Since I’ve Been Gone
It’s been five years since I’ve written a blog post. Whoops. I’ve just updated my website to a new format that allowed me to ingest my prior blog posts from […]
Recent reads (a rhapsody)
I’m always late. Late to blog, late to read the books the rest of the world raves about. Late to meetings, late with paperwork. Never late for meals. Here at […]
Alchemy and Meggy Swann, by Karen Cushman
Karen Cushman is a delight, and I could stop my review right there. The integrity and authority with which she embroiders unsentimentalized and yet hopeful, trimphant narratives of Elizabethan England […]
Marvelous Middle Grade Summer Reads, mid-July edition
I’ve read some wonderful middle grade novels so far this summer, and there’s a tall stack still waiting for me. My Son Number Two, who is my great reader, has […]
The Iron Ring by Lloyd Alexander
In 1998 my second son was born. He was a lazy nurser and didn’t gain weight as fast as doctors would have liked. I settled on a plan to nurse […]
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
How shall I read Ethan Frome? It’s my first Edith Wharton novel. My studies in early 20th Century American literature are grossly lacking, so I fear I lack the proper […]
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens: Tracing Roots in Wodehouse & Tolkien
As a child, I reread my sister’s copy of Little Women until my mother bought me my own, which I then lovingly destroyed. But I never made much sense of […]
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
For three days I’ve been the hopeless prisoner of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South (1855), presented in audiobook format by BBC and superbly narrated by Juliet Stevenson. It’s 18.3 […]
Tolkien: It’s About the Journey. Setting, language, society, and race in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
My cat, by instinct, knows when she needs to gnaw on my houseplants to soothe her troubled belly, and sometimes I, in much the same way, know instinctively what I […]
Going Public
On Tuesday, October 12, my latest hardcover, Secondhand Charm, hit the shelves, published by Bloomsbury Children’s Books. So began a whirlwind of activity which I will try to document below. […]