Books Received
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Books Received
Book Smart: How to Develop and Support Successful and Motivated Readers. By Anne E. Cunningham and Jamie Zibulsky. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Intended primarily for parents of young children, this accessible volume provides helpful advice on how to foster a love of reading. Both authors have strengths in developmental psychology, and they draw on their knowledge of child psychology when explaining how parents can help their children become independent readers.
Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health and Victorian Culture. By Katharina Boehm. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Katharina Boehm delves into Dickens’s interest in the medical practices of his day, showing how this interest is reflected in his portrayal of childhood illness in such works as Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, and Our Mutual Friend.
Chinese Literature and the Child: Children and Childhood in Late-Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. By Kate Foster. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
In this scholarly work, Kate Foster shows how shifts in Chinese society during the 1980s and ‘90s resulted in changes in the portrayal of children in Chinese literature. She explains, for example, how the one-child policy altered family dynamics, and that these evolving family dynamics can be seen in the ways in which parents and children interact in Chinese fiction.
Isabel Allende: A Literary Companion. By Mary Ellen Snodgrass. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.
This reference work covers the totality of Allende’s canon. For specialists in children’s and young adult literature, the entries that relate to her young adult novels will be of particular interest. These novels include City of the Beasts (2002), Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (2004), and Forest of the Pygmies (2005).
The Street Children of Dickens’s London. By Helen Amy. Stroud, UK: Amberley Publishing, 2012.
Helen Amy is a historian, and in this book she provides a readable account [End Page 293] of the history of London’s street children between 1837 and 1901. She does make references to their appearance in Dickens’s novels, but her main emphasis is on the history of London’s impoverished and often homeless children during the Victorian period. [End Page 294]
