Anya ,'Storyteller'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
It looks the original books were from the '60s, and the new ones (written mostly in the '90s by a family member) focused on Amelia as a child.
I have such an urge to go back and read the first original one. Dressing the chicken and dusting the furniture is coming back to me, too!
I read that one recently to my son. It was at my mother-in-law's house. He liked it! Dusting the furniture, dressing the chicken, drawing the curtains. Puns.
I had one Amelia Bedelia book as a kid. It was an I Can Read book, and I think it had something to do with baseball, maybe?
Yeah, we recently read the original Amelia Bedelia book to Rose (it was in a Little Free Library -- score!), and she loved it. Dressing the chicken and drawing the drapes were her favorites. We found another one where she gets fired and goes around town trying to find a new job, which was less funny to me (or maybe it's just that the premise wears thin after a while), but I think Rose liked them both.
Got a little sidetracked by other projects, but I finished Code Name Verity last night. Sat blubbering on my couch for a bit, but dang. What a story.
On the kids' books front, I've been re-reading Nancy Drew books, and at least as far as I've gotten (part-way through the third), they are totally non-offensive! Which was kind of a relief, to be honest. As long as you don't mind that she's apparently out of high school with no plans for college, I think these are totally safe to recommend to modern kids.
Jesse, they were edited in the 60s or 70s? So if you find early editions, there's a fair bit of casual racism in them.
Now THAT does not surprise me! So, the go-ahead only applies to the edited version where all the servants are (apparently) white and half the villains are noticeable by their pale blue eyes.
Oh gods yes. I inherited a bunch of the original edtion NDs. with the blue cloth covers and orange silhouette of Nancy on the binding. I devoured them as a child, and at some point my mom threw them all away. I mourned, and as an adult, I started putting my collection back together. Until I actually *read* one, and was both jolted and appalled by the casual racism, classism, and callous disregard of the Other in every paragraph. I sold them (I'd invested a bit in the ones I'd found), but I felt bad about it. I really wanted to shred them so nobody would read that tripe.