Not long ago, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Todd Akin, made a medically ludicrous and morally objectionable statement about “legitimate” rape and the chances of a woman becoming pregnant afterward. His remarks and the controversy afterward make the…
Category: Violence/War & Peace/Refugees
Human Rights for Kids: A Review of The Stamp Collector
Some readers might know that I’m in Portugal right now and will be here until the end of the year, as my husband has a visiting professorship. This afternoon I was looking at the bookshelf of the young woman from…
Letters to a Girl at War: Dear Blue Sky
With the spread of the internet, an increasing number of young people in war zones have been able to tell their own stories, and to be heard by a wider world. One of the most famous blogs of this kind…
Crow: If You Think “It Can’t Happen Here”…Well, It Already Has
In the early 1990s I reviewed a historical novel for young readers, part of a historical fiction series from an educational publisher, about an interracial friendship between two 12-year-old boys in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. In the story, a…
The Many Facets of Bullying: A Review of Cornered
Last December I reviewed A.S. King’s excellent young adult novel Everybody Sees the Ants for my local newspaper and interviewed the author on the novel’s central theme of bullying. Since then, several more books have come out on the subject,…
The Forsaken speaks to reluctant heroes
The Forsaken by Lisa M. Stasse (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) $16.99 Dystopian novels often allow readers inside the scariest of ideas. They encourage readers to think about war and our darkest fears, both internal and…
Focus on the Bully: A Review of Orchards
The recently released video of middle schoolers tormenting a 68-year-old bus monitor in Greece, NY, near Rochester, has prompted national outrage aimed at the young bullies. Last week in a post titled “Where Have All the Manners Gone,” my sister…
Mr. Death’s Blue-eyed Girls leaves readers questioning guilt and innocence
Mr. Death’s Blue-eyed Girls by Mary Downing Hahn (Clarion Books) 16.99 If you have read Mary Downing Hahn’s earlier ghost stories especially Wait Till Helen Comes: A Ghost Story, you know what I’m saying when I say her books always…
On Children’s Rights
We’re back after some technical difficulties, and as promised, I’m following up Ann’s eloquent review of Never Fall Down with a report on the Children’s Rights Panel from this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, which featured Patricia McCormick, Arn Chorn-Pond,…
Ellen Levine: A Tribute
Last summer I reviewed the young adult novel In Trouble by Ellen Levine, about two teenage girls in the 1950s who find themselves pregnant and make different decisions about whether to undergo what was then an illegal and dangerous abortion.…