Category: Ages 11+
When I was studying creative writing in college, there was this sort of pall over the subject of publication. “It probably won’t happen to you,” our professors cautioned. If you’re lucky, they said, you may […]
If you’ve read Glenn McCarty’s The Misadventured Summer of Tumbleweed Thompson, you’ve heard about US Marshall Dead-Eye Dan. And if you’ve read McCarty’s Junction Tales, you’ve met Dan face-to-face. (For the record, I highly recommend […]
I always feel awkward when I review a book I’m pretty sure you’ve already read. Each time I do it I wonder: why spend time reviewing The Chronicles of Narnia or Anne of Green Gables […]
This week we had a big discussion about when exactly Advent begins, and I was certain that it started next weekend. I had looked at the schedule for Advent readings at our church—I knew what […]
Summer is sometimes a pleasant unraveling: our schedule frays a bit by mid-June; by July the ends are loose and fuzzy; by August, what routine we have left is shapeless, a heap of thread unpicked […]
“I couldn’t put it down.” “You won’t be able to put it down.” “It’s unputdownable!” I recently read our local bookstore’s monthly magazine, and the reviews were littered with phrases like this. This seems to […]
When I was a senior in high school, a friend of mine started attending a Christian college just over the Canadian border. She came back jazzed, sparkling. “It is so exciting,” she tried to explain […]
Scripture doesn’t tell us much about Jesus’s childhood—just that it happened, and that he never sinned. But what was it like to be the sinless son of God, a perfect child in a fallen world, […]
The Christmas that J.R.R. Tolkien’s son was three, he found a letter addressed from the North Pole. In a shaky, spidery hand, the letter’s writer introduced himself as Father Christmas; he enclosed a self-portrait for […]
Our family is in a funny spot, reading-wise. On one end, we have our seventh grader, whose school reading list includes Plutarch and Shakespeare and who loves a good adventure—the more intense the better. On […]
