Joseph Bruchac’s Children of the Longhouse

Bruchac, Joseph. Children of the Longhouse.  1996.  New York and London: Puffin, 1998.
It’s the late fifteenth century, pre-contact with Europeans, for a twin brother and sister who are members of the Mohawk branch of the Iroquois nation, and the novel alternately tells of what happens from his viewpoint and hers–in the long run, mostly, his, [...]

Picture Book Texts

I’ve given my permission for a post I wrote recently on the Child_lit listserv to appear on Susan Thomsen’s Chicken Spaghetti blog. The post is about picture book texts and their relationship to poetry.

John Smelcer’s The Trap

Smelcer, John.  The Trap.  New York: Henry Holt, 2006.
In alternating narratives, a grandfather and grandson in the cold winter of the Alaskan wilderness confront different kinds of traps.  The old man is your archetypal old Indian of book after book and movie after movie–a fairly placid and calm old man close to nature and full [...]

Liza Ketchum’s Where the Great Hawk Flies

Ketchum, Liza.  Where the Great Hawk Flies.  New York: Clarion, 2005.
The two alternating narrators are two boys, one a blond-headed newcomer to a small Vermont community whose family suffered in an Indian raid during the revolutionary war a while back, the other a dark-haired son of an English man and a Pequot woman (with Mohegan [...]

More on Berlie Doherty’s Abela

In an article in called “I Didn’t Know There Were Cities in Africa! Challenging children’s — and adults’ — misperceptions about the African continent,” (Teaching Tolerance magazine, Number 34, Fall 2008, Brenda Randolph and Elizabeth DeMulder reveal a trap I’ve fallen into in my earlier discussion of Abela when they suggest an important way to [...]

Bebe Faas Rice’s The Place at the Edge of the Earth

Rice, Bebe Faas.  The Place at the Edge of the Earth.  New York: Clarion, 2002.
This is a very earnest book, and very determined to be wise and moral and cathartic; but in spite of (or maybe even because of) that, I find it very distressing.  It is trying so hard to be having the right [...]

Lauren Myracle’s ttyl

Myracle, Lauren.  ttyl. 2004.  New York:  Amulet, 2006.
This novel purports to be the transcripts of IM conversations among three 10th grade girls, who are best friends.  I say “purports” because, when I picked it up, I thought I’d be undergoing an experience in linguistic strangeness.  I’ve never IMed, and I understood it used a whole [...]

Blake Nelson’s Gender Blender

Nelson, Blake.  Gender Blender.  2006.  New York: Delacorte, 2007.
As the back cover suggests, “something FREAKY happens”–more or less as it once did in Mary Rodgers’s Freaky Friday, except this time the two characters who switch bodies are a middle school boy and girl.   It’s played mostly for laughs, as the two then have to deal [...]