Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

Rating:  Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Pamela Smith Hill. South Dakota Historical Society Press (2014), 448 pages. Laura wrote this autobiography in 1930, and tried unsuccessfully for many years to get it...
Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast

Rating:  Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea, by Richard Henry Dana. Signet Classics (1840), 432 pages. This book is quite well-known and already has legions of devoted fans; my purpose here is to urge reluctant readers to give...
Stargazing Dog

Stargazing Dog

Rating:  Stargazing Dog, by Takashi Murakami. NBM Publishing (2011), 128 pages. Stargazing Dog was first published in Japan in 2008, where it has sold over a half million copies. It’s a relatively short graphic novel that should take about a half hour to...
Dog Boy

Dog Boy

Rating:   Dog Boy, by Eva Hornung. Viking (2010), 288 pages. I don’t know if there any other novels about abandoned Russian children raised by feral dogs. (If you know of any, please let The Book Shark know!) The fact that Dog Boy may be the only such book...
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

Rating:   Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson. Random House (2011), 353 pages. I borrowed this from a friend with the understanding that it is a quiet story about two old widowed people falling in love, which admittedly doesn’t sound terribly...