Told through the letters of eleven-year-old Tate P. Ellerbee to country singer Hank Williams, Dear Hank Williams is a warm and moving story about family, love and grief. I enjoyed Tate’s innocent humour and the vivid portrayal of childhood in post-war Louisiana. The letter-writing format made her feel especially real, while the songs she mentioned encouraged me to listen along and helped bring the late 1940s setting to life.
Genre: Fiction
BR: Emily Of New Moon trilogy by L.M Montgomery
Lucy Maud Montgomery, created another and better-known representative of Canadian girlhood in “Anne of Green Gables” and all the subsequent Anne books, but Emily was closer to her own heart. Like Anne, Emily is a strong-minded, gifted, imaginative child, left alone and unprotected in a harsh world, who is taken in by adults who are at least initially cold and unloving. Both girls grow up amid the beauties of Prince Edward Island, both keenly sensitive to natural splendors and highly fanciful, not to say occasionally precious, about assigning names to lakes and trees and identifying spirits and fairies in their surroundings. Anne is an original and spunky girl, with a certain amount of talent for writing verses and romantic tales, but Emily is a writer.