Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls is a small book with a temperament too large for its pages: concise in language, volcanic in feeling. At its barest level it is the narrative of Conor O’Malley, a boy living in the daily suspense of his mother’s terminal illness, who is visited one night by a monstrous yew … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mortimer by Robert Munsch
Mortimer reads at first like a comic domestic sketch: it’s bedtime, Mortimer refuses, Mortimer makes a racket, and every adult who enters the scene fails to quiet him. But beneath that simple spine of plot sits the set of a small stage where Munsch — working in his characteristic oral-storytelling register — orchestrates an escalating … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mortimer by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mud Puddle by Robert Munsch
Robert Munsch’s Mud Puddle reads like a tiny masterpiece of oral storytelling compressed into thirty-two pages: brisk, comic, cumulative, and animated by a single, delightfully absurd conceit — a mud puddle that repeatedly “jumps on” a child and gets her “completely all over muddy.” The story began as a tale told in a nursery school … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mud Puddle by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Thomas’ Snowsuit by Robert Munsch
Thomas' Snowsuit by Robert Munsch turns a domestic, wintertime battle into an energetic miniature drama: a small boy resists the ritual of being bundled for cold weather, and the adult attempt at care escalates into a comic standoff. The narrative depends on repetition, mounting absurdity, and a tight point of view that keeps the reader … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Thomas’ Snowsuit by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch
At first glance The Paper Bag Princess is the kind of picture book one might read in five minutes and, in good conscience, tuck back on a shelf. Read closely, however, it behaves more like a miniature manifesto: a tight, witty demolition of fairy-tale expectations that nevertheless leaves room to teach — not by sermonizing, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner (1928) stands as one of the most quietly profound works in children’s literature—a book that, under the gentle veil of whimsy, reflects deeply on friendship, identity, and the fleeting nature of childhood. Though often shelved as a companion to Winnie-the-Pooh, it is, in many ways, the more … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
Few works of children’s literature invite as sustained a double-vision as A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh: at once an apparently simple collection of episodic adventures for very young readers and a compact, artful meditation on friendship, play, authority, and the strange temporality of childhood. Published in 1926, the book wears its modesty like a costume—genial, unassuming, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse reads at first like a picture book and ends up feeling like a pocket philosopher’s manual: sparse in language, lavish in feeling, and insistently human. In fifty or so short panels — a handful of words on each page, hand-lettered and paired with loose, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (a seven-book sequence first published 1950–1956) is at once a cornerstone of modern children’s literature and a knot of theological, mythic and cultural tensions. Read as a sustained experiment in imaginative pedagogy, the books deploy fairy-tale economy—clear moral polarities, archetypal figures, and episodic structure—to teach, to delight, and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) sits oddly and brilliantly between children’s tale and moral fable, between ethnographic curiosity and wild lyric. Read simply as a collection of animal stories, it is superb entertainment: taut, vivid, and full of suspense. Read as literature, it becomes a compact study in moral pedagogy, imperial imagination, and narrative voice — … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
The New Renaissance Mindset 