Well, I have some mixed feelings about this one. I wasn’t all that into the story itself, and was pretty disappointed at what I felt was an abrupt ending. (To be fair, Murayama wrote a second book about the Oyama family–Five Years On a Rock–so maybe the story picks up where it left off.) In […]
This was a great peek into one of the historical labor union strikes of the early 1900s that helped make factory work more bearable. And the timing of this read is appropriate since the teachers of Los Angeles Unified School District just finished a labor strike, and Denver Public School teachers have also voted to […]
Hmmm. I’m torn about this one. It has some great things to say about race but I don’t think the target audience is going to sit still long enough to get the message. One of my concerns since my son was born is that so many fantastic new books for young people have strong female […]
Run by Ann Patchett (2007) was an amazing read and just great for my reading challenge–we really feel not just the New England snowstorm, but also many of the Massachusetts people. I am reading my way across the USA–5 or so books from each state, with an emphasis on those where the setting becomes its […]
In the early- to mid-1990s, I lived in Massachusetts, outside of Lawrence, along New Hampshire’s tiny coastal strip, and worked for a Girl Scout council on the North Shore, which included Lawrence, Lowell and Lynn, Salem, Marblehead and Gloucester. I also did an internship a bit to the west, around Worcester. What I remember the […]
As I was putting together the book map for Kansas, I came across an interesting conundrum: where in Kansas was Dorothy from? (Or, more to the point, Amy Gumm?) L. Frank Baum’s books don’t give the name of any towns near where Dorothy lived with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em on their farm. And […]