When Elizabeth Borton de Trevino won the Newbery Award for I, JUAN DE PAREJA in 1966, she told a story about reading Sigrid Undset's KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER as a child:
I got hold of the book first. I sat in a corner with that novel and could not do anything but wash and dress mechanically, eat what was put in my hand, sleep reluctantly, and read, for two weeks. Next, my sister seized the book and she was tended, as I had been, and relieved of every household task and duty until, sighing, she turned the last page. Then my mother said, "All right, girls, take over. It's my turn." And she never moved or spoke to a soul until she had finished it. My father did not care. He was rereading, for the tenth enchanted time, the African journals of Frederick Courteney Selous, the great English hunter, and while we were in medieval Norway, he had been far away in darkest Africa, with all the wild forest around him. That is the kind of family we were.
That is how Peter from Collecting Children's Books starts today's blog post "You Know it's a Good Book When..." I loved his opener so much I had to repost and I'll direct you to his blog to read the rest or add some comments. Be sure to check out other posts as he does a great job of exploring the Newbery Award books of present and past and if you love to learn about authors' lives you can always learn something from his posts.
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