Following the death of her mother, 16-year-old Katie D’Amore is spending the summer tending to the grounds at the home of the famously reclusive Miss Martine. It’s the kind of work Katie’s mother would have appreciated—the quiet pursuit of beauty—and the physical labor is a welcome diversion. She joins a cast of devoted caretakers, working […]
Lit & Letters
April is National Poetry Month
Click here to read my round-up of new poetry books for kids, as published in BookPage:
http://www.bookpage.com/0904bp/children/childrens_poetry.html
With a Capital ‘T’
Henry Smith spends a lot of time thinking about Trouble. His father’s repeated warning seems to reverberate through the halls of his family’s seaside New England home: “If you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.” Yet Trouble, with its emphatic capital ‘T’, finds Henry’s family in a […]
In English, It Ain’t What You Know…
Beginning with his “English Delusionary” (a glossary of words created solely for this volume), Bill Brohaugh wants to make one thing perfectly clear: He spends a great deal of time considering irregularities in the English language and our repetitive abuse of them. This is not necessarily a bad thing because Brohaugh, the former editor of Writer’s Digest, isn’t cranky about […]
Collected Poems of Jane Kenyon, Now in Paperback
This complete collection of Jane Kenyon’s poems was first published in 2005, ten years after her death. Previously housed in four separate volumes, Kenyon’s work was met with effusive praise and was reviewed, it seems, nearly everywhere; the words “treasure” and “essential” being common descriptives. While her poems sometimes address the mundane, Kenyon “belongs on a a short list […]