As so many significant events in my life, it happened at the library. It all started with a stack of bookmarks printed with a list of middle grade books. My oldest daughter had just finished second grade, and had already cloistered herself in the world of high fantasy. The books on this list were varied in genre with a diverse cast of main characters and a disproportionate number of Newbery medals gracing their covers. The bookmarks were labeled “Global Reading Challenge,” so I challenged my daughter to read all ten before the summer was over. Read More
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Global Reading Challenge
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Enchantment Lake
I never read Nancy Drew until my daughter got a haircut a couple of years ago that prompted people to say she looked like the famous sleuth. But that doesn’t mean I never went through the girl detective phase as a kid. I actually did it more than once. Linda Craig’s curiously crime-ridden ranch filled my first and second grade years. Trixie Belden’s curiously crime-ridden quaint bedroom community took up a stretch of fifth. In third grade there was also a bunch of kid detectives with a house trailer hideout in a junk yard, but I think they were all boys. In any case, I’m not new to girl detective books, even though it has been a long time since I immersed myself in one.
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Ambassador Kate DiCamillo at Seattle Public Library
Kate DiCamillo has a Southern accent. I did not expect this because I do not hear it in the lyrical rhythms of her wide-eyed fiction. Both the accent and the wonder are explained by her childhood in Florida, where she experienced a number of unusual theme parks, and was particularly impressed by the vision of hidden worlds granted by glass-bottomed boats. It was on one of these boats that she heard a lady in a plastic rainbonnet say
Oh my. This world.
And knew exactly what she meant. Read More
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Ride the Lightning Thief
My daughter discovered Percy Jackson in the third grade and hasn’t read much else since. I have defended this choice, because like Neil Gaiman and education specialists everywhere (stay tuned for my article on the subject in the March issue of ParentMap), I believe that any reading is good reading. My own experience supports this. I too read high fantasy obsessively and exclusively for several years at about the same age, and I have grown to be an adult who reads primarily nonfiction and medieval literature.
Meanwhile, Rick Riordan has become something of a whipping boy for the literary establishment, trotted out as an example of what’s wrong with children’s literature today at every opportunity. It seemed strange to me. Riordan writes long narrative novels that incorporate classical mythology – doesn’t that sound like exactly what literary types would want their kids to be reading? Was it just a case of literary hipsterism that declared something so popular couldn’t possibly be cool? Read More