On My Bookshelf
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Three Among the Wolves: A Couple and Their Dog Live a Year With Wolves in the Wild
Helen Thayer
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Make Lemonade (Point Signature (Scholastic))
Virginia Euwer Wolff
Touching Spirit Bear
Ben Mikaelsen
Book Reviews
Warning: The reviews contained herein are unabashedly biased, frequently cursory, and occasionally snarky. If you manage to write a term paper based on any of these reviews, that’s one sorry-ass paper.
Note Bene: We will never rate a book 0 for the simple fact that The Celestine Prophecy is the absolutely worst-written book ever to torture the American psyche.
Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom
*** By Katherine Paterson. As you might expect from a muliple Newbery award-winner, Paterson’s other books aren’t half-bad either. She has a couple dozen or so, of which I’ve read many, but I’ve got a ways to go. Whilst picking up Lyddie for a class of mine, I also picked up Rebels. Good choice, Lisa!
When I was a kid, call it childish racial prejudice or merely prescience, I steered clear of Paterson’s Asian-focused books. In the case of Rebels, it was probably just as well I waited. The book is of very fine but dense prose, and of exactly the voice you would imagine telling you a based-on-the-true-story story of 19th century China: exceedingly formal and a touch mythic. This would have done me in as a younger reader, even if I had gotten through the foreign names. I would have tossed the book aside as boring and perhaps never have picked it up again.
Continue reading review »Posted by Lisa at 09:32 PM on August 26, 2004