L.H. Johnson's Blog

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 […]

My rating: 4 of 5 stars When I was researching How To Be True, I read a lot about the experience of the common (wo)man in 1930s and 1940s Germany. It’s difficult to ever really grasp this period because there are somehow always new stories to discover, new – horrific – episodes to process, and […]

How charming the world can be when it gives you books like this, books which sprawl out in front of you like yourself on a too-hot day and demand the world to stop until you have finished them. I have taken too long to get to this series so you should not. Monica Dickens is […]

Cuckoo in the Nest by Michelle Magorian My rating: 4 of 5 stars I had mixed memories of this. I had remembered it as being a bit stiff to read and something that I was not even sure I had finished. Yet Michelle Magorian is one of my favourite writers (A Little Love Song, forContinue reading "Cuckoo in the Nest by Michelle Magorian"

Hello everyone. One of the things I’ve been working on this year is a very occasional podcast about children’s literature. This is, as the title may suggest, a terribly sporadic deep dive into the world of children’s literature and it now has two episodes available. I’ve been doing a sort of very soft launch onContinue reading "An Occasional Podcast About Children’s Literature – Episode Two"

Meet Mary Kate by Helen Morgan My rating: 4 of 5 stars There is gentle and then there is this, the gentlest of things which takes your gentle into an infinite black hole (don’t question my science here, I’m making a point) of gentle until it is the most gentlest of all gentle things. ThisContinue reading "Meet Mary Kate by Helen Morgan and illustrated by Shirley Hughes"

Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World by Leah Broad My rating: 4 of 5 stars “But this book does not ‘rewrite’ history. It relates a history that has always been there, waiting to be told.” That was the moment when I knew that I was interested. I am not particularly knowledgeable on classicalContinue reading "Quartet by Leah Broad"

Elizabeth Taylor by Donald Spoto My rating: 3 of 5 stars I have been having feelings, I think, about how women are written about in biography and in particular, about female movie stars. There is something that I’m yet to quite tease out about how their body becomes the centre of attention and how thisContinue reading "Elizabeth Taylor by Donald Spoto"

Girl, a spin-off magazine from Eagle, is something I’ve always had a lot of time for and so I was delighted to pick up several of the Girl Annuals recently. These are hardback compilations of the magazine’s content and can often have features about The British Snail Watching Society, comics about famous women from history,Continue reading "Reading Girl Annual"

Let me explain… For a while I’ve been wanting to do a podcast and now I have. It’s called Auther/Auther and Episode One: Angela Brazil and the New Girl is now live. If you’d like to listen and if I’ve done it right, then you can find it on all the places where you normallyContinue reading "Introducing An Occasional Podcast About Children’s Literature"