As many of you know, books get bought and come to reside on my to-be-read shelf for a variety of reasons. Some do so on an annual basis. For example, I read The Best American Short Stories yearly. Also each year I check to see what won the Newberry Award, and if the subject interests me at all, I buy and read it. About four years ago a book called Walk Two Moons won. If I remember right, it was an American Indian based story. I wasn't all that interested, but the name of the author, Sharon Creech, sounded familiar. A quick check of Hiram College's yearly At a Glance, that school's answer to a yearbook, proved my memory right. A Sharon Creech had attended school there at the same time I did. The picture in At a Glance was clearly a younger version of the woman whose picture was on the dust jacket. Now knowing a Newberry-winning author, however casually, is certainly a reason to buy and read a book. So I did. It was okay.
This fall on my first Barnes and Noble outing after my hospital stay, I saw she had another book out. Into the shopping cart it went. On the shelf it resided, and yesterday it rotated into being read. Entitled The Castle Corona, it's a tale of kings, princes, peasants who become tasters, and queens who do well-meaning things in the wrong way. It ends well and everyone lives happily ever after. Physically the book is delightful—lush, heavy pages with lush-but-stylized illustrations. All the way through it, I kept thinking it would be a great book to read nightly, a chapter at a time, to a four or five-year-old. If anyone reading this review has a family which includes such a child, I strongly recommend giving The Castle Corona a try.
