Matthew Quick's Sorta Like a Rock Star Little Brown, 2010 In a reading month that included War and Peace and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, you can imagine that I was craving something a little lighter. Enter Amber Appleton and her loyal dog, Bobby Big Boy, in the pages of this
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) Penguin, 1978 She's "goodness made interesting". That's what Irving Howe calls Tess, the main character in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Interesting is one way to put it. Not all of his Victorian readers found it so however. His religious skepticism and his
Erin Blakemore's The Heroine's Bookshelf HarperCollins, 2010 Have a favourite book that you tend to revisit when times get tough? Or maybe at just any ol' time that you find yourself missing the characters therein? Perhaps you have a fondness for Jane Eyre, or you can't help but re-read Little Women over
Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider (1987) Harcourt Inc, 2003 The Whale Rider is set on the East Coast of New Zealand, and that is, indeed, where Paikea is the tipuna ancestor, but this is a novel, not a narrative of myth and culture. It is a story of one fictional
Mildred D. Taylor's The Gold Cadillac (1980) Illus. Michael Hays Dial Books for Young Readers, 1987 Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) won the Newbery in 1977 and it remains Mildred D. Taylor's best known novel. But the Logan family was actually introduced in her first novella, Song of the Trees
