In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Books Received
  • Mark I. West

Beyond the Bedtime Story: Promoting Reading Development During the Middle School Years. By Nicholas D. Young and Christine N. Michael. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2015.

Intended for parents and teachers of middle school students, this book provides practical suggestions on how to foster a love of reading in early adolescents. The authors draw on research in the fields of literacy education and adolescent psychology.

Neil Gaiman in the 21st Century: Essays on the Novels, Children’s Stories, Online Writings, Comics and Other Works. Edited by Tara Prescott. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015.

Although Neil Gaiman’s writings for children are not this volume’s exclusive focus, several of its contributors do discuss them. Examples include Jennifer McStotts’s essay on Gaiman’s Newbery winner The Graveyard Book and Renata Lucena Dalmaso’s on his picture books The Wolves in the Walls and Blueberry Girl.

The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales. By Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. Edited by Erika Eichenseer. Translated and with an introduction by Maria Tatar. Illustrated by Engelbert Süss. New York: Penguin Classics, 2015.

Like the Brothers Grimm, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth wrote down German folktales during the mid-nineteenth century. Most of these tales, however, went unpublished, and in 2009 they were discovered stored away in a municipal building in the Bavarian Alps. This new collection brings seventy-four of these tales into print.

What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City. By Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.

The authors of this study analyzed the circulation records of the public library in Muncie, Indiana, from the early years of the twentieth century, and the result is a snapshot of mid-American reading habits and tastes. [End Page 93] Of particular interest to children’s literature specialists is the section on children’s borrowing patterns, which includes a chart listing the most frequently borrowed children’s books. The top three books on this list are Louisa May Alcott’s Under the Lilacs, Horatio Alger’s The Young Adventurer, and Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore. [End Page 94]

...

pdf

Share