By Anna Fiore | On October 14, 2021 | Updated August 25, 2022 | Comments (3)
Marguerite Henry (1902–1997) was an American children’s book author who wrote some fifty-nine novels inspired by true stories of horses and other animals. Her most famous novel, Misty of Chincoteague (1947), was the first in a series of six stories centered around a wild palomino pony named Misty.
Set in the island town of Chincoteague, Virginia, the novel stars Misty and her mother (Phantom) along with brother and sister Paul and Maureen Beebe. While the book is a work of fiction, the story is based on real people and ponies of Chincoteague Island.
In 1948, Misty of Chincoteague received the Newbery Honor Award and went on to become a classic children’s horse story, right up there with Black Beauty. The book was a bestseller, reprinted numerous times, and is still in print.
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By Nava Atlas | On October 8, 2021 | Updated June 19, 2026 | Comments (4)
All This, and Heaven Too is the evocative title of Rachel Field’s 1938 historical novel, based on the life of her great-aunt Henriette Deluzy Desportes.
Though she passed away prematurely, Field manage to produce a prodigious array of works in several genres, including children’s books (notably the award-winning Hitty: Her First Hundred Years), poetry, plays, and novels.
If the title seems familiar, it may be in part thanks to the widely praised 1940 film of the same name starring Bette Davis in the role of the novel’s heroine. Read More→
By Anna Fiore | On September 26, 2021 | Updated September 30, 2022 | Comments (0)
Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) is recognized as one of the most groundbreaking modernist authors of the twentieth century. She is perhaps most widely known for iconic novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and her semi-autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse (1927).
To the Lighthouse was Woolf’s fifth novel, and has remained one of her most highly regarded works.
Inspired by recollections of her childhood summers spent on the Cornwall coast, To the Lighthouse depicts the fictional Ramsey family and their assorted house guests spending a vacation in the Hebrides, on the island of Skye. Read More→
By Marcie McCauley | On August 22, 2021 | Updated February 7, 2026 | Comments (0)
The summer I was twelve, I pulled a well-read and worn book from the shelves of the public library and discovered a story that seemed to be told directly to me.
Behind the deceptively dull cover of Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster (1912) were letters and drawings that pulled me hard and fast into Judy Abbott’s life—an orphan at boarding school.
So many of my favorite things were combined in this book: orphans and lonely childhoods, girls succeeding against the odds with their studious natures, boarding school and class events, and perhaps most of all, the burgeoning writer’s sensibility that I also enjoyed in Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964).
I borrowed and devoured Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs that very afternoon; I’ve revisited it many times. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On August 15, 2021 | Updated June 19, 2026 | Comments (0)
Time Out of Mind by Rachel Field (1894 – 1942) was this American author’s first novel for adults, published in 1935. The following year, it won the National Book Award.
Field had been writing prose and poetry for children and young adults, as well as plays, since 1924. Her major breakthrough, up until Time Out of Mind was released, was the children’s book Hitty: Her First Hundred Years (1929), which won the Newbery Medal.
The story in Time Out of Mind is narrated in the first person by Kate Fernald. Kate, described as a hardy, “square-rigged” girl, comes to the Maine coast home of the Fortune family at the age of ten. She accompanies her mother, who serves as the housekeeper, and grows up with brother and sister Nat and Clarissa Fortune, forging a bond that would last a lifetime. The book begins: Read More→
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