Charitable Summer Reading, Young adult book review

The White Darkness

4 Comments

A quick note on my current book:

I’m loving The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean.  I’ve been a fan of McCaughrean’s writing ever since reading  A Pack of Lies years ago, and am finding The White Darkness to be as masterful a piece of literature as A Pack of Lies.  Unexpected, quirky, intelligent, engaging: it’s awesome, and I’ve only just begun it.

Current summer reading hour total, for those of you who have made Heifer pledges based on the hours I read:  4 hours.  🙂

4 thoughts on “The White Darkness”

  1. Hello there! I found your blog through your brothers, and I am in need of a book reccommendation for my neice, who is eight and half. She is terrified of thunderstorms, and I thought a book on them might help her. I figure if she can understand them, she might not be so terrified of bad weather. Amazon has been of little help. Have you run across a book like this?

  2. Hi Stephen,
    There are a lot of great options for your niece – I would try a couple of tactics: books on Norse and Greek mythology would be good (I particularly love the D’Aulaires books on each of these – oldies but goodies), since they show that the human need to explain thunder and lightning goes back many, many years.

    Also, nonfiction books on thunder and lightning would be helpful, to explain the science behind the storms. The library I work at owns “Weather” by Rebecca Rupp (I’m writing this from home, and can’t look at the book in person, but the description sounds good). I also really like the DK Eyewitness series of books, and they do have one titled “Hurricane and Tornado” by Jack Challoner, which does talk about thunderstorms, or “Weather” by Brian Cosgrove.

    You also might try some fictional works that address the issue of fear in general. I particularly like “Not Afraid of Dogs” by Susanna Pitzer, which is about a little boy who is not afraid of anything (except dogs), and learns to get along with a visiting dog when he realizes the dog is afraid of thunderstorms. By the end of the story, they’re curled up together in bed, sound asleep and no longer afraid of dogs or thunder.

    Good luck, and I hope these suggestions help!

  4. Thank you very much for those suggestions; I’ve written them down and will see if I can hunt them down on Amazon or at the local Books-A-Million.

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