Balloons! Fancy hats! Napoleon! All this plus female empowerment. Lighter than Air: Sophie Blanchard, the First Woman Pilot is a biography of an eighteenth century woman balloonist. As Matthew Clark Smith warns in the back matter, “I was forced to use my imagination in describing Sophie’s childhood.” But he grounds it in real events of […]
John Ronald’s Dragons is a biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, focusing on the parts of his life that inspired his fantasy writing. The book invites you to see Gandalf in a headmaster who smoked a pipe, dragon’s smoke in the smoke pouring out of smokestacks in an industrial city, and the frightening Mines of Moria in World […]
[My publisher is giving away my book, Mountain Chef along with John Muir Wrestles a Waterfall over at Page Through the Parks on Facebook. There will be five winners–so go comment on the giveaway post to enter!] I had seen Martin’s Dream Day mentioned on a few lists, so I was happy when my library got it, but […]
Kids’ writing takes on depth and power when they learn to use words that evoke the real world. I loved doing a workshop on sensory-rich writing with kids in a fourth grade class this year. We used a 1915 photo of an outdoor picnic, one that I had used in researching Mountain Chef, as our point […]
Charlesbridge Publishing has issued an educator’s guide for Mountain Chef. It’s available in a beautifully-formatted form on their website or in a bare-bones format here on mine. And they’re also offering a Charlesbridge giveaway! With summer approaching, Charlesbridge is offering five lucky people two of their national parks related titles–Mountain Chef and John Muir Wrestles a Waterfall. The giveaway […]
There are plenty of dinosaur books that explore the natural history of extinct creatures. But The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk explores, in greater detail and with much greater authority than dinosaur books ever achieve, the natural history of a creature tht went extinct in 1844. It explores with heartbreaking specificity why it went extinct […]
Deborah Freedman’s book This House, Once speaks to that human desire to know how stuff is made. In spirit, it’s a lot like the wonderful book Where Did My Clothes Come From? by Chris Butterworth. But that books revels in the intricate details of cloth- and clothes-making, while This House, Once is atmospheric and poetic. The book begins with […]