A friend of mine who writes middle-grade novels told me recently that historical fiction for kids is selling well these days. (I guess we’ve all had enough of the current reality.) Linda Joan Smith’s debut novel, THE PEACH THIEF, fits right into that. I wrote about it, glowingly, for the New York Times Book Review:… Continue reading »
Archives for book reviews
New writing alert: me in the NYTBR
The New York Times Book Review asked me to review two new middle-grade novels that confront, in very different ways, the growing threat to kids’ freedom to read. This threat has been worrying me a lot lately, so I was especially glad to get to write about these two books. Read the review.
The TLS: “Coming Clean” (review)
In the TLS, writer Beejay Silcox writes about CLUTTER and “mess as an emotional and cultural problem”: “Neuroses and trauma may have helped to bury Howard’s mother in domestic rubble, but so did an insatiable, deep-rooted, and increasingly unsustainable, cultural hunger to own. ‘The chaos of my mother’s house, then, can be read as a… Continue reading »
