This week’s Newbery winner was another surprise—the 1934 biography of Louisa May Alcott: Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women by Cornelia Meigs. Published a hundred years after her birth, Invincible Louisa traces the Alcotts’ many (29 in 28 years) moves across New England with their four daughters: Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth…
Month: July 2014
My 5 Favorite Writing Books & 5 on My To-Read List
This past weekend we drove down to Illinois again to visit two of Evan’s cousins and their wives. We swam in a lake, grilled kabobs, played board games, went to church, and then let the men go into Chicago for a Liverpool Football Club friendly match. While the boys were away cheering at the…
Newbery Review # 12 (Young Fu, Lewis, 1933)
I was surprised by how much I liked the 1933 Newbery winner Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze by Elizabeth Foreman Lewis. A Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, the book follows Young Fu through his coppersmith apprenticeship in 1920s Chungking, China. Following the death of his father, Young Fu and his mother Fu Be Be…
My Goddaugther & Loving Your Friends’ Children
On Saturday morning we got up and crept quietly out of the house, hoping that we could let my niece and brother and sister-in-law sleep past 7:30. I think the dogs foiled this plan, but I hope we slipped out without causing too much of a ruckus. We finally, after almost five months of…
Newbery Review # 11 (Waterless Mountain, Armer, 1932)
This week’s Newbery winner from 1932 has us returning to the States, but this time we’re in the southwest with Laura Adams Armer’s Waterless Mountain, the coming of age tale of a young Navaho (the 1930s spelling of Navajo) boy named Younger Brother. The story opens when Younger Brother is eight and first begins…
Foggy Beach & Writing Days: Finding Beauty on the Shore
Last Saturday Evan and I went to the sandy dunes of a Lake Michigan beach. It was our only Saturday home, sandwiched between our June in Atlanta and the next three weekends in Chicago. We had gotten the name of a great state park an hour north from friends who remembered it fondly. …
Newbery Review # 10 (Cat Who Went to Heaven, Coatsworth, 1931)
The shortest Newbery with so much emphasis on the illustrations, Elizabeth Coatsworth’s 1931 The Cat Who Went to Heaven, almost seems like a long picture book (something about the length of My Father’s Dragon or The Little Prince). It tells the story of a poor artist whose housekeeper brings him a lucky cat, Good…
Cocktails at Sunset, Thoughts on Growing Up
I can hardly believe it is really mid-July. I think that perhaps this has to do with how the weather this early morning was in the 50s. The 50s, in July. Yesterday, there was a heat index of 100 in DC. But here we are with windows open 2 1/2 weeks before Evan starts…
Newbery Review # 9 (Hitty, Field, 1930)
The 1930 Newbery Award Winner Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, by Rachel Field follows a small wooden doll around the nineteenth century world as she is lost and found by an assortment of owners. The 5 inch doll Hitty begins her life when a wood-carver peddler takes refuge from a winter storm in Maine…
Walks in the Woods with Friends, the Rhythm of the Ordinary and Extraordinary
During our month in Atlanta, I continued to slowly work through (and very much enjoy) Alan Jacobs’ biography of CS Lewis, The Narnian. Like all good biographies, this one is also a great deal about the time and place of the person, and Lewis’ early 20th century England and Ireland are fascinating. One…