Howling Frog Books

 Doing well so far!  I'm deep into a more serious book, but in the meantime I enjoyed TWO children's books from the UK that probably qualify as minor classics and which I quite enjoyed. Knock Three Times! by Marion St. John Webb: this 1917 fantasy tale reminded me of E. Nesbit in its Edwardian tone with humorous asides, but it was weirder.  Nine-year-old twins Molly and Jack receive birthday presents from an aunt, and while Jack gets the paint box he'd hoped for, Molly gets a very disappointing pincushion shaped like a grey pumpkin.  But!  That night, Molly sees the pumpkin grow and roll away out of the house.  She and Jack follow it through a tree portal into the Possible World -- a pleasantly bucolic and magical land, where the inhabitants are horrified to hear that the Grey Pumpkin is back.  That Pumpkin contains an evil wizard who once menaced the kingdom, and who was imprisoned in a regular pumpkin (it turned grey from his wicked soul) and dispos...

 The Giant Under the Snow, by John Gordon I heard of this one somewhere and was intrigued, and I had to buy it on Kindle.  I'm not sure it was ever published in the US?  If so, it was decades ago; this story was published in 1968. Jonquil (Jonk), her boyfriend Bill, and his best friend Arf (Arthur) are nice, slightly disaffected teens of the late 60s.  On a school field trip to the countryside, Jonk wanders off and finds herself on a barrow that is surprisingly hand-shaped.  Then she's chased by a terrifying dog and takes shelter at the home of Elizabeth, a somewhat mysterious woman.  Soon the three find a Celtic buckle that turns out to be the deciding factor in a resurgent war between two powers, and between the winter solstice and Christmas, they have to try to help Elizabeth and foil an ancient evil. This is a really interesting and unusual story, much in the vein of Alan Garner or perhaps Susan Cooper (but a little bit older).  It's legitimately s...

 I've had these sitting on the desk for a while, and I'm just going to take them all off at once.  These were all books on my TBR shelf that I finally got around to reading! The Stones Are Hatching , by Geraldine McCaughrean :  It's 1919, and Phelim and his sister live deep in the countryside.  Phelim is on his own when all the old folktales rise up at once and hit him -- the domovoy and the glashans take over the house, call him Jack o'Green, and tell him to hurry up and save them all from the Stoor Worm, as the Black Dog attacks from outside.  Phelim is to travel cross-country and gather up his allies: the Maiden, the Fool, and the Hobby-Horse -- but the trouble is, he's never been told any of the stories.  He hasn't a clue how to navigate a world gone back to every superstition come alive, and he can't understand why everyone thinks it's his job to defeat the Stoor Worm.  It's a well-told tale of discovering the world and himself. The Thorn Ogres ...

 I have quite a pile of random children's books on my TBR shelf, and I've been going through them, so here are three at once! The Children of Noisy Village, by Astrid Lindgren : This qualifies as a minor classic, not as popular as the Pippi Longstocking stories, but a lovely book describing a Swedish country childhood in about the 1950s.  Lisa lives in the middle farmhouse of three, and since there are six lively children in those three farmhouses, it's known as Noisy Village.  Lisa and her two brothers, the two sisters on one side, and a boy (plus infant sister) on the other -- they all get up to mischief and fun every day.  Lindgren takes her children through most of a year, describing summer, Christmas, birthdays, and spring.  This would be a great read-aloud for a child 5 and up. Nicobobinus, by Terry Jones : It was the Terry Jones on the spine that caught my eye.  What kind of children's book would he write? It would be guaranteed to be silly and all o...

Hello to 2025!  Guess what, I've been reading up a storm!  It's been lovely!  Impossible Creatures, by Katherine Runnell I heard this middle-grade story, from the UK, described as comparable to Diana Wynne Jones, so I tracked down a copy to see.  While, naturally, it cannot compare in my mind, I do have to say that this is an excellent, primo-grade fantasy story, with as imaginative and intense an ending as anyone could hope for.  Highly recommended! Christopher, whom all critters love, is reluctantly headed to Scotland to stay with his grandfather for a while, as his dad has to travel for work.  But he finds that his grandfather is another animal-attractor, and it's because they're hereditary guardians of a portal... Mal loves to fly in her flying coat, which was given to her (along with her name) at birth by a seer.  Flying makes her easy to spot, and a murderer is after her.... The two meet as Mal escapes through the portal, begs for Christopher's h...

 ...and wow, there are a lot of them!  Since Witch Week, I've been indulging in reading the entirety of the Wolves Chronicles, for a total of 12 (13?) titles (nine for this post).  I tried to read them pretty much chronologically, that is, in some sort of publishing order.  I didn't totally succeed and almost missed one (Midwinter Nightingale ) so that happened nearly at the end.  Aiken sometimes went back and slotted a story into a previous storyline, so for example, Dido eventually has two adventures on her way back from Nantucket to England, but those were written later. I've been highly entertained by how Aiken gets more and more fanciful the further she goes.  By the end, England is divided into several small countries(?), Jamie Three's father was named Angus the Silent, and genealogy goes absolutely wild, as does world geography.  I would love to see a map! The Stolen Lake :  Dido takes a detour to Hy Brasil, where Queen Guinevere has been w...

It's Witch Week!  And this year we are reading Joan Aiken, one of the true greats of 20th century children's literature (not to mention some very fun other things).  One of my favorite go-to presents for children is Aiken's Arabel and Mortimer books, which are so funny and worth reading many times over.   But for this Witch Week I decided to revisit the alternate-history world of the Wolves Chronicles, which are set at the beginning of the 1800s under the reign of James III (often called Jamie Three).  In this world, not only are wolves the scourge of England in winter, but the industrial revolution is well under way, and the Hanoverians are forever plotting to overthrow King James and set the German Bonnie Prince George upon the throne. Aiken builds an amazing, adventurous, eccentric, and very dangerous world for her characters. Aiken is incredibly imaginative and inventive, so you never know what will happen next, and the language is wonderful.  Dido is the...

 The Loneliest Place, by Lora Senf It's the new conclusion to the Blight Harbor trilogy, and the Clackity is BACK!  I enjoyed this just as much  the other two, and they're perfect spooky fall reading.  Go get your copy from the library today! Evie has been back from the Nighthouse for a few weeks now, and summer is almost over, but she still has one more thing to do.  Now that Evie knows that her parents are a) alive and b) trapped on the Dark Sun Side, she can't think about anything but rescuing them.  In true protagonist fashion, she doesn't want to endanger anyone else, so she leaves a note.  Evie thinks she's prepared, but the Clackity is a lot angrier this time around. In order to find her parents, Evie must run the gauntlet of the storybook her mother wrote for her, in which a little girl who loves herself some alone time looks for the loneliest place in the world.  The Clackity has set up a challenge for each page, and its goal is to first ...

 The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, by Robert Louis Stevenson  It's Spin Day!  Did you read your book? The Black Arrow was fun.  It's set -- as the subtitle says -- during the Wars of the Roses, a chaotic and confusing time when two branches of the English nobility fought over which would control the throne.  Everybody else fought on one side or the other, and quite a few switched sides on the regular, according to who looked like winning.  This lasted decades, in patches, and was essentially a series of civil wars that took up much of the 1400s.  It ended with the death of Richard III in 1485 and the accession of Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian who married Elizabeth of York to unite the two branches.  But in this story, Richard III is a young man.  Strictly speaking he isn't even the Duke of Gloucester yet, but RLS makes him duke a little prematurely to avoid confusion. Richard Shelton, called Dick, is a teenage orphan in the care of Sir...

 The Clackity, by Lora Senf The Nighthouse Keeper I was recommended this title by Leila at Bookshelves of Doom , who is on Substack now.  I'm so glad I read it, and I can't wait to get my hands on The Loneliest Place , the final book in the Blight Harbor trilogy, which comes out soon. Blight Harbor is the seventh-most-haunted town in America, so Evie has become familiar with the supernatural since she moved to town a few years ago to live with her Aunt Des.  But she's never been allowed to explore the old abattoir on the other side of town; that place is haunted in a very bad way.  Des, however, has a job to do there, and Evie witnesses her disappearance.  To get Des back, Evie has to make a deal with the Clackity, the monster that inhabits the place, and go through to the other side of reality on a quest. Under a dark sun, Evie has just hours to find her way through seven houses and rescue her aunt from the even worse monster pursuing her.  She has a few t...

  The Witch Family, by Eleanor Estes, ill. by Edward Ardizzon e I picked up this titles from the discard table, largely because of the Ardizzone illustrations.  I like to collect Ardizzone and will grab whatever I can (same for Trina Schart Hyman).  And soon I happily grabbed a matching book, The Alley , so I'll read that soon too!  I like Estes just fine, but usually you only see The Hundred Dresses.  I'd never heard of The Witch Family. This is an utterly charming story!  If you have a witch-loving little girl in your vicinity, get this story for her right away.  Amy and her best friend Clarissa love to sit together and draw pictures, and Amy has decreed that Old Witch must be banished.  She has been too wicked, and she must be banished to the Glass Hill, there to live all alone.  If she behaves herself, Amy will let her out for Halloween.  But Amy doesn't wish to be too tough on Old Witch, so she lets Little Witch Girl and Weeny Witch...

 Hey everybody!  I disappeared for a while there, and I'm not quite sure what I am going to do, but I'll tell you about it.  My reading mojo disappeared; I mean, it took a long vacation and I wondered if it was coming back.  I think it had mostly to do with my husband's layoff back in January; worry took up most of my brainspace and there was not much left over.  I could read the fluffiest mysteries, and Diana Wynne Jones.  I read something like eight of Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels, would you believe -- I liked those when I was around 13.  But I couldn't seem to keep up with blogging, or anyone else's blogs, or read anything new or in the least challenging.  I saw the CC Spin and I just couldn't do it!  Instead I embroidered things and played too much on my phone. A couple of weeks ago, my husband got a nice contracting gig, and I instantly felt much better.  Pretty soon my reading came back, and with renewed energy -- I read two Shakes...

 Well, I've spent most of this month doing things besides reading.  I guess you could call it a reading slump.  But I did read Ozma of Oz, which was a familiar book of my childhood! In this installment, we go back to Dorothy, who is accompanying her Uncle Henry on a voyage to Australia for his health -- an amusingly transparent method of getting Dorothy on a ship, since there is no way a Kansas farm family would send anybody to Australia when they could just go to Florida or someplace.  Nevertheless, to Australia they go, and Dorothy is swept overboard in a storm.  Luckily she manages to cling to a chicken coop, and pretty soon she and the chicken come to shore.  The hen starts talking, so we know that we're somewhere near Oz! Dorothy and Billina discover that they're in Ev, a land next to the desert that surrounds Oz, and they find the mechanical man Tik-Tok and wind him up, so he joins the team. The queen and all her children have been captured by the Nom...

  The Marvelous Land of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill Dorothy has gone home, but the land of Oz continues!  Baum was inundated with letters begging for more, so he wrote a sequel, in which he introduces a whole slew of new characters.  I remember this story very well; I must have read it many times as a kid.  It was fun to get an adult perspective on the story. We start off with old Mombi, a would-be wicked witch whose ambition is held down by the local Good Witch.  (Mombi lives in the land of the Gillikins, which is all purple.)  She has a boy, Tip, who she uses as a slave, and when she's gone on a trip, he makes a jack o'lantern, gives him a body of sticks, and sets his pumpkin man up to scare Mombi on her way back.  She turns the tables on him by using her new Powder of Life to bring Jack to life, and then imprisons them both.  Tip and Jack escape and figure they might as well head to the city of Oz, and on the way Tip bri...

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum   It's such a long time since I read this story, but I remember all the illustrations so well!  I must have read it many times as a kid. I think we all know the story, so I won't repeat it, except to point out that there is about three times as much material in the book as there is in the movie.  I'm not a huge fan of the movie -- I didn't grow up on it like so many people did -- so I won't say a lot about it either.  But Baum puts in a whole lot of hazards and side-trips that couldn't fit in the film version! L. Frank Baum was wanting to write an imaginative, fairy-tale type of story for the new America.  Forget all those princes and princesses, and especially all the violence, death, and heavy-duty moralizing of 19th-century children's literature!  This was going to be a fun, quirky story for a vigorous, expanding America, and it was going to star some familiar sights for an American child, like scarecrows, fa...

 Lory over at the Enchanted Castle has had a fun idea: reading all 14 Oz books from December 2023 - January 2025 .  If you can't take that much Oz, the first six are the main titles and you can just read those. I remember reading many of the Oz books when I was a kid, including several of the later titles.  But I haven't read them at all since then (except of course the first one, which I aloud to my kids).  So it would be quite interesting to do an adult readalong and see how they hold up and what I missed before.  I had no idea that Baum was making fun of General Jinjer, for example; I thought she was great. So I'm going to do it and read at least the first six books.  We'll see how it goes! First up!

First off, happy Halloween!  Happy Witch Week!!  I hope everything is suitably spooky in your neighborhood. Wow, I feel like I've done quite a bit of reading lately....but what I have not done is finish anything much.  I think I am 30 - 50% through ten or so books!  There are books all over my coffee table; it's a disaster. How Democracies Die, by Levitsky and Ziblatt  I Served the Kind of England, by Bohumil Hrabal The Cancelling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott Overreach, by Owen Matthews (oh my gosh so heavy-duty) The Lost 116 Pages, by Don Bradley A Land, by Janetta Hawkes Sexy but Psycho, by Dr Jessica Taylor  (fascinating and I think goes a bit too far) London Diary, by James Boswell  (why yes he has picked up an STD, again) Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter, by Katharine Coldiron  (I love this book) So, I'm in kind of a ridiculous place right now.  But here are the three books I'...

 Here are some titles from my official TBR list that I just haven't written about yet!  Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia : I saved this one for October, for an official RIP read.  And wow, this is a spooky story!  It's the 1950s, and Noem í is a debutante out for a good time in Mexico City.  Her father sends her down to the countryside to check on her cousin Catalina, who married last year in a romantic whirl.  Noem í arrives at a classic Gothic scene: a mouldering family mansion on a misty mountain, and....this is a strange place.  The silver mine that gave the Doyle family their wealth has been closed down for years, the house is festooned with mold, and everyone is very strange.  Catalina seems to be ill.  Her husband Virgil is creepy, but not as creepy as his elderly father is.  Just one family member, Francis, seems friendly, if shy and something of a weak character.  As Noemi unravels the dark family history and the se...