by Melanie Heuiser HillI have written before about the need for longer picture books in addition to the shorter ones making up the current trend in picture book publishing. I want to stay on the record as saying there’s plenty of reason to keep publishing picture books that are longer than 300 – 500 words. I’m an advocate for 3000 – 5000 words — a story with details!… more
byMelanie Heuiser HillMy daughter and I are finishing what we call “The Betsy Books” — the wonderful series of books by Maud Hart Lovelace that follows Betsy Ray and her friends as they grow up in Deep Valley, Minnesota.
When I first read the Betsy Series, I started with Betsy and the Great World and Betsy’s Wedding and did not discover the earlier books until we moved to Minnesota, where they were all gathered together on a shelf in the library.… more
by Melanie Heuiser Hill
Our household has been patiently (and not so patiently) stuck in a long season of waiting for decisions around some important and exciting opportunities. Everyone has something up in the air. Applications, interviews, tests, hopes, and dreams are all out there, and now we watch for the mail, check messages compulsively, and try to make friends with the suspense….… more
by Melanie Heuiser HillMy twelve-year-old daughter is inhaling books these days — a stack at a time out of the library, every bookshelf in the house pillaged, major insider trading at school, etc. There’s no way I can keep up, but when I move a book from here to there I often flip through or ask her opinion.… more
by Melanie Heuser Hill
My dealer (in books, my drug of choice) and I have a special relationship. I send her emails of books I’d like to have as I have a need, and she gets them for me. I know that doesn’t sounds all that special, but because she keeps a running tab for me and because I’m usually not in a hurry, I sometimes forget what I’ve ordered by the time we meet on the street corner for the hand-off.… more
by Melanie Heuiser Hill
This week, I am reading (for the umpteenth time) what I think of as The Very Most Favorite Book of the children in my church. They call it That Book About Bread. The book is In God’s Hands by Lawrence Kushner and Gary Schmidt and it resonates deeply with these kids.
I know how it will go.… more
by Melanie Heuiser Hill
I recently read about a series of get-to-know-you games to play with kids. One suggested making a list of hard and fast rules that everyone could agree to — a series of sensible prohibitions, perhaps — and then taking turns thinking of the exceptions to those rules.
RULE: No running in the hallways. EXCEPTION: Run if the building is on fire.… more
by Melanie Heuiser Hill
In a meta-move (we’re not usually so cool), our mother-daughter book club has started the Mother-Daughter Book Club series by Heather Vogel Frederick. We read the first book last month and the second is scheduled for our next meeting. I’m not sure we’ll be able to stop there. It was good we held them until the girls were the age of the girls in Frederick’s first books — the timing is perfect now.… more
by Melanie Heuiser Hill
Our first-born turned eighteen this week. This prompted many trips down memory lane about his childhood, as he is now an “adult.” I was rather tickled to realize that so many of our family memories have to do with books — all the cool books we’ve read, the cool places we read them in, and the times we’ve read when the other parenting protocols didn’t quite seem to fit.… more