Let’s play a game, shall we? I promise to keep it short and simple. I’ll say a word, and you tell me everything that comes to mind. Ready? “Princess.” I’ll give you a minute… Now, if the words that spring to mind are “crown,” “castle,” “ball,” and “prince,” I think it’s fair to assume that…
The Riot and the Dance Part I: Earth is a film described by its creators as, “A boisterous new nature documentary featuring a biologist who was once told he would never succeed if he kept blabbing about all that silly Creator-creature nonsense.” I got to watch an early screening with my family, and we found…
We read lots of historical fiction to our children. Most books were good at imparting information, some were rich in explanation, some filled us with inspiration, but only a few captured our imagination. It took a true storyteller to do that. The words “history” and “story” are from the same Latin and Greek root words,…
My son’s favorite books are the Lord of the Rings series, so buying John Ronald’s Dragons: The Story of J. R. R. Tolkien by Caroline McAlister for his birthday was an obvious choice. Even if he was turning ten. A well-written, beautifully illustrated picture book has a magical quality of appealing to all ages. John…
The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles has a job of the utmost importance. It is his task to open any bottle found at sea and make sure that the message is delivered. This description from the flap of today’s featured picture book, The Uncorker of Ocean Bottles, written by Michelle Cuevas and illustrated by Erin Stead,…
It was a warm April afternoon – the kind of day that woos buds from the earth and birds back home from their sunny southern holiday. A friend, who had recently moved several states away, was in town for a visit. She planted herself in the wicker chair on my back porch. Within minutes of…
The lesson was forced upon me. As a working mother, I couldn’t read like I wanted to read. Awake by four-thirty or five, my day began with a mad rush to collect lunches and afterschool supplies. From eight to five, I was teaching and grading papers. From five to seven, I was carting kids around…
We’re spoiled around here. Though I’m sure there’s no shortage of used book stores in your town, in Tennessee we have the King of Used Book Stores, the Grand Pooh-bah of the Printed Word. We have McKay’s. This is the place that has allowed me to build a library for my children, that has occupied…
“She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn’t read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble…” That’s how Captain Crewe describes his 7-year-old daughter Sara’s love for reading in…
Evangelicals like to say they love the Inklings, that group of Oxford-associated authors who produced lots of narrative-friendly prose during the 1940s. But do something for me, would you? Name as many of them as you can. I suspect that most can readily recall C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and probably a few will cite…
Our own S. D. Smith is running a Kickstarter campaign to finance publication of the third book in his Green Ember series, Ember Rising! I’ve read the manuscript. Ember Rising is everything the next book in this series should be – Fresh and compelling while staying entirely grounded in the characters, places, and themes of…
In any friendship, one person will challenge the other. Glenn McCarty’s new book, Horace and Oscar Visit the Lake, features just such a friendship. Horace, the stuffed rabbit, longs to discover where colors come from and to see the world outside the nursery and past the yard. Oscar the toy giraffe, on the other hand,…
