making space for creativity
I love to remember a romantic anniversary. All spring I’ll give my husband Evan a running tally of our anniversaries: late February was 16 years since our first awkward date to see the play The Good Person of Szechwan, early March was 16 years since I asked you to drive me to an Ash Wednesday…
The Newbery Award has been given each year since 1922 for “The Most Distinguished Contribution to American Literature for Children.” But “children” is a pretty large category: what a 3 year old might love is not the same as what a 13 year old might. As a general rule, most Newberies are good reads for…
This is the third year I’ve written down all the books that my picky (or shall we say “possessing discerning literary tastes”) daughter has enjoyed. Lily is fun-loving and opinionated, especially about books. So here are the books that both my husband and I enjoyed reading to her (and her six year old brother Jackson.)…
After spending over 8 years reading the 101 Newbery award winning books, I have some favorites. I love a good book list, so that was my original plan for this post: list my favorite 42 Newberies. But as I was telling my husband Evan about this, he said he wanted to know what I thought…
2022 Newbery winner, The Last Cuentista, by Donna Barba Higuera. Petra Peña wants to become a storyteller like her Abuelita, but instead she is leaving her beloved Lita (what she calls her grandmother). Together with her little brother Javier and her scientist parents, Petra is among some of the few people to escape the destruction…
We’ve made it folks! I’ve read through 100 Newberies, reviewed over eight years! This is the last set of quick recommendations and ratings for Newberies 76 through 100. (If you’d like to see the first three sets here is # 1-25, 26-50, and 51-75. For links to each individual review you can go here.) This last…
2021 Newbery winner, When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller. Little sister Lily is moving back to help her sick Halmoni, her Korean Grandmother, with her mother and older sister Sam. Halmoni has always told stories that seem magical, so when a tiger that seems directly out of her stories begins appearing to Lily,…
This is my 7th year of birthday reading lists! (You can see the others here: 30 // 31 // 32 // 33 // 34 // 35 // 36). My top non-fiction picks for this year are Divine Conspiracy, Try Softer, Paradox Lost, Prayer in the Night, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and The Making of Biblical Womanhood. And my top fiction reads were A Place to Hang the Moon…
2020 Newbery winner, New Kid by Jerry Craft, is a graphic novel that follows 7th grader Jordan Banks to his new private school. He’s not thrilled about being there: he’d rather be at an art school, and he’d rather not be one of the only scholarship kids, and he’d rather not be one of the only…
Dear Friends and Family, We hope you are having a blessed season of Advent and are eagerly awaiting Christmas like Lily and Jackson are. It is amazing to see how their anticipation and love for candles and carols, special Christmas books and home-made ornaments grows each year. They love to rearrange our nativity sets, have…
2019 Newbery winner, Merci Suárez Changes Gears by Meg Medina follows Merci’s sixth grade year as a scholarship student at a fancy prep school while her grandfather’s neurological health deteriorates. Merci wants everything to stay the same, but middle school is not the same as grade school, with popular girl Edna driving her crazy and…
2018 Newbery winner, Hello, Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly weaves five children’s (and a guinea pig’s) stories together, mainly over the course of one day of missed connections, serendipitous meetings, and a little mystery sleuthing to rescue Virgil Salinas and his guinea pig Gulliver from the bottom of an abandoned dry-well. What was interesting: In…
One memory I have of my childhood Christmas-longings was really wanting old, special family traditions. My parents made Christmas wonderful, but we, I felt, lacked in the tradition department. There was something about our family tradition of putting our artificial tree together that lacked that Christmas magic. One big reason for this is we kept…
2017 Newbery winner, The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill is a high fantasy novel about the last baby, Luna, that good witch Xan saves from being abandoned in the forest. But Xan accidently “enmagics” the baby, letting Luna drink not a tiny bit of starlight, but a whole lot of moonlight. This magic…
2016 Newbery winner, Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña and illustrated by Christian Robinson is a beautiful picture book about CJ and his grandmother’s trip on the bus to serve at a soup kitchen. CJ is not thrilled about the rain, or having to take the bus, or not having headphones…