NEVER SAY A MEAN WORD AGAIN, A TALE FROM MEDIEVAL SPAIN Written by Jacqueline Jules and illustrated by Durga Yael Bernhard What could be more universal than name-calling and fighting – between children or adults? What could be harder to…
Category: Family
Making the Invisible Visible: Estela Bernal’s Can You See Me Now?
I met Estela Bernal at a novel revision workshop led by the wise and generous Barbara Seuling. Estela and I shared a room and she told me about her work rescuing abused animals and educating people about responsible pet ownership.…
Marilyn Nelson, Poetry and Prejudice
Novels and Biographies in Verse! Sometimes we are moved by a whole collections of poems and sometimes the power of one poem causes us to pause, to wonder over. I would like to share the beginning of this poem by…
Three Middle Grade Titles from Indie Publishing Pioneer Zetta Elliott
Zetta Elliott burst onto the children’s publishing scene with a Lee & Low New Voices Award and the acclaimed 2008 picture book for older readers Bird, the moving story of a boy’s close relationship with his troubled older brother. Since…
The Transcriber by Kristen Witucki
In the short novel The Transcriber by Kristen Witucki, published by Gemma Media, the protagonist Louis makes short work of society’s understanding of disability as he analyzes the way the world treats his blind sister Emily. The book is an…
Girl in Reverse ~ A Chinese-American Teen Searches for Her Story
Barbara Stuber has transformed artifacts collected in a museum into fragments of story. Combined, the artifacts create the provenance of teenaged Lily Firestone. Stuber exquisitely extends the use of the term provenance from the life story of a work of art, to…
Loss, survival, and hard-won truths in Pandemic by Yvonne Ventresca
Apocalyptic scenarios are favorites for teens. Many times, the apocalyptic scenarios take us severely out of the world of reality and into a fantastical world of flesh-eating zombies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that scenario! By contrast, however, the…
On Personal and Collective Memory: An Interview with Marjorie Agosín
Last week I reviewed Marjorie Agosín’s debut novel for middle grade readers, I Lived on Butterfly Hill. This lyrical novel is the story of a perceptive and courageous girl living in Valaparaío, Chile and facing traumatic political events that force…
From Chile to Maine and Back: A Review of I Lived on Butterfly Hill
Marjorie Agosín is an acclaimed poet and essayist whose dozens of published works explore the lives of women and Jews in her native Chile and the struggle for human rights around the world. I Lived on Butterfly Hill (Simon &…
Anna Was Here, asking the hard questions of life
I recently read Anna Was Here by Jane Kurtz. Anna is the young daughter of a minister, growing up in Colorado, when her father decides to move his family to Kansas in order to help his home church through a…