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Gr 4-7 This is Horvath's most luminescent, beautifully written novel yet. Jane Fielding lives what seems to be an idyllic life with her poet mother and three younger siblings in a house on the beach in coastal Massachusetts, where they gather mussels, pick berries to eat, and lay in the warm tidal pools. But at 12, Jane no longer wants every summer to be exactly the same. She prays for adventures, 100 of them, and gets 14, each of which gives her insights into understandin...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

"All our lives are mundane, but all our lives are also poetry." And so it is with Horvath's latest book at its ambiguous, magical best. In the first of Jane Fielding's longed-for adventures, the summer she's twelve, a bony man in a loose suit turns up, stays for dinner, and invites the family to a fair in town. "That was your father," Jane's mother says afterward. Is he? Or does Jane's poet-baker-beachcomber mother think that she and her siblings need a father? In the course of the summer three more strange men turn up: a father for each of them? Mea...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

Twelve-year-old Jane has three siblings and a poet-baker-beachcomber mother. Over the course of one summer, four strange men turn up, ...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

In My One Hundred Adventures, Polly Horvath combines strong setting and characters, lovely writing, and understated humor. Horvath also uses her signature quirkiness to great effect. In one particularly memorable scene, the town’s preacher, Nellie Phipps, sends Jane off in a hijacked hot-air balloon to drop Bibles to houses below. Happily, Jane is a natural balloonist, but it turns out a Bible may have accidentally hit the Gourd baby on the head. This incident, as well as Jane’s new role in helping the preacher (who fancies herself a budding healer), sets in motion m...Log In or Sign Up to Read More