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Category Archives: Fiction
A children’s series that ages with its audience: Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill captures 10 year old life well
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill is the third in Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series. The girls are now 10 years old and the largely standalone chapters of the first two books smoothly transition into larger story arcs … Continue reading
Posted in 20th Century Children's, 7 years and up, American, Children's, Children's Classic, Children's Classics, Coming of Age/Rites of Passage, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novel, Uncategorized
Tagged Betsy-Tacy books, childhood, children's classic, early 20th century, fiction, friendship, good out loud, growing up in America, historical, humour, illustrated, imagination, Maud Hart Lovelace, mid-western United States, play, school, semi-autobiographical, siblings, society, starting school
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Would you like world-ending pink topping with that? Lost is a Good Book is a generous second helping of Thursday Next from Jasper Fforde
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde is the second book in the Thursday Next series. Despite a sudden celebrity for saving Jane Eyre and improving the ending, not every one is happy with what Thursday has done. A … Continue reading
Posted in British, Contemporary, Fantasy, Fiction, General adult audience, Novel, Speculative Fiction
Tagged absurdist, action, adventure, apocalypse, British, bureaucracy, convoluted plot, fantasy, fiction, greed, humour, Jasper Fforde, legal trouble, literature, novel writing, probability, quirky, rich setting, satire, shady business practices, society, supernatural, Thursday Next, vampires, well written, Wordplay
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Deadly lizards, delinquent boys, a sinister warden and a whole lot of HOLES feature in Louis Sachar’s acclaimed YA novel
When Stanley Yelnats gets caught holding a celebrity’s stolen sneakers which have just fallen on him out of the sky, he knows that it’s because of the family curse acquired by his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather. Stanley is sent to Camp Green Lake, … Continue reading
Posted in 10 years and up, 20th Century, 20th Century YA, Adventure, American, Coming of Age/Rites of Passage, Family Drama, Fiction, Light Fiction, Novel, YA Classic, Young Adult
Tagged boys, camping, friendship, good out loud, growing up, hardship, history, overcoming adversity, resourcefulness, summer camp, survival, Texas, well written
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A powerful book about growing up and making sense of the world that I first read while I was growing up: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
I first read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in year 10 and it was the first really decent book I got to read for high school english (the junior syllabus really wasn’t inspiring – in year 8 we had … Continue reading
Posted in 20th Century, 20th Century Literature, American, Classic, Coming of Age/Rites of Passage, Fiction, General adult audience, Novel, Uncategorized, YA Classic, Young Adult
Tagged American South, childhood, fear, growing up, growing up in America, injustice, power, race, racism
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Wit and wordplay, parody and playfulness, allusion and appropriation: Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair is to classic literature what Hitchhiker’s Guide is to sci-fi and fantasy
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde is set in an alternate England, where home-cloned dodos are common house pets and the public’s passion for literature occasionally erupts in street violence. Thursday Next is a literary detective, part of a specialised … Continue reading
Mansfield Park: A mature but, for us, challenging novel by Jane Austen
Of all Jane Austen’s heroines, Fanny Price of Mansfield Park is surely the least appealing, the most ‘foreign’ to our age. Unlike Emma’s assertiveness and Lizzy’s humour, Fanny’s combination of self-effacement and moral conviction are at odds with modern core … Continue reading
Posted in 18th Century, British, Classic, Fiction, General adult audience, Novel, Novel of Manners, Young Adult
Tagged adoption, adultery, better than the movie, character-driven, childhood, clergymen, divorce, family, fiction, integrity, Jane Austen, marriage, morality, navy, observant, self-control, upbringings
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Bucketlists and marriages of convenience: The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery uses a bunch of tropes before they were popular
The Blue Castle was L.M. Montgomery’s only book written for adults and my favourite of her non-Anne books. Really the only difference between it and her young adult novels is that the heroine is 29 and unmarried teen pregnancy is … Continue reading
Posted in 20th Century, 20th Century Light Fiction, Canadian, Fiction, General adult audience, Light Fiction, Novel, Romance, Young Adult
Tagged Canada, cats, classic tropes, death, drunkness, family, fiction, individualism, L.M. Montgomery, lighthearted read, marriage of convenience, romance, spinsterhood, teen pregnancy
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A nuanced exploration of family dynamics, moral identity and cross-cultural perceptions: Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
The basic storyline of E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread revolves around the child of a mixed marriage and the various characters’ feelings, motives and actions regarding it. Yet this storyline is the vehicle for exploring the struggle between … Continue reading
Posted in 20th Century, 20th Century Literature, British, Classic, Family Drama, Fiction, General adult audience, Novel
Tagged character-driven, child-raising, classic, cross-cultural marriage, culture, drama, E.M. Forster, ethics, external viewpoint, family, observant, thought-provoking, well written
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The Sydney Opera House and the murder and narrative of Helga’s Web by Jon Cleary: Equally impressively constructed!
Helga’s Web is the second book in the Scobie Malone series (it stands alone but has key characters in common with The High Commissioner). During the building of the Sydney Opera House, a woman’s body is found in one of … Continue reading
Posted in 20th Century, Australian, Crime fiction, General adult audience, Novel
Tagged 1960s, Australian history, class, gender, intricate, Jon Cleary, justice, Murder, Plot-driven, police, politics, rich setting, Scobie Malone, society, Sydney, well written
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