L.H. Johnson's Blog

My rating: 4 of 5 stars I had driven for several hours to visit a town in which I used to live. It was there that, with a few minutes to spare, I popped into the second hand bookshop and came out with a crate full of Elsie Oxenhams. Many of them were titles I’d […]

I have an enormous amount of time for what Sally Nicholls does. I’ve just gone through my previous reviews of hers and there’s not a one that I haven’t found something incredibly valuable and resonant within. There’s something in her incredible grace and eloquence that feels so rich for me, and I am eternally happy […]

My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is an impossibly eloquent thing. It is the sort of book that you write a thousand sentences for and realise that none of them will ever be enough. So here, let us try and find the enough to describe this. If This Is A Man documents the time […]

My rating: 3 of 5 stars Worrals On The War-Path or The One With All The Moustache Twirling is a lot. But then, all of these books are for me. They’re the sort of books which laugh in the face of restraint and subtlety and instead give you high drama (often rather camp drama) and […]

My rating: 3 of 5 stars I had a long train journey and The Chalet School Wins The Trick was in my bag. It is not the most glamorous of Chalet School books, I think, but it was my read and in a strange way, it was like coming home. There is a comfort here, […]

My rating: 5 of 5 stars For a moment I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy revisiting this one. I had come to it with excitement, driven by memories of my first encounter with it a long, long time ago, and yet the first few pages weren’t quite working for me. I couldn’t quite figure […]

Directed by Terrence Malick, A Hidden Life tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian who refused to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler and fight on the side of the Nazis during the Second World War. Over a graceful, often profoundly immense two hours and fifty-four minutes, the viewer sees the impact of […]

It’s time for episode three of my very occasional podcast on children’s literature. My aim is to get five of these done by the end of the year so we’re on track (hurrah! a plan coming together!). This episode focuses on Elinor M. Brent-Dyer and her Chalet School books. It is not three hours long, […]

Hello everyone! It’s a nice moment in all our lives to share the below piece, which I recently published on my academic blog. For those of you who don’t know, I am an author and also an independent academic who researches historic children’s literature, juvenilia and girlhood. I love what I do very much (and […]

My rating: 5 of 5 stars There’s a wickedly sharp little moment, earlier on in this, when I knew that I was getting the good stuff. It concerns a storyteller and a comment on a character’s agency and when I read it, I squeaked and I settled in because Greenberg is good and a feminist […]