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The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr Analysis
The Tiger Who Came To Tea (1968) is a picture book written and illustrated by British storyteller Judith Kerr.
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The Cost Of Living by Mavis Gallant Analysis
This is the kind of subtle story which would make a terrible movie adaptation, except perhaps in the most subtle of hands. One character confronts another for some wrong-doing, and in one fell swoop the wrongdoer manages to sully the waters with ease, simply because she’s had so much practice. PLOT The first big chunk…
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Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown Analysis
Goodnight Moon is an American picturebook classic, and is of particular interest because who would’ve thunk it? Margaret Wise Brown had a talent for creating odd-duck prose which went down a treat (and still does) with the preschool set. But is this book only of value for toddlers? Never. PARATEXT In a great green room, tucked away…
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The Common Day by John Cheever Analysis
“The Common Day” is a slice of life story set around the time of the 20th Century world wars. Though this story was first published after WW2 had ended, the story is set in a time of unrest, when even the most cosseted upper-crust of New Hampshire can’t feel entirely at ease about the future.…
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Harry The Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham Analysis
Harry The Dirty Dog (1956) is a good example of what Bakhtin termed ‘the material bodily principle‘ — the human body and its concerns with food and drink (commonly in hyperbolic forms of gluttony and deprivation), sexuality (usually displaced into questions of undress) and excretion (usually displaced into opportunities for getting dirty). This book is also…
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The Great Chain Of Being by Kim Edwards Analysis
You may recognise the author’s name from her bestselling The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which was first published 8 years later in 2005. WHAT THE STORY IS ABOUT A girl feels overlooked because her important father gives names of significant family members to each of her siblings except to her. She tries in vain to win his…
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No Roses For Harry! by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham Analysis
No Roses For Harry by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham (1958) is a sequel to Harry The Dirty Dog. I like this story less due to its increasingly outdated message about masculinity. WHAT HAPPENS IN NO ROSES FOR HARRY Human grandmother sends partly anthropomorphised pet dog a coat for the dog’s birthday. The coat…
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The Snowman by Raymond Briggs
This month I’m blogging a series aimed at teaching kids how to structure a story. This seven-step structure works for all forms of narrative. It works for picture books, songs, commercials, films and novels. Today I take a close look at The Snowman by Raymond Briggs.
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Bernadette by Mavis Gallant Analysis
The idea of a strange, perhaps untrustworthy housemaid is particularly discomfiting to a middle class who can afford such luxury; we hate to think that we invite our own evil into our comfortable homes. An untrustworthy woman let into the home is a familiar trope in horror stories, and is the basis of Mavis Gallant’s short…
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Rudie Nudie by Emma Quay Analysis
In Rudie Nudie sister and brother have a bath together. Their mother towel dries them. Instead of getting dressed immediately, they take a few minutes to prance and leap and enjoy the way their textured environment feels against their skin. The story ends with their parents putting pyjamas on them and tucking them into bed.…
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Short Story Study For Writers
In the 1880s Brander Matthews said that short stories should be spelt with a hyphen to distinguish between two different forms, which reminds me of the picture book vs picturebook debate. A short story is a story that is short. A short-story proper derives from the Romantic tradition and has its beginnings in myths and legends.…
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I Am Waiting by Christopher Isherwood Analysis
What might the ‘inverse of a superhero story’ look like? What if superpowers are given to ordinary men who do nothing with them? You may know Christopher Isherwood’s name from the film A Single Man or Christopher and His Kind. I Am Waiting is one of two short stories Isherwood had published in The New…
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Better Alternatives To Harry Potter aka Why The Hell Is JK Rowling’s Mashup So Popular?
No one really knows why Harry Potter became so popular. In fact, many academics find Harry Potter relatively poorly executed, first from a storytelling perspective. Talking about another, better book, Diane Purkiss says the following: There’s no info dump; there’s no narrator; there’s no Dumbledore figure who in the last chapter plods in and says…
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Possum Magic by Mem Fox and Julie Vivas
Possum Magic is a classic Australian picture book by Mem Fox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BboBeS-vhjg WHAT HAPPENS IN THE STORY OF POSSUM MAGIC Grandma Poss uses bush magic to make a child possum (Hush) invisible so that Hush won’t be eaten by snakes. (I’m going to put aside the fact that snakes seem to ‘see’ via vibrations, so…
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Tough Boris by Mem Fox and Kathryn Brown Analysis
Tough Boris is an Australian-American pirate picture book published in 1994. As fodder for stories, ocean piracy has never been out of fashion. Especially in stories with an implied readership of boys, the pirates of modern picture books are often comical rather than scary; jovial rather than evil. Pirate stories bear little to no resemblance…