Hannah > Books: must-read-kid-lit‎ (39)

This is a bandit night at its best: the glow and the warmth of the camp in the dark woods, the light of the fire and us singing and dancing and hollering around it, the people songs and the nighttime songs and our laughter all mixing together into something new and hopeful, a kind of promise, or maybe a wish. An owl hushes us from the trees up where I can't see any owl but I know it's there watching me. I wonder what the owl thinks of us. I wonder what Momma would think of me, dancing and all dressed up, her own daughter a bandit?

He lifted his head high, crossed his arms, and stared into the Green Wall. The bully wasn't right, couldn't be right, because to succeed in this plan, the boy had to be the greatest knight that ever lifed.

"Once upon a time, there was a boy who was invincible," he whispered, breathing in deeply and filling his lungs with knight superpowers.

He straightened his back, his blanket flapping behind him. "I'm coming in!" he shouted. "You know what I want, and you'd better give it to me."

Then he strode into the forest.

The wind, with a wild cry, slipped under the umbrella, pressing it upwards as though trying to force it out of Mary Poppins's hand. But she held on tightly, and that, apparently, was what the wind wanted her to do, for presently it lifted the umbrella higher into the air and Mary Poppins from the ground. It carried her lightly so that her toes just grazed along the garden path. Then it lifted her over the front gate and swept her upwards towards the branches of the cherry-trees in the Lane.

I'll say this quietly,
I needn't roar to be heard,
I can be a friend
to a bee or a bird.

You said I must change, I must chomp Marianne,
but chomping your friends is a terrible plan.

Let nobody say
just one way is true.
There are so many ways
that you can be you.

Then I heard Mr. Green's voice in the sighing of the wind, in the clicking of the frozen branches. He reminded me that my family was all around me: The animals sleeping in their dens. The frogs sleeping in the mud under the frozen river. Grandfather Mountain and Grandmother Moon. Even the wolves were my wild brothers, he told me. He said that I should do as they did and howl my loneliness away. And so I did.*

Mrs. Jane Tabby could not explain why all four of her children had wings.

"I suppose their father was a fly-by-night," a neighbor said, and laughed unpleasantly, sneaking round the dumpster.

"Maybe they have wings because I dreamed, before they were born, that I could fly away from this neighborhood," said Mrs. Jane Tabby.