The Bluest Eye is a tragic story about Pecola Breedlove's yearning for acceptance in a world that rejects and ultimately destroys her, but not really. It's more about all the angles from which Pecola is viewed. The plot is secondary, a frame on which Ms. Morrison drapes a quilt depicting the devastating consequences when perceptions, including identity and self-worth, are perverted by racism, greed, ignorance, shame. It is a painful book to read, but I couldn't stop reading it. It is filled with ugliness, but its writing is beautiful. It reveals things about us that are very difficult to love, but I loved it.

This Gaiman title differed from the last Gaiman title I read, which differed from the one I read before that. Mr. Gaiman may well write well in any style. His Odd and the Frost Giants reads like a myth, with personable (and personality-filled) characters, including a boy named Odd who has lost his father and most of the use of one leg. He leaves his village after his mother marries a man with several children of his own and without any interest in Odd. Then the story really kicks off. Odd encounters a bear, a fox, and an eagle with an interesting history--yes, they can talk--and a problem that Odd is determined to try to fix for the sake of his village as well as his new companions. It's a quick read that, I think, would engage grade school readers on up.

What would you wish for if you could have one wish granted every day? Five siblings--well, really only four of five because "Lamb" is too young--in E. Nesbit's Five Children and It discover that deciding what to wish for is only the beginning of their troubles. When they uncover a sand fairy who promises to grant them a wish a day, "careful what you wish for" becomes a much more colorful aphorism.

Somehow, I had not read E. Nesbit's work before, and I am not familiar with turn-of-the-20th-Century British lit for children. I don't know if this title is typical; it's really a collection of tales bound by a theme and characters. Not all of the tales translate as well to this time as some do, but they create a fun structure for the story, and Nesbit's conversational style delighted me. Her voice, speaking directly to her young readers, was probably my favorite part of the book--witty, instructive without patronizing, friendly. She charmed me.

Unseen Academicals, a Discworld story, offers more of Mr. Pratchett's reliable humor and satisfying characters, but it also offers a different kind of satire than other Discworld titles I've read. In Unseen Academicals, "it's personal."

With the introduction of Nutt and his circle of friends who are truly the "unseen" keeping the wheels of Unseen University turning (and its faculty eating), Pratchett focuses his commentary on what it means to be an individual in a group, a more granular and yet more universal target than politics or nationalism or capitalism or sexism. Here we have a story that explores what makes us who we are, raising questions about the relationships between perceptions, personal worth, and identity--again, not superficial topics, but, as always with Pratchett, super-fun.