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Bellairs said of his third book: "The Face in the Frost was an attempt to write in the Tolkien manner. I was much taken by The Lord of the Rings and wanted to do a modest work on those lines. It was simply meant as entertainment and any profundity will have to be read in." Writing in 1973, Lin Carter described The Face in the Frost as one of the three best fantasy novels to appear since The Lord of the Rings.
Thanks to two Disney movies, Alexander Key is best known as the author of Escape to Witch Mountain. But he was once most well known for The Forgotten Door. Like so many classic Key titles, The Forgotten Door features a character, out of place, persecuted and feared because of his astonishing abilities and extraterrestrial origins.
Like Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lois Lenski used her travels to compose historical fiction novels that “describe the everyday life of people." On Lenski's trips south she saw "the real America for the first time." Of her trip she said, "I saw and learned what the word region meant as I witnessed firsthand different ways of life unlike my own. What interested me most was the way children were living.”
Beyond the obvious anthropomorphic pig, Walter Brooks’ similarity to E.B. White can be found in his wit, wisdom and wry prose. Honing his writing at The New Yorker, Brooks imbued the inhabitants of Bean Farm with a sophistication that displayed substantial respect for his young readers.
The author of the famous novel To Sir, With Love penned Billingsly: The Bear with the Crinkled Ear, a moving novel about an extraordinary friendship. If you loved The Velveteen Rabbit, you must meet Billingsly.
Without John R. Tunis there may not have been The Natural. If you haven’t discovered Tunis, the “inventor of the modern sports story,” start with his eight-book baseball series about the Brooklyn Dodgers. It begins with The Kid from Tomkinsville, a book Phillip Roth usedalong with its main character Roy Tucker in his book American Pastoral. It is also considered an influence for both Bernard Malamud's The Natural and Mark Harris' Bang the Drum Slowly.
Like Dahl’s The Witches, Yolen’s The Wizard of Washington Square reveals the magic hiding around us in plain site.