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A Wrinkle in Time Cover
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Retro Childhood Review: A Wrinkle in Time

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. I have a tendency to be somewhat contrary about my reading choices. If it seems that EVERYONE in the entire world really loves a thing, I take that as a sign that I shouldn’t bother reading it. It’s one of very few rebellions that I engage in and there’s so much in the world to read that I’ve never actively pushed back against this completely misguided tendency. However, it was this spark of defiance that resulted in me never picking up A Wrinkle in Time when I was precisely the age and the type of child that would have really loved and connected with it. But, you see, EVERYONE loved A Wrinkle in Time, even the popular girls who (in my mind) probably never ever read anything else because they were too busy doing their hair. And I was a NERD. I read comic books, played D&D, loved video games, had read the Hobbit when I was 8 and Lord of the Rings when I was 12, so if the popular girls liked the book then there was NO WAY that I would ever demean myself by picking it up. Look, I had issues, OK? However, that means that I am now reading A Wrinkle in Time for the first time and I’m really angry at myself for having stuck my nose up at it when I needed it.
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Retro Childhood Review: Justice and Her Brothers

Justice flicked her eyes this way and that. All else around the parlor appeared ordinary. The light of sun set the room aglow in corners and on walls. It was an eerie effect, but not something she hadn’t seen before. The house was stifling, as it had been for weeks. But there was nothing odd about sunlight, about heat, at this early hour. Yet, since the summer started, she’d got the notion at times that something deadly strange was going on. When I was considering what book to read for Black History Month, I was once again struck with how inadequate my small library of childhood favorites is in representing any perspective that is not white. Thank goodness for Google. I’m upset with the system that existed in my small, very white town. A system that seems to have excluded voices of color and, indeed, made attempts on numerous occasions to explicitly do so. All of this means that I was never introduced to the exceedingly talented Newbery Medalist author, Virginia Hamilton. I suspect this is not JUST because she is a black woman, but because, at least when it comes to Justice and Her Brothers, one could easily mistake her work for “Not Sci-fi.” This is a mistake that needs immediate rectification because nothing could be further from the truth.
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Retro Childhood Review: The Dark is Rising

There was an endless variety of faces — gay, sombre, old, young, paper-white, jet-black, and every shade and gradation of pink and brown between — vaguely recognizable, or totally strange… [Will] thought: these are my people. This is my family, in the same way as my real family. The Old Ones. Every one is linked, for the greatest purpose in the world. I was going to start my review of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence with the first in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone, because it holds a certain place of nostalgia based on its similarity to other much loved childhood fiction like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, both being about a group of absurdly normal siblings doing something important. But as I considered what I wanted to read to finish out 2017, a year full of darkness for so many people, the only book that seemed appropriate was The Dark is Rising. Because what’s more relevant than a book about how one person can fight back the darkness by finding strength in the love and support of family, friends, and a world that is fighting with him? Especially when it’s full of winter holiday cheer.

Peter and the Wolf Coloring Book Cover from 1947
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Retro Childhood Review: Peter and the Wolf

Each character of this tale is represented by a corresponding instrument in the orchestra: the bird by a flute, the duck by an oboe, the cat by a clarinet playing staccato in a low register, the grandfather by a bassoon, the wolf by three horns, Peter by the string quartet, the shooting of the hunters by the kettle drums and bass drum. As I was driving home the other day, my local classical radio station played a recording of the Colorado Symphony’s orchestration of the symphony that made me fall in love with classical music when I was just a tiny little child. Whether I first heard this at my hippie community college preschool program or at home, I have no idea. I do know that my mother, a kindergarten teacher, was a firm believer in music education and we had oodles of children’s books that came with narrated tapes. But the one that has stuck with me after all these years is Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 symphony, Peter and the Wolf (which you can listen to here).
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Retro Childhood Review: A Serendipity Book

So on some Autumn morning Look into the frosty pool. You’ll see in your reflection That you’re a Flutterby too! This is a bit of an odd review, but as I was looking through my bookshelves I happened upon one of the most precious books in my collection, Flutterby, written by Stephen Cosgrove and illustrated by Robin James. It is so worn that I have no idea what color it started out, the pages are torn and marked with scribbles, and the title page is adorned with what must be one of my earliest signatures (and also the name of my best friend in kindergarten). Flutterby is such a delightful story that you can’t help but be charmed by the miniature Pegasus that desperately wants to figure out who she is. I turn to it whenever a child comes to visit, because the message is simple, but powerful, and accompanied by colorful illustrations. But Flutterby is only one such story in the long line of Serendipity Books, a series that began in 1974 when Stephen Cosgrove wanted something beautiful and affordable to read to his 3-year-old daughter.
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Retro Childhood Review: The Egypt Game

But, actually, that was the way with all of the Egypt Game. Nobody ever planned it ahead, at least, not very far. Ideas began and grew and afterwards it was hard to remember just how. That was one of the mysterious and fascinating things about it. Not every single book that I read as a child was a science fiction or fantasy novel, just MOST of them. I have a feeling that the cover of Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Newbery Honor book The Egypt Game must have tricked me into believing it was a fantasy. Surely, with a name like that, it must be a portal fantasy full of mummies, pharaohs, and gods (a childhood fancy that is problematic unto itself). My impression wasn’t entirely incorrect. But it would be more accurate to say that the portal in The Egypt Game is the vivid imaginations of the characters themselves, a magic just as powerful as anything in Narnia.

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