Month: July 2024
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On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1938)
The continuing autobiographical adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The book opens with the family arriving to their new home in Minnesota, and goes on to cover a couple years of time as Laura goes from age seven to age nine. This is book three or four of the series (depending on if you count Farmer Boy), so you don’t need my recommendation to decide if you should read this one or not.
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Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes (2004)
Martha is a twelve-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin, about to leave for her family’s annual trip to her grandmother’s home on Cape Cod, when she’s given a page from the journal of a classmate named Olive who died in an accident earlier that summer. She barely knew Olive, but the entry says that Olive wanted to visit the ocean, become a writer, and be friends with Martha. Her visit to her grandmother’s is a growing experience, with Martha thinking about death, love, and becoming a writer herself. A beautiful and melancholy book, older in themes than the…
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Introduction
Welcome! This site will track my progress through reading all of the Newbery Honor books, with a post for each as I finish. If you’re not familiar: every year since 1922, the American Library Association awards the John Newbery Medal to “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” from the previous year. The…