5 Stars. I read this back in college and loved it so much that I still have my copy from that class. I decided to re-read it when my husband and I visited the coast of Maine last month. I might love it even more now. The narrator, who remains unnamed, is accepted in this tightly-knit community, but she’s still enough of an […]
Young orphan Jim Burden is sent from Virginia to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. There is a Bohemian family on the train with him. None of them really speak English. They all get off at the same station in Black Hawk. It turns out that the family has just bought the farm next to […]
Soooooo……..yeah. I just rated Walden, one of the great American classics, two stars. That probably says more about me than it does about the book, doesn’t it? Don’t answer that. But here’s the thing–well, a few things. 1. I’m not generally an abstract ideas kind of person. I like narrative and stories and characters that […]
Sixteen strangers move into a brand-new apartment building next door to the estate of missing, eccentric millionaire, Sam Westing. When Westing turns up dead, the sixteen people are given clues and charged with finding out who killed him. I swear I read this when I was in fifth grade, but I didn’t remember a thing […]
Linda, an overweight girl in fifth grade, gives a report about whales one day. Someone passes around a note that “Blubber is a good name for her” and Linda has a new nickname. The other kids start to tease and harass her and just generally make her life miserable. Our narrator, Jill, watches all this […]
Anytime kids gather together in the dark, scary stories are inevitably told. Alvin Schwartz gathered a good selection of the most popular and published them in this anthology. I kind of think this scared me when I was little but I don’t actually remember ever checking it out from the library. My theory is that […]
Our young British protagonist and his Norwegian grandmother know something that we don’t: Witches are real and they live among us. They look like sweet neighbor ladies but they’re keeping a lot of secrets. Chief among them? They want to wipe out the children of the world. When Grandmamma and Grandson (do we ever learn […]
Young Mickey hears a noise deep in the night and finds himself falling into the Night Kitchen, where he has to help the cooks get the milk into the batter. What a fun little book! I never read much Sendak when I was little for some reason, so this was completely new to me. The […]
Um, I think I missed something. This book’s average rating on GoodReads is 4.47 as I write this and I’m rating it 2 stars. Where did I go wrong? It’s been a while since I finished so I won’t be able to get too specific. First of all, I didn’t particularly care for the writing […]
Walter Hartright finds a woman, all in white, wandering down the road to London in the middle of the night. As they talk and walk, she mentions that her happiest times were spent at Limmeridge House as a child. By coincidence, Walter is leaving to become a drawing teacher at this house the very next […]
A group of friends travel to Pamplona, Spain for the annual running of the bulls and subsequent bullfights and fiesta. I didn’t like it. Not one bit. We read this for my book club because one of our members remembered loving it when she read it in an English class and had been wanting to […]