My second column for Bay Windows, Of Dinosaurs and Monsters, is now online. If you live in Massachusetts, you can also find a paper copy, suitable for reading on the T, in the doctor’s office, or whenever your cable modem goes out.
We’ve been reading a lot of books about snow here at the house of Mombian, perhaps in hopes of coaxing something sleddable out of our unusually mild winter. Since today also marks the start of Black History Month, I thought it would be appropriate to highlight The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. Keats himself
I’ve always been fond of Groundhog Day. Maybe because it’s an underdog (-hog?) of a U. S. holiday, its February 2nd date following the noble Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and preceding the excessively commercial Valentine’s Day. It also seems to hearken back to a time when people paid more attention to natural signs (right
This coming Monday is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day here in the U. S. His work and the movement he led represent values that resonate with many of us, regardless of race. I thought it would be appropriate to honor the holiday by showcasing a number of books for young children about Dr. King. What
My son’s latest favorite read is Wild About Books, by Judy Sierra. It’s the cheerful, rhyming tale of a librarian who accidentally drives her bookmobile into the zoo. The animals discover the fun of reading, and the zoo is never the same. Marc Brown, author of the popular Arthur series, illustrated the book, but you’d
Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling has revealed the title of her seventh and presumed final Harry Potter novel. She’s buried the answer at jkrowling.com, where you can click several “secret” links and solve a hangman puzzle to find the answer. (Yahoo! News has the solution, as well as the title, if you don’t want
Just in time for the holidays, I’m relaunching an updated Mombian Shop, chock full of books, music, videos, toys, baby gear, and lots of things for house and home. You’ll find items geared towards children of same-sex parents and items celebrating lesbian culture, but also more general categories of products. We’re a diverse lot, really,
A trashy lesbian romance? A dark allegory about modern life? A young-adult mystery? If you think you have it in you, give it a try during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), in which participants attempt to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel between November 1 and November 30. The object is not necessarily to produce a
My three-year-old son and I have long been fans of Don Freeman’s Corduroy and A Pocket for Corduroy books. Corduroy is an inquisitive teddy bear whose understated adventures are charming and funny without sliding into cutesiness. More than anything else, the books are about the power of the friendship between the bear and his human
Before You Were Born: Our Wish for a Baby is a book series by registered nurse Janice Grimes, who works in an IVF (in vitro fertilization) clinic and is an IVF mom herself. The series is intended to help parents explain genetic origins to children conceived by assisted reproduction. Each of the sixteen volumes explains
