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A Peek At Adrastea, Enthralling, Tolkien-Inspired Fantasy By Anastasia Vincent

For Greater Glory: Books About The Cristero Martyrs in Mexico

Grand Opening: Books For Catholic Kids

The Story of a Book

Erich Kaestner, Germany's Most Beloved Children's Author

Erich Kaestner wrote wonderfully funny and witty, heartwarming stories about kids who find themselves confronted with adult sized problems and solve them with courage and dignity. Kaestner was a man who had not forgotten what it is like to be a child and who took children seriously. Have you ever read C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Children? Kaestner writes in a similar voice, unpatronizing and honest, speaking to children as equals. Most of Kaestner's books take place in Berlin in the twenties and thirties, a hard time and place to grow up in. Unemployment, poverty and crime cause oppressive hardship in the lives of Kaestner's young heroes who show amazing strength of character in the face of ad

In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

Here is what you can do with the books and souvenirs: Unit Study: Lewis and Clark, Pompey’s Pillar You can find the link to the State Park i

Our Favorite Read Aloud Picture Books

Our family owns many picture books but there are some all our eight kids wanted to read over and over again. Strangely all of us, including Mama, agree on which are our favorites. Honestly, I never got tired of reading these to my kids. There must be some magic about them. To my surprise, I just now notice that the books are from five very different cultures. It just so happened. I was not trying for ‘diversity’ which is my pet peeve. We just seem to love legends and folk tales. The Khan’s Daughter by Lawrence Yep, illustrated by Jean and Mou-Sien Tseng This is a extraordinary combination of masterful storytelling and illustration creating magic in one book. In an exotic Mongolian world a

Some Great Graphic Novels For Catholic Kids

After criticizing FairyTails and other bad graphic novels in a recent post, I have now dug up some good quality books for you - as promised. I will keep looking for more. My favorite first: The Shadow of His Wings: A Graphic Biography by Max Temesou. I was elated to find a graphic novel version of one of our family’s favorite autobiographies. Father Gereon Goldman was a Franciscan seminarian in Germany, when the Nazis drafted him and his fellow students into the SS. His adventures as an undercover priest in SS uniform are much stranger than fiction. On returning to his home town after the war, he finds that a nun from a local convent had been fervently praying for his protection throughou

Narnia, Middle Earth and Other Worlds

C.S.Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the two series I would take with me to a desert island. So would my husband and all of my kids. The two authors, who were friends, have succeeded in writing fantasy books that recreate the story of God’s creation in their own fantasy worlds, Narnia and Middle Earth. These subcreations, as Tolkien calls them, are every bit as beautiful and terrifying as our own world and as complex. Each comes with its own geography and history, Middle Earth even with its own languages. The peoples of these worlds operate under the same virtues and vices as we do. In both worlds, there has been a fall. In both worl