rereading fever

[coraa]

So it's (almost) December, which means there's more than usual stress, which, for me, means rereads. Last December it was a complete Discworld rereaed.

This December, apparently it's middle-grade books from my childhood. Who knew?

It started with Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret. (Harriet is more famous but actually, upon a reread, I think The Long Secret is the better book.) Then I bought all the Anastasia Krupnik books that were available on the Kindle, and chafed that that's less than half. (I may break down and buy physical copies.)

Now it's the discovery that the Ramona books are available on the Kindle. I'm also thinking of rustling up my extremely battered copies of Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher and The Farthest-Away Mountain.

I'm a little embarrassed by this but, to be honest, not much. I think I have become, blissfully, old enough to do kid stuff.

(Someone is going to read this, scratch their head, and ask, "But don't you review YA fantasy all the time?" And oh, yes, I do; most of my favorite books of the past three years have been YA fantasy. But modern YA fantasy is an utterly different beast than the middle-grade books of my own childhood; it's not the same thing at all.)

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

I love Jeremy Thatcher! And Jennifer Murdley, too.

Speaking of Bruce Coville's books, were you a Unicorn Chronicles fan? Because the third book in that series came out last year, and the final book is due out in 2010, and these things make me very happy. :-)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ooh, Jennifer Murdley! I'd forgotten that one. I remember really liking it -- particularly the way it used the fairy tale elements.

I read the first Unicorn Chronicles book, but then lost track of them. I'd like to pick them up again, though.

[janni.livejournal.com]

What's fascinating about the Unicorn Chronicles is how each book is -- a thing an order of magnitude more than the book before: from a slender middle-grade thing, to a not-so-slender middle-grade thing, to a thicker almost-YA thing -- only it's not just about length or genre, but somehow about depth and breadth of story, too.

I adored all of them, and I adored them in I think different ways. There's a progression going on here.

Book 3 (Dark Whispers) was one of my favorites last year. I'm very curious where Book 4 (The Last Hunt) is going to take all the threads from the first three.