Books Received
Buy Issue for $20 at JHUPThe Canadian publisher Broadview Press publishes a series of scholarly editions of classic literary works under its Broadview Editions imprint, to which this volume belongs. In addition to reprinting the original American edition of Tom Sawyer, Lucy Rollin provides a scholarly introduction in which she covers Twain's life and includes background information about the writing and publication of Tom Sawyer. She also provides four appendices full of primary sources related to Twain's classic.
The second volume in a series titled The Author and You, this autobiographical work is intended for children. However, the book includes lots of information that would be of interest to children's literature scholars, including a detailed account of the author's childhood in Cuba, her schooling in Europe, and her immigration to the United States.
This standard reference work includes entries on 25,347 children's books that are currently in print and that have received positive reviews from major reviewing periodicals, such as Booklist and Horn Book. Of these entries there are approximately 5,000 that did not appear in the 7th edition of Best Books for Children, which was published in 2002.
Judy Bradbury argues that children should continue to be read to even after they become independent readers. She then goes on to provide detailed read-aloud plans for twenty-five books that appeal to children in the third and fourth grades.
Part of Libraries Unlimited's World Folklore Series, this collection consists of fifty traditional English tales, along with background information, color photographs, a glossary, and a collection of traditional riddles.
The past ten years have seen the publication of several encyclopedias that focus on children's literature, but The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature stands out among them. As Jack Zipes, the editor-in-chief, states in the introduction, this "is the first comprehensive reference work in English to provide detailed information about all aspects of children's literature from the medieval period to the 21st century on an international scale" (xxix). This four-volume work includes more than 3,200 entries as well as a bibliography of secondary works, listings of the winners of the major awards for children's books, and information about special library collections related to children's literature.
This practical book provides specific information on how to organize family-oriented book clubs. The author also suggests titles that lend themselves to this type of library programming, and for each title she lists a series of questions designed to spark group discussion.
Like the other volumes in the Norton Critical Edition series, this book includes the authoritative text as well as a wide variety of critical interpretations of the text. In this case, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina assembles a series of letters that Burnett wrote that have a bearing on The Secret Garden, fourteen book reviews that came out shortly after the 1911 publication of the book, and nine essays written by literary critics, including Gillian Adams, Phyllis Bixler, Anne Lundin, Margaret Mackey, and Christine Wilkie.
