Guest Blogger! Recommending Letters from Rapunzel (Middle-Grade Fiction)

And now, another fantastic guest blogger!  Jackie Greenberg is Marketing Manager at Penguin Young Readers Group.  She is also a fellow student in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the New School (we graduate next month!), and a very talented writer.  She's hard at work on a middle-grade novel that is funny, moving, and creative.  I can't wait to see it in libraries and bookstores, where it belongs; and I feel privileged to have gotten sneak previews.

Here's Jackie's recommendation:

When Julie first asked me to guest blog, a (long!) list of possible books to choose immediately began racing through my mind. So many favorites – how would I ever choose one? But it turned out, the answer was simple. I’ve had many favorites over the years, but one was different, one stuck with me in a way few others have.

 

As a kid I used to read books over and over (and over and over!) again. But as an adult, with a tall stack of books next to my bed and never enough time to get through them all, I’ve long since put an end to that practice. Until Letters from Rapunzel. Reading this book brought the true kid out in me again because, for the first time in a long time, I read it twice.

 

The main character in LETTERS FROM RAPUNZEL goes by “Rapunzel” and draws connections between herself and the heroine trapped high in a castle. Because she too is trapped – in Homework Club after school, but trapped nonetheless. She’s stuck there because an “evil spell” (or CD as she calls it – clinical depression) has sent her father away. But when she finds a ripped piece of a letter her dad wrote addressed to a post office box, she becomes consumed by writing to this mysterious friend of her dad’s. As she writes and writes – and keeps waiting for an answer – Rapunzel works through her feelings of loss and the changes going on in her life. And she does so in a voice so smart, so charming, and so fun, you never want to put the book down. So, if you’re anything like me, you end up reading it twice.

 

Thank you so much, Jackie!  It's going right at the top of my list! 

To return to my website, click here:  www.juliesternberg.com/books.  And please feel free to post a comment about Jackie's recommendation, or any others, and to add a recommendation of your own.