Great Reading: Bookmark It!

Volume 31, Number 3, February 2004

Ruth Cox

Grief and Acceptance

At the end of words: A daughter’s memoir. Miriam Stone.
Candlewick, 2003. $14.00. 0-7636-1854-3. Grades 6-12. Via journal entries and poetry, Stone, a college senior when she wrote this, chronicles her senior year in high school while coming to terms with her mother’s impending and eventual death from cancer.

Boston Jane: Wilderness days. Jennifer Holm.
HarperCollins, 2002. $18.89. 0-06-029044-7. Grades 6-10. Learning that her father has died and she has no reason to return to Philadelphia, Jane decides to make a life for herself in the small village of Shoalwater Bay in the Washington Territory.

The goblin wood. Hilari Bell.
HarperCollins, 2003. $17.89. 0-06-051372-1. Grades 6-10. After superstitious villagers kill her mother, the grief-stricken young hedgewitch, Makenna, escapes to the woods to live with the goblins. Five years later she leads the goblins in a last attempt to save themselves from extinction.

Green angel. Alice Hoffman.
Scholastic, 2003. 14.95. 0-439-44384-9. Grades 8-12. Sparse lyrical prose tells the story of 15-year-old Green who lives a quiet country life with her family until they are killed in an apocalyptic fire that leaves her alone to fend off looters and to deal with her grief and loneliness.

Wasteland. Francesca Lia Block.
HarperCollins, 2003. $15.99. 0-06-028645-8. Grades 9-12. Three voices narrate this tale of intense unspoken feelings: Marina, devastated by her brother Lex’s suicide; Lex, consumed by his unbrotherly feelings toward his sister Marina; and West, the boy who loves Marina no matter what.

Ruth Cox is assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of Houston-Clear Lake in Houston, Texas. She can be reached at Cox@cl.uh.edu.