Parenthetical

If you are like me and a great many of my friends, you are currently obsessing over Downton Abbey. (That’s the PBS link, because that’s where Americans can watch streaming episodes, but of course it’s a BBC show.) It’s a soap opera that makes you feel smart! It’s a BBC show that doesn’t look like [...]

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Happy second round of Nerds Heart YA! After much deliberation, Allegra of My Library Card Wore Out and I chose Toads and Diamonds by Heather Tomlinson as our winner. It was a tough call, of course, as I loved many things about Tall Story. But ultimately we decided Toads and Diamonds had more “kid appeal.” [...]

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Carina Chocano’s New York Times article “A Plague of Strong Female Characters” gets at most of my issues with this trope: “Strong female character” is one of those shorthand memes that has leached into the cultural groundwater and spawned all kinds of cinematic clichés: alpha professionals whose laserlike focus on career advancement has turned them [...]

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I’ve just read three books about kids with different ways of perceiving the world, and because they’re thematically linked (also to catch up on reviews quicker) I’ll review two together: Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko, and Anything But Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin. Al Capone, my favorite of the two, takes place [...]

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The moment when Helen Keller, splashing water over her hand, connects Annie Sullivan spelling W-A-T-E-R with the concept of “water” is part of our national mythology. This is Annie’s story up to that point — her arrival at the Kellers’, her attempts to tame Helen from a wild brat into a civilized child, her own [...]

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Sherlock Holmes, contentedly retired to Sussex to keep bees (which Giddygeek and JanetCarter assure me is canon), meets his intellectual match in Mary Russell, the wealthy orphaned teenager up the road. They fight crime! One of you lovely people (sorry, I forget who) recommended this for our 8th grade summer reading list a couple of [...]

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Just back from WWII, Evie’s stepfather takes her and her mother on a surprise vacation to Florida, where they meet Peter, a young man he knew in the service. As Evie falls for Peter, she is caught in a tangled web of secrets and lies. This won a National Book Award and I’d heard people [...]

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In 1942 India, Vidya is primarily concerned with convincing her parents not to marry her off until she can go to college. Those hopes die when her father is seriously injured at an independence march and Vidya, her parents, and her brother move to Madras to live with her father’s far more conservative extended family. [...]

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Callie Tate lives on a wealthy farm of pecan trees and too many brothers in turn-of-the-century Texas. One day she gathers the courage to ask her intimidating grandfather about the two different kinds of grasshoppers she sees in the fields, and he tells her to figure it out herself. From her eureka moment — they’re [...]

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Sixth grader Miranda walks home with her best friend every day, helps her mom study for her $20,000 Pyramid debut, and reads A Wrinkle in Time over and over again. But suddenly her life is full of odd characters: the crazy man under the mailbox on her street, and the kid who punches her best [...]

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