While I was in St. Andrew's with Nicole and Alyson, we went to a used bookstore where I found two very old books by Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies. I'm fairly sure that they're out of print now, so I was delighted to have come across them.
They're historical fiction meant for children. Two children living in "modern" England meet Puck, who then introduces them to people from moments in England's past so that the book becomes a sort of novel about British history in very simplified form. They're well-written, of course, since it is Kipling, and each chapter has a ballad before it.
While I was flying back on Tuesday, I read Puck of Pook's Hill. I read both books way back in highschool, and they still make for a charming light read.
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I had a similar experience recently, in reading the book Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the precursor to Little House on the Prairie, which I found while cleaning at my parents house. The book details a year of life when the author is a very young girl living in the woods of Wisconsin. It is clearly written for young children, but I still found it very interesting, and there was of course the nostalgia feeling from having read it as a child. I actually think I may re-read the other eight books in the series some time soon, as they were such an important component of my elementary school years.
ReplyDeleteNice. I remember reading Puck of Pook's Hill and not getting it - too deficient in English history!
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