Currently reading
A London Family, 1870-1900: A Trilogy
The Cellist of Sarajevo
Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
All the Names
A History of the World in 100 Objects
Down the Garden Path
Virtue Betray'd, Or, Anna Bullen
Year of Wonders
Swallows and Amazons
Illusion in java
The Legacy of Roxaboxen: A Collection of Voices
I read my 6-year-old a beautiful book called Roxaboxen, about a group of children in the 1910s who create an imaginary town called Roxaboxen (made mostly of rocks and boxes) on a desert hill in Yuma, Arizona, complete with streets, houses, shops, and a jail. The book was illustrated by the incomparable Barbara Cooney. When I got to the end, there were notes that Roxaboxen was a real place! Then I found this book, which not only has photos and a history of the "Roxaboxenites" who created the town, but includes a facsimile of the "History of Roxaboxen" hand-written and -bound in 1916 by the author's mother, Marian Doan, when she was 11 years old and Roxaboxen was a thriving concern. That history, as well as the recollections of McLerran's aunt and other surviving Roxaboxenites, became the premise for McClerran's children's book. The book spawned a play and then a movement to create a park from the Yuma hill that had been Roxaboxen. It took 9 years of fund-raising, legal acrobotics, and work to clean and restore the hill to its 1915 contours and vegetation, but in 2000, the city of Yuma opened Roxaboxen park (http://www.ci.yuma.az.us/4761.htm). You can even donate a rock from your town! Anyway, The Legacy of Roxaboxen is beautiful and made me teary more than once.