By Taylor Jasmine | On April 16, 2015 | Updated May 21, 2024 | Comments (0)
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin, published in 1903, is a classic American tale of an orphan girl coming into her own and finding her way in a world that’s indifferent to her plight.
Rebecca Rowena Randall comes to live with her two aunts in the fictional village of Riverboro, Maine. Rebecca’s spirit tries the patience of the more stern of her aunts but ultimately uplifts and inspires them. She faces many challenges, but along the way, learns from all of them on the road to young adulthood.
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was a great success from the start. It was adapted for the the theater starting in 1910, and was filmed several times. The best-known film adaptation starred Shirley Temple (1938), with a plot rather freely altered from that of the book.
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By Nava Atlas | On April 13, 2015 | Updated September 20, 2025 | Comments (2)
Madeleine L’Engle (1918 – 2007) was a prolific writer of fantasy and science fiction for young adults and children of all ages. A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels are perhaps her best-known works.
It may come as a surprise to those who cherish this series that she had quite a hard time finding a publisher for it. “A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published,” L’Engle later reflected. “You can’t name a major publisher who didn’t reject it. When we’d run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up.” Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On April 5, 2015 | Updated September 24, 2022 | Comments (0)
From the original review of The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley in the Bridgeport Post Sun, April 1959: A collection of short stories is relatively unusual as a literary debut, but in the case of Grace Paley the choice was by and large justified.
Virtually all of these ten stories center around love and they are written in a style that is an odd mixture of matter of factness, subdued sentimentality, and hyperbole.
Love, the author seems to suggest most of the time, is really a pretty funny business, and the best way to approach it is to appear hardboiled, while hiding a smile up one’s emotional sleeve. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On March 30, 2015 | Updated May 22, 2023 | Comments (2)
The Age of Innocence, a 1920 novel by Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937), is considered one of her finest. It earned her a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921, which made her the first woman to win this award.
The story centers on Newland Archer, an upper-class New Yorker in the 1870s. Central to the narrative is Archer’s conflicted desires between duty to his staid but loving wife and his passion for scandal-plagued Countess Ellen Olenska, a divorcée.
Edith Wharton grew up and lived in a similarly charmed world of wealth, one that could protect its inhabitants from everything but heartache. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On March 27, 2015 | Updated September 23, 2022 | Comments (0)
From the review of Crucial Conversations by May Sarton in The Carroll Daily Times Herald, May, 1975: This reviewer found this an utterly satisfying novel because it has lovely language and many messages that tickle the intellect or warm the heart.
May Sarton is a poet of note, also a novelist; she has lived a long time, been a perceptive observer and is a wise woman.
The story is a far cry from blood and thunder and bizarre sexual encounters. Its format is a series of conversations between sensitive people about marriage and divorce and finding oneself. Read More→
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