Cece Bell's (El Deafo, Amulet, New York, 2014) is a middle childhood graphic novel memoir that explores the author's experiences of losing her hearing and growing up with a severe hearing loss. As a graphic novel, the story is able to avoid a medicalized view of disability by combining image and text, a format that allows readers, those with…

Written before the successful publication of Skellig (1998), David Almond's short story collection, "Counting Stars," has attracted less critical attention than his more famous novels. Falling between fiction and autobiography, the earlier short stories are more firmly grounded in realism than the novels, which feature elements of…

The dolls' house as children's plaything is anything but simple. Inasmuch as the dolls' house may be the reproduction of domestic ideals on a minute scale and an educational model prompting girls to become good housewives, this article argues that it is also a means and space to express imagination, creativity, and agency. Including a short…

As a narrative series, Brandon Sanderson's humorous, middle grade, Alcatraz Smedry novels display some of the arguably vague concepts of Reader Response theorist Wolfgang Iser as accessible themes that encourage a critical understanding of the stories. "Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians" (2007), "Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones" (2008) and…

In the last two decades there have been significant numbers of children's books written about various aspects of the refugee experience. Previously authors had tended to approach this sensitive area principally through an historical perspective. However as the number of refugees in British schools increases, books dealing with contemporary…

While "Where the Wild Things Are" may be Maurice Sendak's most popular book, "In the Night Kitchen" is arguably the greater work. Though his journey in "Wild Things" shares many of the elements of Mickey's adventure in "Night Kitchen"--swinging between the protagonist's initiatory verbal assertions and silent, completely pictorial spreads that…