Book Recommendations for Young Readers

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Every once in a while, I like to share on the show the books that my son is reading at home or the books that we’re reading to him.

And there’s two that I had in mind today.

One is Full of Beans by Jennifer Holm.

And the other one is the graphic novel series, The Lumberjanes, or just Lumberjanes.

Lumberjanes is really interesting.

Do you know Lumberjanes?

No, but it sounds like something I would have enjoyed as a kid.

They had flannel shirts and jeans out in the woods or something?

Kind of the gender parallel to lumberjacks, right?

-huh.

So it’s these young women.

I believe they’re all kind of campage because going to camp in the woods and they have these supernatural adventures.

And animals are involved and strange things happen and it’s really funny and stuff.

And my son loves these books.

I think he owns all seven of them now because he’s read them again and again.

And one of the things I like about them is they just throw out these names of famous women.

And my son always like pops up out of his book and says, who’s that?

I’m like, well, look it up.

And so he’s kind of getting this like secondary education on top of laughing at whatever gags are happening in the strip.

Some of it’s a little serious, but most of it’s kind of goofball-y.

Nice.

Lumberjanes.

And that’s by Shannon Waters, Grace Ellis, Brooke Allen, and Noelle Stevenson.

And then the other thing that he’s reading, he’s now read this three times, is Full of Beans by Jennifer Holm.

Full of Beans is about a boy named Beans set in the 1930s in Key West during the Depression.

This is when Key West is coming up and being developed as a tourist resort.

And so there’s all these notions of change.

There’s ideas of the Cuban influence there.

Cuban food comes up and Cuban language comes up.

And there’s like a real historical kind of quantity to it where I actually feel like he’s learning true history, at least from the period in the place, and not wholly invented history like a lot of maybe the more extraordinary or fantastical children’s works do.

And so he’s learning like slang from the 30s.

Oh, nice.

He’s learning a little bit about Cuban culture.

He wants to eat the Cuban food now that he’s had it described.

And I really think this Full of Beans book is a book that anybody who’s 10, which is how old my son is, can really enjoy and reread again and again and get a little more out of it each time.

Interesting.

So it wasn’t published in the 30s, right?

No, no.

But it’s about the 30s.

So historical fiction published now looking back to the 1930s.

Really, really cool stuff.

Okay, so Full of Beans and Lumberjanes.

Okay, great.

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