Set in a Cambridgeshire manor house surrounded by a flooded river, this gentle novel of a haunting dating from the Great Plague was my first experience of literary atmosphere for its own sake. Eleven-year-old Harriet is bright, edgy, uncompromising, and driven - like nearly everyone else we want to hang out with. I launched my own spy notebook in middle school 55 years later I am still at it, snooping to see how life works. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (1964) The queen of unreliable narrators, an expert in denial, narrates this wrenching - and wrenchingly funny - tale of the mental collapse and recovery of a matron in a prosperous London suburb. Gardam's novels only get richer with rereading. The Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam (1991) Single phrases can sting with accuracy: "the smog of desire" "democratic and ordinary and tired" "a dead dog bloated as a fraise" "all I want is a room up there / and you in it" "joy seems to be inexorable." Buy it here. Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara (1964)īefore text messaging was invented, O'Hara reveled in staccato rhythm with immediacy and delight. The gray-tint, cross-hatched drawings evoke George Cruikshank and Samuel Palmer, but the mordancy is vintage Sendak. Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More to Life by Maurice Sendak (1967)Ī Sealyham terrier, Jennie, adventures into the trippy afterlife to find that mortal appetites are eternal after all. It probably inspired me to risk my own appropriation of Oz. The story is audaciously retold, as if the Arthurian cycle were not already one of our foundational myths. I chose White's tragicomedy of the education, rise, and death of King Arthur. In the 1970s, teen geek readers swore either by J.R.R. His new novel, The Oracle of Maracoor, continues the adventures of Rain, granddaughter of the Wicked Witch of the West. Gregory Maguire is the author of Wicked, the revisionist Wizard of Oz tale adapted into a long-running Broadway musical.
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