For Halloween: ‘Harry Potter’ wizarding robes

Dressed in my official Hogwarts robes for Halloween, I had my wand ready for shelving while at work in Bellview library. The colorful holiday-themed poster-boards behind me are the work of Traci Ordenez.

‘Little Free Libraries’ in Ashland, Oregon

File photo/Little Free Library

What a wonderful surprise during our first year in Ashland, Oregon, to discover “Little Free Libraries” appearing on residential streets.

I love these little cabinet-like structures that are filled with free books. An article in the Ashland Daily Tidings profiles some library builders.

Disabilities should not be used as insults

As a person on the autism spectrum, I have unique gifts and challenges. My brain works differently from the majority of people and when I went to school, my classmates enforced a school-wide “norm” that I was to be bullied and shunned.

‘Cinder Edna’ by Ellen Jackson

The slideshow that accompanied our reading in The Joy of Children’s Literature this week raised an intriguing question: Do “fractured” or feminist fairy tales make sense if children don’t have the context of the original story?

With Cinder Edna by Ellen Jackson (1994), illustrated by Kevin O’Malley, children have a chance to compare and contrast the story of Cinderella with that of her next-door-neighbor. Both young women are similarly forced to work for a wicked stepmother and stepsisters.

‘Yeh-Shen’ by Ai-Ling Louie

Intrigued by the statement in our text for Children’s Literature, that a story from China “predates the earliest European version of Cinderella by 1,000 years” (Johnson 131), I chose the 1982 retelling of Yeh-Shen by Ai-Ling Louie, illustrated by Ed Young, as one of two different visual or literary interpretations of Cinderella.

One of the differences, as highlighted in our text, concerns the source of magical intervention that lets Cinderella “go to the ball.” Instead of a fairy godmother, Yeh-Shen is aided by the bones of her beloved pet fish.