Red Hood

Red Hood by Elana K Arnold is a retelling of Little Red Ridinghood. In this version, the wolves are the ones in danger.

Bisou lives with her grandmother in the woods near Seattle. She has lived there since her grandmother came and got her in Canada after her mother was killed.

As Bisou is walking home after a school dance, a wolf attacks her. It is the biggest wolf she has ever heard of. But it does not harm her. She manages to evade and then kill the wolf. 

When her grandmother figures out what happened, she has a story to tell Bisou. One about boys and how they can become wolves, endangering the young women around them.

Arnold has written a very readable, important book for all teen girls. 

Arnold, Elana. (2021). Red Hood. New York: Balzer and Bray.

The Alchemist

If you have not read The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream by Paulo Coelho, go read it today. As a matter of fact, buy it. You will want to re-read it often.

The Alchemist is a fable about someone in search of something. Santiago travels the world searching for treasure. He has had a dream that there is treasure buried in Egypt. He makes an amazing journey from his home in Spain to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert. At the end of this journey he finds the alchemist.

This is the story that enlightens. It shows that the journey is as important, if not more so, than the destination.

Coelho, Paulo. (1998). The Alchemist. New York: HarperFlamingo.

Ella Minnow Pea

ELLA MINNOW PEA:
a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable
by Mark Dunn

Ella Minnow Pea is set on the tiny island nation of Nollop, just off of the coast of South Carolina. The people of Nollop take the English language seriously and pride themselves on its correct usage. In fact, they practically worship Nevin Nollop, the man who came up with the shortest sentence using all of the letters of the alphabet. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. They even have a statue of him in the capital square that includes that pangram.


But one day a tile falls off of the statue. The letter Z. The High Island Council goes into an emergency meeting. When they come out they have decided that Nevin Nollop is upset with the people for taking sloppy usage of the language. Therefore, the letter Z is banned. It is no longer allowed in writing or speech. There are even penalties for its usage.


As more tiles fall off of the statue, more letters are forbidden from use. The ramifications of this are enormous. The language and the society begin to unravel. The citizens of Nollop have little time left to come up with a solution to the total destruction of their culture and way of life.

Mark Dunn has written a thought provoking, scary novel about the power of governments using a format that is hilarous and heartwreching to anyone who uses the English language. I highly recommend this book to anyone who prizes our freedom of access to books.

Dunn, Mark. (2001). Ella Minnow Pea: a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable. San Fransisco: MacAdam / Cage.