Photographs were an important resource for me in writing my book Mountain Chef, about a 1915 camping trip. Recently I spent three days sharing some of those photos with a fourth grade class and helping them explore how photos can be used to research and to inspire their writing. I was struck by how visually attuned […]
(My review of a nonfiction middle grade title, Super Gear, was on Nerdy Book Club earlier this week. You can see it here.) Chance. Serendipity. Accident. The Marvelous Thing that Came from a Spring: The Accidental Invention of theToy that Swept the Nation shows that the process of creating something new may start with an accident, but […]
The Music in George’s Head: George Gershwin Creates Rhapsody in Blue is an elegantly-structured story. The book has three main parts. First, we learn about the many types of music Gershwin listened to as a boy. For example, “He just couldn’t stop thinking about Melody in F, a classical tune he’d heard at the penny arcade.” He […]
Let’s turn away from the executive branch of government for a minute and think about the judiciary. I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark is a delightful picture book biography that is organized around a principle central to Justice Ginsburg’s work on the bench and, in fact, to all the workings of representative democracy: disagreeing […]
Election day is next week. In the relentless frenzy over this election, I try to remember how many women fought for my right to vote. Mara Rockliff’s book Around America to Win the Vote: Two Suffragists, a Kitten, and 10,000 Miles is a light-hearted, fun look at what women were willing to do to change hearts and […]