The new school year has just bgun for my two middle schoolers, and this novel by Rebecca Stead is just the sort of thing you would want to put into the hands of kids that age. Stead’s 2010 Newberry winner is an homage to Madeleine L’Engle and her classic novel A Wrinkle in Time. As in that novel, our heroine, 12-year-old Miranda, finds herself grappling with the concept of time travel, but unlike Meg Murry, she will not be the traveller. Earthbound Miranda has to […]
A Mile in Their Shoes
I don’t know if author Carolyn Parkhurst has a child on the autism spectrum, but if she does not, then she is an incredibly thorough researcher and empath. Her latest novel Harmony focuses on a Washington, DC, family of four who join a sort of commune in New Hampshire in order to help their 13-year-old daughter Tilly, who has an autism diagnosis. The leader of Camp Harmony, Scott Bean, is an independent educator whose approach to working with children on the spectrum and their families […]
Before the fictional Atticus Finch, there was the real Sister Blandina
At the End of the Santa Fe Trail, originally published in 1932, is the diary of a nun, a Sister of Charity, named Sister Blandina (born Rosa Maria) Segale who spent 20 years, from 1872-1892, as a Catholic missionary and educator on the frontier of the American West. She was only 22 when she was sent to the small post in Colorado known as Trinidad. She eventually went on to posts in Santa Fe and Albuquerque before returning to Trinidad and then back to her […]
Ending the Circle of Revenge
We are chased into this life. We are chased by what we do to others and then in turn what they do to us. We’re always looking behind us, or worried about what comes next. Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich form the holy trinity of contemporary writers for me. They each produce impeccable novels on a regular basis, featuring strong but very human characters who are dealing with complicated and heartbreaking situations, and usually ending with pain tempered by some small hope. Race, […]
Perception and Remembrance
The Blind Assassin is Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize and Dashiell Hammet Award winning novel (2000) that spans the major events of the 20th century while telling the tragic story of the Chase sisters. It is an ingenious combination of history and mystery with love, infidelity, avarice, godliness, war and literary references woven deftly within. This is also a novel about women, class and perception, or misperception/blindness as the case may be. The novel is narrated by Iris Chase Griffen, daughter and wife of captains of […]
How should we live when the world is dying?
The Children of Men is a work of dystopian fiction with religious overtones. PD James steps out of her usual realm of detective novels/mysteries to ponder what happens to relationships (among people, between people and government, between individuals and God) when the end of the world is immanent. In 2021, it has already been 35 years since the last live human birth. For reasons that science has not been able to explain, humans worldwide have been unable to reproduce; they are simply no longer fertile. […]
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