When I was a younger reader, I avoided stories about boys. A friend of mine sought them out because the boys had all the best adventures and the girls were always learning how to be 'good'; I kept reading stories about girls in search of the ones who were 'bad'
The summer that I was eleven, my grandmother went to Ireland; she brought me back a sweater, which was real wool and, therefore, very picky, and two books of Irish fairy tales. That sweater should have been perfect for me, because I was a picky granddaughter, who believed that I
Can you even imagine a more perfect cover for a book to bear for an event such as this? From the outside, it appears the quintessential Irish collection. The title, too, conjures up images of lush landscapes, farms bound by stone fences, above which a leprechaun or pixie might peer
After I finished reading the fourteenth story in All Aunt Hagar's Children, I thought how about steadily impressed I'd been with the crafting of these stories. Each of them seemed to possess that kind of "I could tell you stories all day" attitude, like the stories were just a collection of
It's been a long time since a book inspired me to create a Spelling It Out.* Generally speaking, it coincides with an author's shifting onto my MRE lists (Must Read Everything). Consider it official: Z.Z. Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere makes her a MRE author for me, and now I'll
