The Reading Promise

I cannot say enough about the book The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared by Alice Ozma.  Let me start by giving you a little bit of the background, Alice Ozma was named for two very famous literary characters – Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Ozma a ruler in the land of Oz, that’s right as in the The Wizard of Oz. 

In this well-written autobiography/memoir Alice tells the story of how her father read aloud to her every night for eight straight years, only stopping the night Alice moved away to attend college.  Now, her father was/is an elementary school librarian and knows the importance of reading aloud, so he would practice using different voices, adding in pauses, and adding emphasis.  Reading aloud doesn’t have to be that difficult, sitting down and sharing a story is all that is required.

I may be biased because my parents (both of them) read aloud to all three of my siblings and I for as long as I can remember.  As we got much older (into middle school and high school) my mom would take 15-20 minutes before we ran out the door to school to read aloud to us.  Yep, that’s right we had enough time in the morning with the four of us in our teenage years to get up, eat breakfast, all get ready in one bathroom, and my mom still had time to read aloud to us.  She read us everything Harry Potter, the classics, mysteries, short stories, Christmas picture books, pretty much anything we could agree on was fair game.

The Reading Promise is an inspiring true story about the importance of sharing books and reading aloud to children of all ages.

Title: The Reading Promise
Author: Alice Ozma
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Page Number: 320 pgs.