Books

Up until this point, the Freddy books have been — what is the word I’m looking for? — fluffy. Oh, certainly, author Walter Brooks had not hesitated to satirize various features of American culture: political speeches, courtroom trials, and capita...

Well, this did surprise Dr. Murdock, for he had never found a rooster in any of his patients before.Few doctors indeed have the privilege of finding roosters in their patients. But this, of course, is Freddy and the Clockwork Twin, a Freddy the Pig boo...

Temporarily at a loss for more adventures that could feature a talking pig on an upstate New York farm, for his next novel, author Walter Brooks turned to a different sort of story — the tale of traveling circus animals, where Freddy the Pig only mak...

All is, I’m sorry to say, not quite right on the Bean Farm, that home of the loveable animals Freddy the Pig, Jinx the Cat, Charles and Henrietta the chickens, and some rather less loveable rats. (Rats.) A toy train has disappeared. Grain is vanishin...

As it turns out, the problem with spending a delightful winter in Florida and finding a sack of gold in the bargain is that you get terribly bored afterwards. At least, you do if you are a clever pig, a cat, a good tempered cow, a rather less good temp...

Psst. The goblins are calling.And they’re offering fruit. Well, poems—but that’s fruit for the soul, right?Since 2006, Goblin Fruit, edited by Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Wick, has been offering a delectable selection of fantasy and folklore poems...

During and shortly after the great Oz reread, a call came up from the comments asking me to do a Freddy the Pig reread.I must admit: my response was Freddy the what?As I have hinted here and there and on this blog, I spent a significant amount of my ch...

So a few days ago The Atlantic printed their list of the Greatest Girl Characters of Young Adult Literature. And, well, apart from the factual errors here and there on the list, as you might be guessing, I have one or two problems with the list. And th...

In 2008, after the death of Madeleine L’Engle, her granddaughters agreed to publish The Joys of Love, an early novel that had been rejected by several publishers. For whatever reason, L’Engle never made use of her status as a published author to pr...

A Winter’s Love, a serious study of marriage, love and family, is one of Madeleine L’Engle’s early adult novels, published in 1957 before she began writing any of the young adult novels that would make her famous. A commentator on an earlier post...

In 1994, Madeleine L’Engle turned to Vicky Austin again to write the last book in her Austin series, Troubling a Star. The last in the Austin series, it is an odd coda, featuring a Vicky somehow younger and more naïve than in her last appearance, in...

An Acceptable Time joins two of L’Engle’s young adult series together, as Polly O’Keefe from the O’Keefe novels travels to Connecticut and the house where Meg, Calvin, Charles Wallace, Sandy and Dennys began their adventures through time and sp...