
From Author Rebecca Grabill
This Joyful Mess

Funkify Your Wool: A Tutorial on Wool Dying for Rug Hooking or other Crafts
I'm easily bored so the excitement of that Great Goodwill Find of a Hideous Blazing Purple jacket soon wears off. I start to wonder what that purple would do to a light brown, or whether I need a hazy blue-white for snow or sky or what that Blue Blazer would do to white slacks, just because it might be cool and...

Review Unwritten—Katherine Paterson’s Bread and Roses, Too
Just after putting down this latest Paterson book, I had idea after idea about what to say. That was a month ago (at least) and the details have now faded. All my brilliant points of critique, all my Deep Thoughts. Oddly, details of the story itself are not lost, nor are one or two things I’d thought when I first read it. This is probably for the best

Two Undecodable Books (ok, maybe a little decodable)
An adventure story about fun and friendship.
Rylant uses short sentences, though I must say from a reading-developmental level (whatever it’s called), the vocabulary used requires decoding skills a Level 2 might not have. “Knocked” and “enough” are more...

Cinderella or Cinderella or Cinderella - All the Same
If a culturally rich adaptation of a classic tale is going to be on a required reading list for any MFAC program, I think it should be Yeh Shen.

A Little Moody over Judy Moody
Very Ramona-the-pest both in tone and content: the every-day becomes huge in a way that takes a child’s moods and struggles seriously.

Witness this!
This book was made up of poems from different points of view and usually in differing and discernible voices all telling one story.
The plot, though ... the story seemed to end at the wrong spot. It ended with...

A Compass of Gold, off to a Good Start: Pullman's Golden Compass
The power of a great opening: Pullman’s The Golden Compass begins, “Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.” We see a bit of each method of creating conflict. We know...

The Gift of Suffering: The Giver by Lois Lowry
Lowry opens The Giver with a description of fear and immediately cements the unusualness of the world she’s created as well as giving us insight into the young protagonist, Jonas. She also is so deliciously good at creating a Utopia that seems wonderful, at the start, and only slowly...

ChuggaChugga ChooChoo!: Freight Train, the book
Conceptual, informative, this little book teaches object permanence (through the tunnel cut away) and prepositions like through and by, and it uses real...

How to Build a Mosque
The intro is sort of dry, but the melding of fiction and nonfiction with fascinating detail on construction held my interest to the end. Yet why was there such a need for bathing? (I know it’s ritual bathing, but the text doesn’t tell me this.) There’s a ton of info on engineering, but not much...
Hi, I’m Rebecca. I write books and I write here at This Joyful Mess to inspire everyone to find JOY in the everyday messes of life. Here you’ll find inspiration, educational resources, and so much more. Please explore and connect. I’d love to hear from you!