“Go to the library and pick out a book with an award sticker and a dog on the cover. Trust me, that dog is going down.” – Gordon Korman, No More Dead Dogs This is such a cliché, there is even a list on the Goodreads website called “The dog dies . . .… Read more The Dog Dies, Part I
The S.R.S.C. (Society for the Removal of Superfluous Children) has established a colony for children unwanted by their parents, at Watkyns Bay which cannot be reached from the ordinary world unless you know how. (The one exception is a cursed boatful of 17th century Dutch sailors.) There, the children live a life of play and… Read more The Marvellous Land of Snergs (1927)
There is a boy. He lives in a small midwestern town in the mid-20th century, and he is on a campaign to be allowed a dog. He is self-reliant and enterprising, and likes to tinker with inventions. His name is Henry or Homer. This is not a genre exactly, but more like a family, whose… Read more An Inventive, Animal-Loving, Small-Town Boy Whose Name Begins With H
In honor of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award being renamed, I’m moving my discussion of the Little House books forward in the queue. There is a whole genre of semi-autobiographical books reflecting back on the era between the Civil War and WWI. (More on this in another post.) The giant of the genre, of… Read more The Little House Books: A Historical Slap Upside the Head