to create her own world in the real world and be allowed to risk her life in it? For that is the explicit premise of Swallows and Amazons, set out in the children’s father’s legendary telegram sent from his naval ship on service in the Far East: BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN. Tough love was never since so tough (and in any case has long since been outlawed by social services). But this was the green light that sent Roger hurtling down towards a mythic Coniston to tell his siblings their great adventure was a “go”. Let the film version spawn thousands more like it – real ones, rich with the smell of wet rope, burnt camp-fire sausages and lichen on granite. Because Tomb Raider takes some beating.

I thought it was bad enough when I heard the other day that my beloved Paddington Bear was going to get the live action treatment (just thinking of poor Stuart Little makes me shake). I went to the, erm, "official website" and not only was the movie business confirmed but there for all to see was the gloating about Paddington shilling for Marmite of all things. Of course, what do you expect of a

At the Yahoo nonsectarian Charlotte Mason group I started the other year (and where I tend to feel like a Well-Trained impostor), some members were discussing Horn Book editor Roger Sutton's recent post about The Baldwin Project and Charlotte Mason, and one member, Julie, wrote, I use the AO [Ambleside Online] program. I also make substitutions when I feel it is necessary. I am very open to using

Why, what a coincidence. Here I am saying how blogs are great because they review older books, and Gina at AmoxCalli puts forth a request for guest bloggers in Classic Children's Literature.

Gina says that one thing she wants for her blog to do is "review and recommend some of those great children's books from the past. You know, books like Little Women, The Secret Garden, the Little Prince, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, Oz books, etc. Any book you came across as a child or adult that made a profound impact, the ones that made you love kidlit. If you're interested in reviewing,", go add a comment to her post.

I just went and put in a request to review The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff; I have the ancient 1965 edition, but this newer cover from 2006 is hot.

While starting to put together a list of children's books set in and around Boston (what I really want is what doesn't exist, the Boston version of Leonard Marcus's Storied City), I came across some good news (requires free registration) in last week's Boston Globe, "An adventure in finding books for boys" (emphases mine, as usual): For years, the thinking in the book world was that adolescent

This post, "Have algebra books changed?", by Maria at the always worthwhile Homeschool Math Blog, caught my eye. Good to read read even if your kids aren't quite ready for algebra. Kelly at Big A little a is ready with the 10th Carnival of Children's Literature. Lots of good stuff, or "toasty posts" as Kelly calls them, to read on a cold winter's day (or night)! A classical homeschooling