Many years ago I got lost in James A. Owen’s Here, There Be Dragons and its sequels. At the time I was reading solely for my own enjoyment and found the series to be exciting, wholesome, and a fantastic literary puzzle for me to solve. When my well-read teen book club readers begged for more…
Tag: cautionary
Her Father’s Daughter
I wonder if Gene Stratton-Porter’s success went to her head. She was always opinionated, but in Her Father’s Daughter, she reaches her height of preachiness. If it were only that, it wouldn’t be an insurmountable aspect of the story. We put up with a bit of that from other beloved authors. In this book, Stratton-Porter…
Beauty
Beauty Robin McKinley This will be a summer of reading, rereading, makings lists, and mercilessly shortening them as I plan literature courses for the coming fall. Over the years, I have seen Beauty, by Robin McKinley, on so many lists of good books that I thought it was high time I read it. I believe…
The Great Train Robbery
On May 15, 1855, the crime of the century was perpetrated by turning lead into gold. Enacting a highly sophisticated bait and switch, Edward Agar, William Pierce, Jeremy Forsyth, and James Burgess were able to steal £12,000 in gold which was being transported from London to Paris. This highly publicized crime, the Great Gold Robbery,…
The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Mysterious Howling
“In this way Penelope’s happy and sad feelings got all mixed up together, until they were not unlike one of those delicious cookies they have nowadays, the ones with a flat circle of sugary cream sandwiched between two chocolate-flavored wafers. In her heart she felt a soft, hidden core of sweet melancholy nestled inside crisp…
Percy Jackson
“We can at least try to save something of the goods of which we are the common trustees; the legacy of Greece, Rome and Israel, and the legacy of Europe throughout 2,000 years. In a world which has seen such material devastation as ours, these spiritual possessions are also in imminent peril.” – TS Eliot,…
Why I Won’t Read “The Handmaid’s Tale”
(If you prefer to hear this essay rather than read it, click here to find the spoken tract version of this reflection.) I won’t read The Handmaid’s Tale. And it isn’t because I am a Christian who is afraid of being confronted by ideas that are unsettling. I graduated from Hillsdale College in the very late…
The Great Brain
We are boy moms. Diane and I have a daughter each and two sons a piece. Diane also has grandchildren, most of whom are boys. We love our daughters and we know that our culture has some special snares and traps for them. But as mamas of boys, we are particularly aware of today’s cultural…
Ronia The Robber’s Daughter
Many years ago I read Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren and disliked it. There was something about Pippi’s tone that most people found to be hilarious, but which I found to be troubling. After buying and reading aloud several Pippi books, I finally gave myself permission to acknowledge my concerns about Pippi’s disrespectful attitude towards…