Hello, friends. Since February, I've been bursting with a secret: I am a juror for the 2016 Governor General's Award for Young People's Literature (Text category)!!!!!!!! (I will stop there, although there aren't enough exclamation points in Canada for how I feel about this.) You guys, it's been so difficult keeping this quiet. I'm used to talking about what I'm reading and why I'm reading it, any … [Read more...]
In further praise of…
Hello, friends. A fortnight ago, I blogged about three YA/children's novels I recently read and loved. This week, I want to highlight three more. What if Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace had been children together, and friends? What if they'd solved crimes assisted by their tutor, "Peebs" Shelley, with occasional appearances by the young bookworm Charles Dickens? This is the premise for Jordan … [Read more...]
Persistence
Hello, friends. I've been thinking this week about life's important, meaningful, and really unglamorous lessons. Specifically, I've been thinking about that Thomas Edison quotation: "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." Or, as John Ruskin put it nearly fifty years earlier, "I know of no genius but the genius of hard work." This all came to mind because at … [Read more...]