Romancing Little Women

I usually am able to find something that I like about just about every Little Women retelling that I've read. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case when it comes to Little Women retellings that take the story and situate it as part of the romance genre. This is not to say that I … Continue reading Romancing Little Women

So Many Little Women, So Many Beginnings

I'm back with another installment of "Macy reads every Little Women adaptation or related commodity that she can find." In case you've missed previous installments I've written about Little Witches, a few modern day Little Women graphic novels, Jo & Laurie, and my last trip to Orchard House in January of 2020. That probably makes … Continue reading So Many Little Women, So Many Beginnings

What even is Diary of a Wimpy Kid?

The best school assignments (in my opinion) also make for great blog posts. For my Science Fiction and Fantasy course, we were tasked to choose a book and argue why it was either fantasy or science fiction. While I could have made things easy for myself and picked a book on our syllabus, I decided … Continue reading What even is Diary of a Wimpy Kid?

Contextualizing the Classics: The Borrowers and Front Desk

Bookishly Bright started as Contextualizing the Classics in fall 2017 as a final project for a course at Kansas State University on Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie. The first posts on this blog paired a classic with a contemporary text in order to explore the connections that existed between them and to bridge the gap … Continue reading Contextualizing the Classics: The Borrowers and Front Desk

Katherine Paterson and Sundee T. Frazier

I’m the middle child in a series of three sisters, and while I don’t know what it’s like to be a twin, I can certainly relate to the sibling relationships that Katherine Paterson and Sundee T. Frazier have depicted in their middle grade books. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out who you are when you feel like you’ve been defined by your siblings for so long. Paterson won the Newberry Award in 1981 with Jacob Have I Loved, and Frazier’s 2010 novel, The Other Half of My Heart, offers diversity to the familiar tale of two sisters. Below is background information, contextual information, reading strategies, discussion questions, activities, and resources to be used for a unit on these two novels. I hope students and teachers alike can find fruitful conversation (and maybe even themselves) in these novels.