Most holiday-themed children’s books, let’s face it, aren’t very good. Most are conceived and created mainly to be promoted at their respective times of the year, and accordingly aren’t terribly inspired. And Presidents’ Day would seem, if anything, an even worse holiday than usual for kids’ books; the preponderance of those pegged to it that ...
My son’s 3rd grade teacher gifted him I Survived the Bombing of Pearl Harbor as a holiday gift. I was skeptical since he is a picky reader, and then shocked and very pleased when he read it in one day. Not only that, he was full of questions about Pearl Harbor and battleships. The series ...
Graphic novels have gained a great deal of respectability since I was a kid. With the possible exception of Herge’s Tintin books—and those had European cred!—back then, the genre was linked more with its cousin, the comic book, than with other children’s books. And comic books were distinctly not respectable in a literary sense: Even the ...
Sometimes a new children’s book makes me say to myself, Man, I wish this had been out when I was a kid. And since I’ve always been a history fan—I’m the son of an ancient historian, so it seems to run in the family—Patrick Dillon’s The Story of Britain certainly had a head start at the ...
