Category: Ages 8–11 (page 1 of 29)

August 16, 2024 / 0 Comments

Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm

This week’s summer rerun was first published in November of 2021—the first year all four of my daughters entered school.

That first week of September, I dropped all four of my children off at school and drove home in an empty minivan. Ordinarily, an empty minivan is a treat: a chance to put on a podcast or some music I want to listen to, or to stop for coffee and not share with anyone. But that day, I paused at a four-way stop and thought, Oh. This is normal now. This is every school morning. I didn’t put on a podcast.

What I did was spend that morning at the beach. I spread a picnic blanket on a boulder right at the water’s edge, set out my notebook, Bible, and cup of coffee, and spent the whole morning watching the water, the clouds, the sea birds. Since my eldest daughter was born, thirteen years ago, I’ve always had a small daughter with me during the day. We homeschooled for a time, and they were all there, all the time; during quarantine, we were all together, all the time. And now, during the school days, I am on my own.

I figured I’d be ambivalent about this—both very sad and also, as a staunch introvert who has never minded spending time alone, very excited. And as I sat on that boulder until my coffee was gone, reading and watching the gulls, I felt both of those things: a deep sense of grief over the season behind us (oh, but it was sweet), and a thrumming excitement for the one before us.

That afternoon, I picked up all four girls from school—the littlest looking disheveled, as only a brand-new kindergartner can—and back at home we ate blackberry almond muffins as they told me everything. All at once. They got a day’s worth of conversation into a slim forty-five minutes, and I soaked it all in. The eighth grader had homework (“Already!” she groaned); the fifth grader, also an introvert, had quiet things to tend to in her room. But I grabbed the littlest girls and Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm, and the three of us squeezed into the hammock in the backyard for a good, long read-aloud.

Let me tell you: if you need to build a happy memory with your kids, I’m not sure you can do better than Our Animal Friends. It has everything! Copious illustrations of animals—all shapes and kinds—with their personalities distilled brilliantly into a few short words; humor (“Willow is not interested in umbrella plants”); and even, by the end, a moment of poignant sadness for “the animals that were.” Alice and Martin Provensen have created a book that is hospitable, and through it, they welcomed us into Maple Hill Farm and gave us a connection to the lives lived there. Their illustrations are warm and fun and so . . . pleasant is the word I want, I think. There is something comfortable about them.

Later I found each of the older girls curled up with this book in turn. They are now in the season of algebra and orthodontia, but their reviews were glowing, which gives me hope: even as the currents of our days begin to distinguish themselves into separate threads, we can still share this. We can still laugh at the antics of Big Shot the Rooster and admire Willow’s placid beauty. This picture book reminds us that we haven’t outgrown picture books yet.

Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm
Alice and Martin Provensen (1974)

June 21, 2024 / 0 Comments

The Little White Horse

Over the years here, I’ve reviewed so, so many books. And sometimes in the summer I like to pull past reviews back to the top of the pile, because this both:

a) lightens my summer schedule up a bit (thereby freeing me up to do things like rummage in tidepools and nap in hammocks and drive my girls all over the county to attend Fun Things) and

b) gives me an excuse to share some of my very favorite books with you (again), books that might otherwise have languished in the archives of the blog forever because they were originally published waaaaay back in, say, 2018.

So! This marks our first summer re-run, my friends, and where better to begin than with the beloved book we’re currently re-running (that is, re-reading) around the lunch table at our house? (Good news—it’s still glorious.) I hope your summer is off to a sunshiney start, and that you find moments to read on your own and with your people.

Now, without further ado—a post that originally appeared on Story Warren, back in May of 2018.

“I absolutely adored The Little White Horse.”
—J.K. Rowling

That sentence alone persuaded me to purchase The Little White Horse, a book I knew nothing else about by an author I’d never heard of. If this story fed the imagination of young J.K. Rowling, I wanted to save our family a seat at the feast.

The Little White Horse starts the way so many classics do: Maria Merryweather, newly orphaned, is delivered by carriage to an unknown relative. She is to live at Moonacre Manor with her cousin Sir Benjamin, and to her that prospect sounds simply awful.

But when she arrives she finds Moonacre Manor and the valley around it infused with the unexpected, for the country life Maria dreaded is not dull at all but rich in mystery and delight. She finds clothes laid out in her room each morning, embroidered with someone else’s name. She discovers a room in the manor where every object has some secret shut up in it. And she roves the countryside with a freedom she never had in London, exploring and building unlikely friendships.

Yet there is one blot upon this otherwise unmarred place—the wicked men of the pine wood. In her determination to learn who the men are and how they came to the valley, Maria learns something unexpected—and thoroughly unpleasant—about her own ancestors.

Like an old fairy tale, The Little White Horse assures us from the start that all shall be well and, by the book’s end, all is well—all bows are tied up neatly, all difficulties resolved. But Elizabeth Goudge keeps the route from beginning to end unpredictable: we never know what is coming around the next bend, only that it will be wonderful. And it is wonderful. This book I bought on a whim has become one of the most beloved books in our family library.

June 7, 2024 / 0 Comments

I Think I Think A Lot

Bedtime at our house involves a fair amount of bustling, some snuggling, some tooth-brushing, and a lot of talking—so much talking. I like to joke that I’m a part-time counselor these days, now that all four girls are fluent conversationalists facing challenges that grow right along with them. Often the things they worry about step politely to the side during the day, when there is so much else going on. But at bedtime these worries stride down to the footlights and demand to be heard, and so one daughter or another will drift downstairs and sidle up to one of us, hoping we’ll ask them what’s wrong.

Often, the problem is as big and as broad as this: “I don’t know how to turn my brain off!” To which I can relate.

And so I, with my houseful of overthinkers, am grateful for Jessica Whipple’s sweet book, I Think I Think A Lot, in which the main character wrestles with the fact that she just seems to think and worry so much more than her peers do. The result is a series of insights about her friends that contrast the way she thinks about the world with the way they think about it. The story serves as a fun introduction to the different ways we all think about the world around us and invites readers to recognize themselves in one or other of the characters. And to know that, wherever they land, these differences are good and interesting.

Whipple writes from her own experience with OCD, which provides a helpful backdrop for the book. And she writes broadly enough that I Think I Think a Lot can help kids from all sorts of backgrounds begin to find words for the way they see the world—and to understand better how their friends and siblings might see it differently.

At our house, I think we all think a lot. And you know what? We can glorify God in that, too.

I Think I Think a Lot
Jessica Whipple; Josée Bisaillon (2023)

Though I did receive a free copy of this book for review, I am not being paid to promote it. My enthusiasm for this book is abundant and purely voluntary.

March 15, 2024 / 0 Comments

Something Better Coming

I have written recently, in a few different places, about the loss of a very good friend and about her legacy. My daughters didn’t get to meet her, but they love her because she loved them—Leslie always asked about them, and even sent the occasional birthday gift their way, so she was a sweet presence to my girls even though she lived on the other side of the country.

The other day, my daughter asked about Leslie’s birthday. “We have to celebrate it,” she said. But when I opened my contacts to double-check the date of Leslie’s birthday, my daughter grew suddenly still. “You mean,” she said quietly, “you used to text her, but now—you can’t anymore?”

And then she slipped her arms around my waist and squeezed hard.

My friend has been gone for almost a year, but somehow that was the thing that made her death real—and suddenly, acutely wrong—for my daughter. That realization that, though my friend lives still, in a newer, better way, no message I can send her now will reach her.

“Oh death, where is your sting?” Scripture proclaims (1 Cor. 15:55). And yet, we feel the sting of death around us all the time—as it claims those we love, or in any number of endings that are woven into our daily lives. Things aren’t what they should be, and even our children know it on a bone-deep level.

And so I’m grateful for the season of Lent, where we expose that undercurrent of dis-ease for a bit and put it in its proper place, by reminding ourselves and one another that it will not always be this way. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, death will truly—and forever—lose its sting.

Megan Saben’s book Something Better Coming shows beautifully the hope and anticipation we have, in Christ, as we lean toward Easter. By telling the stories of the resurrections Jesus performed, each one building upon the previous one and pointing toward the next one with the refrain “There’s something better coming,” she gives readers a sense of culmination and completion through the story of Jesus’s resurrection.

This is a glorious way to read the Easter story. We see, through the building tension, that his resurrection was not a single event, disconnected from Scripture, but one woven seamlessly into it—a grand disruption, yes, but one that was promised and foreshadowed through a series of smaller resurrections sewn all throughout the Bible and, specifically, the Gospels.

I am deeply grateful for the truth of the resurrection and for its assurance that, though death stings now, there’s something better coming. I’m glad for that truth when I squeeze my daughter back and assure her that it won’t always be this way—there’s something better coming.

Something Better Coming
Megan Saben; Ryan Flanders (2022)

Though I did receive a free copy of this book for review, I am not being paid to promote it. My enthusiasm for this book is abundant and purely voluntary!

March 1, 2024 / 0 Comments

The Mousehole Cat

My favorite kind of mail is Surprise Mail: the packages that I didn’t order, but that arrive on our porch unannounced and full of possibility.

The Mousehole Cat arrived in just such a package: a friend sent it as a surprise, but also, because the card ended up arriving separately a few days later, as a bit of a mystery. I saw her name on the package but I didn’t have context for the gift. Instead, we opened the book and wondered at it—the why? and the what for?—before we sat down to lunch and read it aloud.

And the book was wonderful. The Mousehole Cat is about a cat, Mowzer, who lives with a fisherman in a place called “The Mousehole” because the bay is almost completely closed off from the sea, but when a storm rolls in that prevents the townsfolk from fishing and famine looms over them, the fisherman makes a brave and sacrificial decision to save the town. And Mowzer sails out with him.

The illustrations in this book are detailed and gorgeous, so much so that it felt hard to read aloud (almost!) because my eyes kept straying toward the pictures even as I tried to read the words. Imagine: Nicola Bayley portrays the storm as the Great Storm-Cat, personifying it in a way that makes it fun for young readers to spot the Cat curled among the clouds and wind, batting playfully with the waves and pouncing through the sky. How could one not get a little lost in illustrations like that?

The only solution, I suppose, is to read it again—and again—making this a book worth savoring. Through both the story and the illustrations, The Mousehole Cat gives us a stunningly beautiful example of what it can look like to love not merely “in word or talk but in deed and truth” (1 John 3:18).

The Mousehole Cat
Antonia Barber; Nicola Bayley (1990)

Category: Ages 8–11 (page 1 of 29)

Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm

The Little White Horse

I Think I Think A Lot

Something Better Coming

The Mousehole Cat

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