making space for creativity
Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game was the 58th Newbery winning book and the award’s first mystery. Set in southern Wisconsin along Lake Michigan (Milwaukee perhaps?), 16 people move into an apartment complex and are each invited to prove that he or she is the true heir to their wealthy next door neighbor by discovering which…
Last week, as the sun began to start warming up early April Wisconsin, I was walking with Lily (11 months) and Jackson (3 1/2) when two older women passed and called out, “We’re jealous of you. We miss that stage!” I laughed and thanked them. But inside I thought, “Well, you wouldn’t…
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson won the 1978 Newbery Award. Jess Aarons the narrator and protagonist is a lonely 10 year old who secretly draws, longs to be the fastest kid in school, and is sandwiched into a family of sisters. Leslie Burke moves into the farm house next to theirs, and they…
Going into the birth of our second child, my husband, Evan, was pretty adamant that we bring less stuff to the hospital than we did the first time around. I’m a chronic over-packer, wanting to be prepared for any situation, but with dreams of being a minimalist. So for our daughter’s birth, I really…
Mildred D Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is the 1977 Newbery winner about the 1930s black Mississippi Logan family through the eyes of the narrator, nine-year-old Cassie Logan. Cassie and her bothers, Stacey (12), Christopher-John (7), and Little Man (6) are not sharecroppers, but their grandmother (Big Ma) owns land that…
As temperatures in Milwaukee compete with those of Antarctica, Lily decided to start crawling, our kitchen pipes froze, and I decided our bookshelves needed an overhaul. Fortunately, Evan got a few days off of school for snow and cold weather. We have a small house and most of our book collection is downstairs on…
The fourth book of the Dark is Rising Sequence, the 1976 Newbery winner, The Grey King by Susan Cooper continues the modern Arthurian fantasy, this time set in beautiful Wales. I read the first three books to get ready for this one, because I definitely have a want-to-check-all-the-boxes-and-read-everything-in-order personality, but I don’t…
To celebrate my 34th birthday, here are 34 of my favorite books from the past year! (You can see my past birthday book lists here : 30, 31, 32, & 33) My very top picks from the year were Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, Born a Crime: Stories from…
I feel pretty guilty about not liking this book: M.C. Higgins the Great by Virginia Hamilton, winner of the 1975 Newbery award. Its subject matter (Appalachian Poor Communities) and its author (one of the first women (or person!) of color to win the Newbery) are both things that I think the Newbery Award books…
A few weeks ago on the first Thursday of November, I documented our day by posting hourly pictures on Instagram. This is something that the wonderful Laura Tremaine (originally with her blog the Hollywood Housewife) started many years ago, but it’s only my second time participating. It’s lot of fun to look back on past…
Paula Fox’s book The Slave Dancer won the 1974 Newbery Medal. It’s the brutal portrayal of an illegal 1840s American slave ship through the eyes of an impressed young white New Orleans teen musician, Jessie Bollier, brought to make the slaves “dance” during the exercise time. Even before the ship has picked up its cargo…
This year for our anniversary in May, my mom took Jackson out for a long morning walk, and we snuggled with our 2 week old daughter on the couch, and got to watch a movie and eat bacon wrapped dates. It was heavenly. Our movie consumption after Jackson was born dropped severely and involved watching…
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George is the 52nd Newbery. It follows the life of an Inuit (Eskimo) girl named Miyax (Julie is her English name) after the death of her mother, raised by her hunter father before an aunt forces her to leave the desolate hunting camps to live with her…
Two weekends ago, family and friends gathered to celebrate the baptism of our little Liliana June. As someone who didn’t grow up seeing a lot of infant baptisms (I was baptized twice, neither time as an infant, incidentally) the beauty and grace of infant baptisms is so striking. We had family and friends pour…
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien is one of my all time favorite books. I distinctly remember visiting my cousins in Texas when I was 11 (they had just come off the mission field in Cameroon) and my Uncle Skip was reading this to his three kids, and I…