Book List : Childhood Favourites

These are some books I loved as a child and have reread frequently over the years. All highly recommended:

1. Anne of Green Gables / L.M. Montgomery
Everyone knows the story of this red-haired orphan who finds a loving home and community in small-town PEI in the 1890's or so. There was something about this story that touched me deeply; I was convinced I had lived in Avonlea in another life.

2.Mara, Daughter of the Nile / Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Set in Pharonic Egypt, this was the impetus for my later infatuation with both Egyptian history and romantic suspense. This has been followed up by reading Elizabeth Peters.

3.The Witch of Blackbird Pond / Elizabeth George Spears
For some inexplicable reason I was fascinated with US colonial history as a 13 yr. old. This book provided great characters, history, romance and also philosophical considerations of religion, and freedom.

4.A Wrinkle in Time / Madeleine L'Engle
Another story about a young misfit of a girl who saves the world and finds romance along the way. Wonderfully imaginative.

5.The Borrowers / Mary Norton
The story of a family of inch-high Victorians having to survive the vagaries of their precarious existence beneath the floorboards of a kitchen. I loved the feeling of looking in at a human family from the outside, or more properly, from underneath. Provided a quote which has always affected my further reading -- "Stories really never end...It's just that sometimes, at a certain point, one stops telling them."