I tell my son, who is conveniently named Jack, two different versions of that classic story, Jack the Giant-Killer. The first is known to most of us as Jack and the Beanstalk, and it follows the traditional storyline: a tumbledown shack, a cow, some magic beans, a beanstalk, fee-fi-fo-fumming, bravery and derring-do, and, at the […]
Review: A Year in the Big Old Garden
My love of stories with characters who are animals probably started with Beatrix Potter and Winnie-the-Pooh when I was too young to remember. As I got older I found Brian Jacques’s Redwall series and Watership Down and The Book of the Dun Cow and S.D. Smith’s Green Ember series and others. Towering above all these […]
Review: The Last Archer
If I were to tell a young person about The Last Archer by S.D. Smith, I’d probably say something like this: It’s the story of an archer named Jo Shanks who wants to earn his place among a group of elite bowmen (bowrabbits? bowbucks?) from Halfwind Citadel. He goes through various trials and battles in […]
Our Very Own Great Tower
If you rummage about in our living room, you probably won’t notice our Great Tower. It’s shabby and brown, and it has a hole rubbed through the leather in the center cushion, courtesy of either the dog or our sons. We found it on Craigslist at a price so cheap we’d’ve been fools not to […]
A Letter from Brian Jacques
I spent my allowance on a steerage ticket to Mossflower Country when I was in elementary school. The mass market paperback was tucked into the shelves of a booth selling books at an Arbor Day celebration in downtown Zeeland, Michigan. Beneath the title, Mossflower, in gothic script were the images of a mouse with a […]