A SITE FOR CHILDREN, YOUNG AND OLD

THE RETURN OF THE BROWNIES

by M.E. Heller

A hardcover book with

Illustrations by award-winning cartoonist

Martha Gradisher

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FIND THE BROWNIES

SPRING is bursting out all over. Who wants to be indoors reading. Now I can take my book outside and, when I have finished tending to the garden, I can sit under that large tree and read and read and read.

The most important thing to me about a book I am reading is its cast of characters. An author who is good at telling a story will also be good at describing the characters who live in it, and try to make me believe that they are real people. Certain characters in literature have been so well described that they go on living for years and years. People still want to keep on knowing them, and thus they appear in movies and Broadway shows, and television series. They just go on and on. Sherlock Holmes is a good example, but then, also, is MARY POPPINS.

THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN by George MacDonald

I read this book when I was very young. I was excited to imagine goblins through this writer's eyes for I had tried to imagine goblins for myself. MacDonald's goblins are a little frightening, but that made the book more fun and interesting. In the end I read it many times.

The princess is a lovely character. She turns out to be quite the adventuress as she is drawn in various ways... none of them pleasant... to the underground place of the goblins where she meets Curdie, the boy miner. The most beautiful part of the story for me is when she finds her great grand-mother in an attic room, singing and spinning a ball of thread which, in its unwinding, will guide the princess through her adventures and safely home.