Beetles, Lightly Toasted

Author

Beverly Cleary

Fiery Ramona Quimby and the well-meaning Henry Huggins may clash, but in this delightful and hilariously told novel by Newbery Medal-winning author Beverly Cleary, an unlikely compromise wins the day.

Henry and his friends are building a no-girls-allowed clubhouse. With a private space...

Author	Mary Norton
ISBN	0152047328

Driven out of their cozy house by the rat catcher, the Borrowers find themselves homeless. Worse, they are lost and alone in a frightening new world: the outdoors. Nearly everything outside -- cows, moths, field mice, cold weather -- is a life-threatening danger for the Borrowers. But as they bravely...

Author	Mary Norton
ISBN	1858815940

Pod, Homily, and Arrietty Clock -- the family of tiny Borrowers -- think they have at last found an ideal home. They've moved into a house in a miniature village built as a hobby by a retired railroad man. The village is the perfect size for the Borrowers, and after the hardships they've faced, the Clocks...

Author

Mary Norton

I think that Mary Norton just lost it by this point. Great borrower hijinks, fun descriptions and imagery, and then a seriously bonkers literary structure. Ghosts are set up quite deliberately and then never actually enter the plot. Why are there the horrifying ghosts of a murder-suicide in the middle...

Author	Gertrude Chandler Warner
ISBN	0807576743

I was going to read Surprise Island, and then comment on it, but every page is such a treasure trove of clichés, naïveté, and ridiculousness, that I think I might have to grace you with a running commentary.

Chapter One: The First Surprise

The book begins with Grandfather lovingly...

Author	Betsy Byars
ISBN	0330299743

When Junior Blossom wakes up in the hospital, his last memory is of crouching on the barn roof with cloth wings tied to his arms, and of Maggie and Vern in the yard below, urging him to fly. That had been just before Junior spotted a police car approaching the farm in a cloud of dust.Meanwhile Pap, the children's...

Author

Gareth Hinds

In a companion volume to his award-winning adaptation of The Odyssey, the incomparable graphic novelist Gareth Hinds masterfully adapts Homer's classic wartime epic.

More than three thousand years ago, two armies faced each other in an epic battle that rewrote history and came to be known...