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I posted yesterday about the Mother-Daughter Book Club  my daughter and I have been part of for the past four years.  Here are the books we read during the last two of them:

5th Grade

• Ruby Holler by Sharon Creech
• Worst Enemies/Best Friends (Beacon Street Girls, volume 1) by Annie Bryant
• Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
• Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson
• The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• The Witches by Roald Dahl
• Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
• Princess Academy by Shannon Hale

6th Grade

• Catherine Called Birdie by Karen Cushman
• The First Horse I See by Sally Keehn
• Hatchet Gary Paulsen
• Rachel’s Journal: the Story of a Pioneer Girl by Marissa Moss
• The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread by Kate Dicamillo
• The Doll People by Ann M. M. Martin, Laura Godwin, Brian Selznick, and Ann M. Martin
• Sahara Special by Esmé Raji Codell
• Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

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Related Posts:

Mother-Daughter Book Club List, Part 1
International Women’s Day: Toasting Pink

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse is a children’s novel entirely written in blank verse. 

I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who sometimes just writes that way.  I may have been an English major in college but I’d even forgotten that this sort of writing had a name.  I’d certainly forgotten (or else, I’d certainly all-but-decided to forget) that this sort of writing had any sort of legitimacy.  I’ve been doing it anyway. (Ashes to ashes, and Hesse won a Newberry:  Dust to dust, and I win writing while I do the laundry.) 

In some ways,  the story is so unremittingly tragic that it should be wildly inappropriate for children; the blank verse is so strange, meanwhile,  that it should be wildly inappropriate for a legitimate author to be using it. 

It works, though.  The author’s theme is forgiveness, even though the only theme some of our children could see was dust. 

Ah, well!