In 1944, Mazo de la Roche published The Building of Jalna, nearly twenty years after she began to work with the Whiteoak family on the page. The beginning grew out of the middle, you might say. Jalna was actually written first, begun in 1925 and published in 1927: the fifth
My reading year began with Marina Endicott's New Year's Eve (2011), written with literacy front-of-mind; its vocabulary, structure and tone are meant to ease the passage for readers with varying degrees of ease reading in English. It begins simply: "The snow started before we left home." Despite its brevity ,
When I was a girl, I was too afraid to watch the part of the Disney movie in which Penny is lowered into the darkness in a bucket. If I had actually read the stories on my bookshelf, I would have had great sympathy for the mice in the Prisoner's
Promise Falls has a history. You might not think so, but it matters. “Are we too insignificant up here: A couple of hours away from New York? Is that what we’re foolish enough to think? Let me tell you something, my friend. You want to strike fear into the hearts
In the wake of my IFOA reading list and the literary prizelists of the season, my November reading felt relatively whimsical. Without duedates attached to the majority of my reading, it was a pleasure to slip into volumes which had sat untouched in recent weeks. Each of these three volumes covers,
