Recommended by: a friend in Tifton, GA.
Janie Hopwood creates a colorful panorama of characters and events in this historical novel about her grandmother Rena Beck’s boarding house.
When Rena Beck’s husband died, leaving her a house but nothing else, she decided to take in boarders in order to provide for herself and her three [...]
Recommended by: Tess Alfonsin
A hard-edged book for teens that takes on multiple tough issues:
Children’s cruelty to each other for being fat or disfigured
What it’s like to grow up fat or disfigured
Surviving parental abuse and abandonment
Abortion
Hypocrisy
Religious intolerance by some Christians
While I applaud the author’s courage in addressing all these important issues, I think the book would [...]
Recommended by: childhood memories
After reading Finn Family Moomintroll recently, I was inspired to seek out Moominland Midwinter, which I also vaguely remembered from childhood.
It’s a quick read, and contrasts quite a bit with the earlier book. The mood is bleaker, as befits a northern winter, and the relationships between characters are more superficial and [...]
Recommended by: Ursula Le Guin, while reviewing “The True Deceiver”
I stumbled across Finn Family Moomintroll in my elementary school’s library as a child, and didn’t really know what to make of it, but loved the image of the snow falling, and the creatures curling up safely for the winter.
Re-reading it now, I still love the [...]
Recommended by: Dave Hingsburger’s blog
The book begins, “My name is Perry L. Crandall and I am not retarded. Gram always told me the L stood for Lucky.” Perry is indeed lucky to be raised by his observant, patient Gram, since the rest of his family is avaricious and self-centered in the extreme.
He is [...]
I bought this book about 20 years ago for the delightful drawing on the cover. At the time, I read it as a rescue story, set in the 1930’s in London’s East End. 5 year old Anna has run away from an intolerable home life, and is found and adopted by gruff, kind, [...]
Recommended by: Cofax
This layered novel combines plot-driven swashbuckling adventure with a more cerebral battle over the contents and authorship of the historical record.
In the first layer of story, Sara, a proficient rare-book restorer, is absorbed by her work on a sixteenth century manuscript allegedly by a Spanish monk, to the point of ignoring the military [...]
This story of young Bod Owens growing up in a graveyard sparkles with inviting details and action on every page, drawing me into reading it while I was supposed to be doing other things. I enjoyed the gradual revelations about his caretakers, and the sturdy, matter-of-fact ethics that Bod learns from them.
Like any good [...]
Recommended by: Marissa Lingen
Narrated by oddly mature sixteen year old Leila (”Lee-la”) Abranel, this coming-of-age novel shows her both grappling with her much older sister’s suicide, and embarking on her second romantic relationship. The story is absorbing, but harrowing events and difficult emotions are described so quietly that the characters seem flat and distant.
My favorite [...]