

Thimble Summer
Author: Elizabeth Enright
Narrator: Joan Allen
Unabridged: 3 hr 27 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Listening Library
Published: 06/24/2008
Categories: Children's Fiction, Animal Stories, Children's Lifestyles
Author: Elizabeth Enright
Narrator: Joan Allen
Unabridged: 3 hr 27 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Listening Library
Published: 06/24/2008
Categories: Children's Fiction, Animal Stories, Children's Lifestyles
Ten year old Garnet lives on a farm in the the 1930s. We loved the start of this book, instantly both wanting to live there in Garnet's house and go swimming in water that was too warm! That never happens in England! We enjoyed the characters and the tale of the coral bracelet and the library incide......more
Such a fun and delightful story! It's full of the kind of summer adventures every child who lives in the city wishes for; swimming in the river, helping with the farm and entering a piglet in the county fair. Other exciting things happen too, like getting locked in the little country library one nig......more
Why didn't I know about Elizabeth Enright when I was growing up? I read everything by Maud Hart Lovelace and Lois Lenski, but she passed me by. Enright's books are just the type that I adored when I was 9 or 10 years old--a bit old-fashioned, but smart, with characters who were adventurous and curio......more
{2021(?) Reread} I remember really liking this when I was younger, and I really liked it again upon rereading it. It's a lovely, very atmospheric book that has a unique and nostalgia-inducing "aura" to it. It reminds me quite a lot of Charlotte's Web, actually, which is High Praise Indeed. Definitely......more
Elizabeth Enright is one of my favorite writers, but her 1939 Newbery Award winner about one summer in the life of Garnet, an active and sunburned (yet bookish) Wisconsin farm girl, is my least favorite of her novels. I picked it up recently for a book discussion in the Children's Book Group, and al......more
Garnet found a silver thimble in the sand by the river and she was sure it had magic, for the summer had proved exciting and interesting in so many different ways. There was the coming of Eric, an orphan and such a nice addition to the family; the building of a new barn with money loaned by the government; and the fair at which Garnet's carefully tended pig won a blue ribbon and three dollars and a half! Every day brought pleasure of some kind to Garnet of the flying pigtails, for she was bursting with energy and good spirits and she loved the outdoors and growing things.
*"This story of a Wisconsin farm sings with the happiness and contentment of a small girl whose roots are sinking deep into the soil of a loved place." -- Library Journal, starred review
"Sprung spontaneously from the author's own happy experience of life on a Middle Western farm, this is a story of the sort for which there is a constant demand: one of everyday life among contemporary children. ... There is the flavor of real life... expressed with charm and humor." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Garnet... is resourceful and full of gaiety.... [Her] joy in living as she watches the great blue heron at the water's edge as the day closes has to be expressed in handspring after handspring down the pasture."
-- The Horn Book