I just finished reading a family favorite to my youngest son: Men of Iron by Howard Pyle. It’s an old book about an even older time, but stirs the soul of most any boy with the usual craving for rough and tumble adventure, breathtaking danger, and contests of brute strength. It also happens to be…
I love many moments in The Wilderking Trilogy, but one of my favorites happens outside the story, on the faces of those hearing it for the first time: it is the Moment of Revelation, when that niggling feeling that there’s something about this story, something familiar . . . But how could that be? The…
For me, the first years are lost. Golly, that’s a great opening sentence, isn’t it? After reading it on the first page of the new middle-grade graphic novel, When Stars are Scattered, I immediately had questions. The first years of what? Why were they lost? The only solution: keep reading. The answers that unfold on…
Like any true fan of Narnia, I’ve read or listened to C.S. Lewis’ masterpieces so many times I’ve almost got them memorized. But revisiting always brings something new and fresh. Prince Caspian did that for me this summer. Aslan is on the move, the Kings and Queens of old have returned and Narnia is about…
NOTE: This piece first appeared in The Rabbit Room, and then on Story Warren in 2013. It seems fitting to re-visit it now. So my nine-year-old son Aedan just finished reading Tolkien’s The Return of the King for the first time. He came downstairs after he finished and we talked about the ending, about the…
Summer seems sundered a little sooner each and every year. I remember wandering through an Ohio Valley August that burnt brown, the fields around my Lexington, Kentucky, home so blasted and brittle it was as if they’d been baked in an oven, the sky a shining sheet every bit as flat and hot as an…
Maybe race is something our family has always talked about, however imperfectly, because of who we are. We may be your average white American family, but our extended family is made up of immigrants and the children of immigrants; some of its members are different races and ethnicities. And it’s absolutely beautiful. But even in…
Are you looking for a book for your young people to have along on vacation, or just to spend the lazy summer days enjoying, but discouraged by the YA offerings? Here are a couple I’ve read recently, one for boys, one for girls, but of course both perfectly acceptable for either. One boring weekend when…
As I continue to write middle grade fiction, I also make time to read fiction for the same age group. Over the past two years, I’ve read Katerine Patterson, Gary Paulsen, Andrew Peterson, George MacDonald, Kate DiCamillo, S. D. Smith, William Armstrong, Scott O’Dell, Susan Creech, Robert Beatty, Lois Lowry, and others. I’m now delving…
If you asked me what book of the Bible on which I might expect to find a children’s book to be based, the book of Job would not be the first to spring to my mind. Job’s first few chapters, lest we forget, are a minefield of sadness. As the book progresses, Job’s wife and…
It’s every bookish kid’s dream job—deputy librarian! I know I loved anything that could connect me more to my church library and public library growing up; helping reshelve books, joining clubs, chatting about favorite reads with the staff. Story Warren regular Carolyn Leiloglou has penned a new picture book that looks at this joy of…
In the fall of 2013, I had the privilege of attending a workshop at Hutchmoot — the annual conference of The Rabbit Room — which featured Randall Goodgame and S.D. Smith. At the time, I was a green young dad, my own boys just past their fourth and second birthdays, respectively. And I was on the hunt…
