Click Melissa Nucera's beautiful image for the Once Upon a Time Challenge Site For the past several Saturdays I have been writing about kidlit and the YA novels that Lizzie Skurnick's Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading inspired me to re-read. (I love re-reading, but
Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear Bantam Books, 1980 I had started high school when I read Jean Auel's first novel in the Earth's Children series, but I don't know if it was the 9th grade or the 13th. It was my grandmother's copy -- she bought a
Sandra Scoppettone's Happy Endings Are All Alike (1978) Deborah Hautzig's Hey Dollface (1978) Madeleine L'Engle's Meet the Austins (1960) Sara Ryan's Empress of the World (2001) Just as I found that many of my favourite early reads about family and relationships featured bookish heroines, so did the next phase of
Mary Stewart's The Little Broomstick (1971) Julie Andrews Edwards' The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (1974) Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (1962) If I'd looked back to my childhood reading, I would have described myself as being much more comfortable with witches and dragons, enchantments and whangdoodles, than
Arguably the best novel of the trilogy, for having been nominated for Orange Prize in 1996 and having won the Booker that year, there was no question in my mind as to whether I would read on following Regeneration and The Eye in the Door. Despite my habit of resisting war
