Tony DiTerlizzi, Holly Black: The Field Guide
I’ve enjoyed Black’s fiction for adult and young adult readers, and The Field Guide, the first volume of “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” demonstrates a similar playful attitude toward well-established...
View ArticleEva Ibbotson: The Secret of Platform 13
This past Christmas afforded me the happy opportunity of researching what-next-after-Potter? books for a young relation, and of course I’m reading a bunch myself. This book shares the plot detail of a...
View ArticleRick Riordan: The Lightning Thief
It took a while for The Lightning Thief to win me over. For much of its length, it felt too nakedly calculated to appeal to Harry Potter fans (with the interesting, but hardly unique, added dimension...
View ArticleWalter R. Brooks: Freddy Goes Camping
I was compelled to read Freddy Goes Camping by Mari Ness’s appreciation Pigs! With! Ghosts! at tor.com, which covers pretty much everything that struck me about this book — the...
View ArticleMichael Bond: Paddington Here and Now
Bond’s Paddington reminds me a smidge of Wodehouse’s Wooster in that after reading a few stories, the template is so nakedly obvious that you might almost think you could produce one yourself:...
View ArticleWillo Davis Roberts : The View from the Cherry Tree
For better or worse, I found myself thinking of The View from the Cherry Tree as sort of what-if-Ralphie-of-A-Christmas-Story-witnessed-a-murder? story. (The novel substantially predates the film, of...
View ArticleS. S. Taylor: The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon
I wanted to love this book, and perhaps I didn’t because my expectations were too high. It’s published by an arm of McSweeney’s, and it features steampunk trappings, secret societies, cloak and dagger...
View ArticleE. Nesbit: Five Children and It
I learned about E. Nesbit and Five Children and It from Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, which predisposed me to wonder if the reason I didn’t know Nesbit’s name while I did know the names Baum,...
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