Category Archives: American

Climbing trees, cutting your own hair and making messes with all the things you find in the kitchen: Maud Hart Lovelace’s second Betsy-Tacy book beautifully captures the experience of being 8 years old

Betsy-Tacy and Tib continues Maud Hart Lovelace’s engaging series of early 20th century American childhood. Betsy, Tacy and their new friend Tib are now 8-year-olds. Life is full of adventures, often with their genesis in Betsy’s fertile imagination. In this … Continue reading

Posted in 20th Century Children's, 5 years and up, American, Children's Classics, Novel | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Capturing childhood: Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace

I recently discovered Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series doing a literature-map search of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Similarly, Lovelace’s series draws on her own American childhood and the target audience ages with the protagonists. In the first book, Betsy-Tacy, the girls … Continue reading

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Light a Single Candle by Beverley Butler

Light A Single Candle by Beverley Butler is a great book written in the early 60s that I discovered in high school. Cathy Wheeler becomes completely blind in her early teens when surgery to treat glaucoma goes seriously wrong. As … Continue reading

Posted in 11 years and up, 20th Century YA, American, Coming of Age/Rites of Passage, Light Fiction, Novel, YA Realism, Young Adult | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a delightful book set just after WWII and featuring an unlikely group of people who learn to love reading under the Nazi occupation of the British Channel Isles. It is an … Continue reading

Posted in American, Contemporary, Epistolary Novel, Fiction, General adult audience, Historical Fiction, Light Fiction, Novel, War Story | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment