WRB—Children’s Literature Supplement, July 2024

“a midnight dance with the moonflowers”

Sarah realized that she often starts this newsletter by referencing weather or nature, but honestly, she’s not terribly ashamed of this fact. We’ve reached that point in summer, at least in Sarah’s neck of the woods, where the cicadas chatter continually throughout the day, adding a captivating layer to the soundscape.

Have you ever noticed how, when you’re walking through the woods and you suddenly break into a pond or marsh area, the sound around you changes? Sometimes, the change is dramatic. Other times, if you enter a pine grove perhaps, the change isn’t so sudden. But it’s a curious effect—one that we’d do well to notice more often.

Anyway, between her roommate being out of the country for two weeks and waiting around for her sister to give birth, Sarah’s had a lot of quiet reading time on her hands. Find out her recommendations (and disapprovals) below, along with a few other treats.  

Comedic moments

Somehow, Sarah got on a Peanuts kick and has been delighting in the simplicity and charm of Charles Schulz’s beloved characters. Snoopy is by far her favorite, both for his wry commentary and his flight abilities. If you can, start with Peanuts collections from the 1950s and work your way forward—and then do yourself a favor and watch the 2015 movie. There’s some disagreement over the merits of this movie, but Sarah’s of the opinion that it takes all the years of Schulz’s work on Charlie Brown and presents Brown as a complete character. It’s easy to be down on poor Charlie Brown, but this movie gives him the chance to shine that he deserves. And, it may just change the way you read the Peanuts comics.

Stories & parables 

For her First Holy Communion many years ago, Sarah received Josephine Nobisso’s The Weight of a Mass: A Tale of Faith (2002) and was completely caught up in the tale woven by Nobisso’s words and Katalin Szegedi’s illustrations. Nobisso and Szegedi also collaborated on another lovely book, this one titled Take It to the Queen: A Tale of Hope (2008).

Books for boys

Joanne Jacobs has gathered together essays on why boys aren’t reading much and what we can do to remedy this. 

One of the links is to an American Mind essay by Katya Sedgwick:

When I look at the top books read in American schools I’m struck by three features—the near-absence of classics, especially in elementary and middle school, the near-absence of folklore and fairy tales, and the near-absence of poetry. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Restoring these three categories to their proper place can improve education immensely.

Sedgwick’s insights and observations are beneficial to this important conversation. 

An epic tale

As usual, Sarah is years behind the times when it came to learning about S. D. Smith’s The Green Ember series. Fortunately though, this meant she didn’t have to wait for any new installments to arrive—she simply picked the series up from the library. She’ll have a longer essay out over on National Review next Sunday, detailing her thoughts about the saga, but in short, she loved it. It has all the best parts of a classic adventure tale: swords, romance, betrayals, true love, glowing jewels, daring escapes, tragic deaths, and evil warlords. Given how much Sarah enjoys the Redwall series, it’s no surprise she was entranced by Smith’s rabbit-centric story. Our main protagonists, brother and sister pair Heather and Picket Longtreader, have their peaceful life thrown into utter chaos and ruin in the blink of an eye. To survive, they must find out who they are—and decide who they will become. 

This only skims the surface of a story full of wild twists and turns, and if you’re like Sarah, you’ll let hard-boiling eggs explode on the stove or stay up past midnight, completely enraptured by this gripping saga.

What the kids are reading