Book Reviews

Elizabeth’s Constellation Quilt, written and illustrated by Olivia Fu, is a picture book about a young mouse named Elizabeth who sails across the sea to visit her grandmother. During the voyage, Elizabeth watches the night sky and connects each constellation she sees to a square on the quilt her grandmother gave her. By the time…

The Green Musician, written by Mahvash Shahegh and published by Wisdom Tales in 2015, is a picture book rooted in the storytelling tradition of Persian and Islamic culture. It tells the story of a gifted musician who plays for a king, and through his music transforms the world around him in ways that no one,…

James and the Giant Peach arrived in 1961, a slim children’s novel by the British author Roald Dahl, and it has spent the decades since polarizing school librarians and delighting children in roughly equal measure. It is the story of James Henry Trotter, a boy of about seven who starts life happily near the sea,…

The Secret Garden is a 1911 children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the English-American writer best known for A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy. It was first serialized in The American Magazine between 1910 and 1911 and published in book form in August 1911. More than a century later, it sits comfortably among the…