Review
Polly Horvath's plots are always a little offbeat - to the point
that when I first listened to one of her stories (
Everything on a Waffle)
I enjoyed it from an adult point of view, but was surprised to find that our children (then probably 7 and 9) also enjoyed it.
As Publishers Weekly puts it, Horvath 'possesses the unique ability to make
extraordinary events (such as brushes with death) appear perfectly ordinary
while extracting something profound from occurrences as run-of-the-mill as a
jaunt to the bookstore'. It's the combination of the banal and the
fantastic that I thought would be off-putting to children, as her books are not
one thing or another - but the bottom
line is that how to classify a book really doesn't bother children all that much
- they just enjoy (or don't enjoy) each for what it is without needing to...
Beyond the Book
Polly Horvath has been writing books since she was eight. She grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She went to college in Toronto and lived in New York and Montreal before settling on southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, with her husband Arnie and her daughters, Emily and Rebecca. She has published many books for children which have been translated into many languages including, German, French, Thai, Japanese, Danish and Italian and she has won many awards including the National Book Award and the Newbery Honor.
