Admittedly, I chose There's an Owl in the Shower because I had read Jean Craighead George's classic My Side of the Mountain. I knew of her reputation for including ecological and environmental themes in the stories she has written for children. But when I realized that it had been published in
When Penelope Lively was interviewed by Emma Donoghue in 2003, the author was tickled to have her books for children acknowledged; her writing for children was routinely dismissed and she explained that she now felt quite distanced from it. The news of this dismissal shocked me because I came of
Lisa Moore has pulled from the headlines to create fiction before, and this is not the first time she has pulled readers into painful territory by the heart. Grove Press, 2014 "I learned to graft bits and pieces of true-life experiences together to form fiction. I learned not
Readers can debate whether Etto or soccer or the town of San Benedetto is the main character in The Sun and Other Stars: the novel can reach readers' hearts via more than one route. Simon & Schuster, 2014 And, yet, that suggests that the three can be separated, whereas this
"Daisy was barely three and could not understand what was going on." Because there is something going on. Something that Daisy, at three years old, could not understand. This is where the story begins, from a future vantage point, when 60-something Eve is looking back at the afternoon in which
