Elizabeth Waterston's The Magic Island Oxford University Press, 2008 I've been reading this book for months. You could actually say 'years'. Which is pretty funny actually because I bought it immediately upon publication...in 2008. But its format got me hooked in a rather unusual way and in some ways I
This is my second-last Shelf Discovery Challenge post and read. I deliberately chose both this and Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear to round things up because they were among the books that helped me shift away from kidlit and YA books to adult reading. The transition via
Sandra Scoppettone's Happy Endings Are All Alike (1978) Deborah Hautzig's Hey Dollface (1978) Madeleine L'Engle's Meet the Austins (1960) Sara Ryan's Empress of the World (2001) Just as I found that many of my favourite early reads about family and relationships featured bookish heroines, so did the next phase of
Judy Blume's Blubber (1974) Jean Little's One to Grow On (1969) Sheila Greenwald's It All Began with Jane Eyre (1980) Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy (1964) Previous shelf-discovery posts I've made have focussed on historical fiction (here, here and here) and post-apocalyptic fiction, mysteries (here) and fantasies, but the majority of my
Mary Stewart's The Little Broomstick (1971) Julie Andrews Edwards' The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (1974) Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (1962) If I'd looked back to my childhood reading, I would have described myself as being much more comfortable with witches and dragons, enchantments and whangdoodles, than
