My 12 year old just gags every time she sees a commercial for this movie.
She really hates books in which majorly bad things happen “suddenly” to one or more protagonists. Mr. McCabe, her 5-6th grade teacher, sent this link to me: http://www.slate.com/id/2160370/pagenum/all/#page_start He was the one who “made” her read the book. (Which I STILL have not read. Think dear daughter and I share a genetic link?)
| Author: | Cynthia Lord |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | fiction, autism |
| Year of publication: | 2006 |
In Al Capone Does My Shirts, the first-person narrator is a boy whose family moves to Alcatraz so that his sister may apply to a school for autistic children near San Francisco. In this less anachronistic modern-day Newbery Honor Book, the first-person narrator, Catherine writes down rules for her autistic brother, David, although she's learned from experience that he routinely ignores them. Written by the mother of two children, one of whom is autistic, the plot, written with the help of Lord's non-autistic daughter, clearly demonstrates how much the parents of the autistic child demand from the one who does not suffer from that disease. | |
Catherine's patience and empathy border on saintliness, and the moral (perhaps the message to the author's non-autistic child) seems to be that she is a better person for having helped her parents with her brother. -- Emily Berk | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Rules | |
| Author: | H. M. Hoover |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 12 and up |
| Genre: | Fiction |
| Year of publication: | 1988 |
De-mythologization (probably not a word, huh?) of the story of Medea, including the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, from Medea's point of view. | |
As in The King Must Die (the story of Theseus and the Minotaur), , in this story too, the ways of the patriarchal Greeks mostly triumph over the matriarchal societies that share their waters. Another theme is the unfortunate tendency of those who lack knowledge in science and healing to assume that those, especially women, who master those arts, are witches (evil). Despite its sympathetic portrayal of Media, in this account, as in the original, Medea's overwhelming love of Jason very badly clouds her judgment and causes her to act murderously. Recommended. | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Dawn Palace,The | |
| Author: | Mary Renault |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 12 and up |
| Genre: | Fiction |
| Year of publication: | 1958 |
De-mythologization (probably not a word, huh) of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. In this version, Theseus expresses his wonder at the radically different ways of life in the patriarchal Greek world in which he grew up and the matriarchal Minoan lands he comes to rule. | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: King Must Die,The | |
| Author: | Diane Duane |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | fiction |
Fourteen year-old wizard Nita's parents are worried about her "relationship" with her wizarding partner (a boy), so they ship her off to Ireland, where she gets into much more harrowing situations (and a romantic one as well) than those she might have experienced if she'd just stayed put in the USA. My daughter and I loved the way the tiny Bard Cat interacts with her less gifted human allies. The seeming contradiction between the way wizards look -- ordinary -- and what they have to do -- extraordinary -- might be heartening to a child who feels that his or her specialness is not reflected in appearance or circumstances. And, the cameo appearances by Celtic mythological beings are fun. The discussions of Nita's romantic thoughts (nothing graphic, but probably not of great interest to younger children) and the responsibilities that go along with great power, and the excitement, mayhem, and death that inextricably mix with battle might make this book appealing to adolescent readers, rather than to younger readers. | |
My 12 year-old and I enjoyed reading this not very challenging, but plot-intensive story. We did feel that we might have liked it even more if we'd at least read the first book in this series first. One of my cynical thoughts on reading this book was that Duane almost certainly was able to deduct a summer's vacation or maybe even a home in Ireland and use this book to prove that it was business-related. Must be nice to be a successful author. -- Emily Berk | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Wizard Abroad, A | |
| Author: | Nancy Farmer |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | fiction |
| Year of publication: | 2004 |
Nearly-Christian, Saxon apprentice-wizard boy is abducted by Vikings and learns that even Berserkers (who live to create mayhem) are human and that ancient gods are to be respected and, often, feared, even if one does not worship them. | |
Nancy Farmer's fairy tale about the intersection of the ancient Norse and Celtic gods with Christianizing Norse folk is awe-inspiring. Unlike the characters that populate other similar stories, Farmer manages to make her characters both archetypal and idiosyncratic. | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Sea of Trolls, The | |
| Author: | Rudyard Kipling |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Sophisticated readers |
| Genre: | fiction |
| Year of publication: | 1901 |
When we finally read (and then re-read) the last page of Kim, my barely 12 year-old said to me, "I loved this story. I love Kim. But no more Kipling for a while. It is too hard." We started reading Kim together in early fall. We finished in mid-December. The difficulty of:
Kim is like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell meet James Bond meet Harriet the Spy, only harder. Not a book to be read when one is tired. | |
The novel describes Kim's path to enlightenment, adulthood, and employment as a British spy. We walk with Kim, the young, orphanned son of an English soldier, as he grows up to be Friend of All the World, the perfect chela (caregiver to a Tibetan monk), and player of The Game (spy). And as we adventure with Kim and the lama with whom he strives to "escape the Wheel", we come to know representatives of nearly all the religious sects and political players in colonial India. Highly recommended for very advanced young readers. -- Emily Berk | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Kim | |
| Author: | Sharyn McCrumb |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | fiction, historical |
| Year of publication: | 2002 |
The book is actually the history of a song, rather than a story about a person who catches songs. And/or it's the story of how a song gets caught. | |
In telling the tale of the song, McCrumb helps us learn the history of a special region of Appalachia -- the beautiful, remote, hilly part that straddles the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. We learn, in "their own voices", of the boy who was stolen from his home island in Scotland and so brought the song to the New World, of his hard life during the Revolutionary War, and of his journey to Appalachia. The song then leads us into the mind of a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, which in this part of the country, literally pitched neighbor against neighbor, few of whom cared all that much for the Northern OR Southern cause. Because the song continuously eludes capture by the songcatchers, we then follow its course through family of a young girl in the early twentieth century and then into the mind of another soldier in World War II and then into the later twentieth century. In each historical period, the song's lyric "When she/he came home, she was a-change-ed, oh" proves true both for those who go to war and for those to whom the war comes home.Highly recommended for advanced young readers. Note: The violence, suffering, and death caused by wars are described in short, sharp, riveting, but horrifying bursts that punctuate many of the stories told by the song's custodians. -- Emily | |
| Similar books | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Songcatcher, The | |
| Author: | Frances O'Roark Dowell |
| Reading Level (Conceptual): | Children 12 and up |
| Reading Level (Vocabulary): | Children 8 and up |
| Genre: | fiction |
| Year of publication: | 2003 |
A group of children abandoned to a group home and an apparently Asperger's-spectrum, intellectually gifted child, are united by a love of architecture, or building, at least, scrap-booking, and the stories told by an overly-imaginative housemate. Not hard to read, although the stories of how the children came to live in the home are sad. | |
The book gets readers thinking about the fine line between imagination and lying, the need to escape mundane realities sometimes -- especially when one's life is nearly unbearable, and about the power of caring friends and adults. -- Emily Berk | |
If you found this review helpful and/or interesting, consider supporting our book habit: Buy this book!: Where I'd Like To Be | |
a review by the mother of a gifted homeschooler
I’ve now read TWTM twice and have had time to think about it a bit. I like SOME things about classical education in general and TWTM in particular, but others, I’m not too keen on.
First of all, Piaget’s stages of development have been known to be incorrect for years (even though they’re often taught in psych 101). They just aren’t true.
Having a true “grammar stage” would be acceptable to some students but just plain painful to most gifted ones–and beyond that, for math, at least, it is simply counter-productive. For example, TWTM predictably likes Saxon math, with its emphasis on rote memorization and the execution of algorthims as a substitute for actual mathematical thinking. While many gifted children will accept this, it is not a good idea. There is, quite frankly, a very good reason that Susan Wise Bauer did not major in science, mathematics, or engineering. Most classical education curricula provide a very poor background for these things. The prediction in TWTM that students will find upper level math and science “hard” is not representative of the difficulty of the subject so much as the completely lack of decent preparation.
Memorization of facts, which is an emphasis of a classical education, provides a framework around which everything else you learn can be hung. Whether it’s dates or mathematical facts (and this from someone who HATED memorizing math facts), there are certain tools that are important to build a body of knowledge upon.
Also, many schools now completely neglect all language arts, and classical programs usually offer a very good program for those. History is often dreadfully dull and incoherent as presented in schools, and most classical plans make it important, relevent, coherent, and at least fairly interesting. Primary sources are important, but they are not the be-all and end-all of math or science or history studies for very important reasons.
For a subject-by-subject critique of TWTM from my point of view, since it’s the most popular book on classical education, click here.
– Sophia