Have you ever met someone whose storytelling ability is even more wonderful than the stories themselves? I haven’t met Kate DiCamillo face to face, but when I’m reading her work, I’m astounded by the tapestry of her words. Simply by describing a setting, this master storyteller can spin my mind into a place rich with […]
Tag Archives: children’s books
I Corinthians 13 is the famous “love chapter” of the Bible. Its poetry defines love in exquisite detail. I think Mark 10 deserves a similar designation: the “Jesus Loves Me” chapter. In it, right after we watch Jesus drawing the little children close and blessing them, we get to gaze at a person through Jesus’s […]
As a little girl, I had to fight back tears when I found a note in my lunchbox from Mama. The elementary school I attended—which in hindsight was quite nurturing—felt cold in comparison to the warmth of her love, felt unsafe in comparison to the haven of home. Glimpses of heaven still make me cry: […]
Snuggled beside my grandmother, I would listen, mesmerized, as the black and white tigers on the page raced round and round a tree until they just melted . . . into butter! Do you remember this story? Written by Helen Bannerman, it was first published under a different title in 1899. The black and white pictures […]
The same God who brought you the good old days will bring you the good new days.” I read this bit of wisdom in a book by John Claypool when I was a teenager, and I’m still quoting it to myself today. The New Year is beginning, and although I feel a twinge of excitement […]
A little while ago, my children and I were driving in the car, listening to the audio recording of Little House on the Prairie when it arrived at the Christmas chapter: “Mr. Edwards Meets Santa Claus.” Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writing is so charming, so full of vivid descriptions and the warmest of family moments. In […]
Each Thanksgiving morning, I heat the casseroles and pies I made the night before in the oven, childhood excitement filling me as a catch snippets of the parade on TV. I always wish we could delay our departure until my boys get a glimpse of Santa (the parade’s caboose), but we must make it to […]
The Lake District in England is overlaid with many a poem and book. Ten years ago, when I set foot there for the first (and only) time, it was already familiar, beloved even, for I had been touched by Wordsworth’s poems and delighted by Beatrix Potter’s picture books. Similarly, this month as I baked pumpkin […]
This summer, my boys and I were running errands, listening to Dragon of the Red Dawn, by the amazing Mary Pope Osborne,* when my heart was linked to a seventeenth-century Japanese poet: Basho. In the book, Basho’s character says, “[M]y banana tree is more beautiful to me than all the beauty of the Imperial Garden.” […]
The following “video essay” made me pause to look—really look—at a tree today . . . how its arms waved in the breeze, its green leaves in stark contrast to the blue sky. I thought about how, even though it has lived on this earth longer than I have and will be standing tall, shading […]
A Children's Book World 