Children's Lit Book Group

When Nick was about five, Mark took him to see Finding Nemo for the first time. Mariah and I were singing in a wedding, and they chose the movie instead.…

Mariah was having trouble with her brother the other morning. “So which one of you is Satan?” she asked. “Because I’m pretty sure he’s the spawn.” Ouch! When I was…

I’ve never been particularly nostalgic. When my other mom friends were folding their babies’ clothes gently away, storing their memories, I was always moving on to the next thing. Walking!…

My daughter absorbed fairy tales through her skin when she was a little girl; Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel — she knew them all. I don’t remember owning a…

My son loves food. It goes well beyond simple sustenance, whether he’s chomping on a shiny gumball fresh from the machine, slurping an ice cream cone as it melts over…

“In an old house in Paris,” my father would begin, solemnly intoning the words as he opened the book on his lap. “That’s not it, Daddy!” I’d giggle. “Oh, so…

Somewhere before the middle of Little Women, the sainted Marmee has a conversation with her angry daughter Jo in which Marmee confesses, “I’ve been angry almost every day of my…

My students don’t like Alice. She’s rude, they say, she is snobby, she interrupts. They didn’t like Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden either, but then she grew up. They…

Children’s literature means all new things to me as I read it as a mother. Last spring I taught two books I love, in two different classes, and began to…

You know you’re in trouble when you start identifying with the bad guy. I read to my seven-year-old son Nick every other night. His dad reads to him the nights…

Late at night, when I’ve stopped worrying about the hole in the bathroom ceiling, the mess on Nick’s bedroom floor, and the various appointments I have for the next day,…