Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I’m offering my unsolicited review of The Living Page: Keeping Notebooks with Charlotte Mason by Laurie Bestvater today. I bought the book because I was curious to see if it was as helpful as I’ve heard some in the Charlotte Mason homeschooling community declare. I hoped it would fit well with our summer theme of keeping journals and writing notebooks. The Living Page takes the reader from theory to application with a needlessly ornate wording tagged with copious notes (405!) documenting Bestvater’s sources for her conclusions on Charlotte Mason’s use of notebooks in education. What’s that? You want me to say it in simple terms? That was exactly the feeling The Living Page left me with! I should have suspected that a book with five appendices, a bibliography, a glossary of definitions, and more than 25 pages of notes would take simple ideas and hide them behind fancy explanations. I appreciate that Laurie Bestvater did a large amount of research. She found even rare mentions by Charlotte Mason and related writers in the Parent’s Review publication of notebook types and wrote them down. She pieced together both how and when some of those notebooks were used. She shares samples of a number of these with ideas for setting up a few types of notebooks and ideas on what materials to use. What I did not appreciate was the almost foreign language she employed repeatedly for this practice of keeping things in notebooks. Oft repeated but little explained or difficult to grasp the meaning phrases included: ◾forms of vitality ◾glory (used many ways: make glory visible, perceive Glory, keep glory, etc) ◾describing things as very ‘catholic’, with a small ‘c’ and no definition available in the glossary ◾sacramental insistence ◾paper postures It is as if she wrote The Living Page for scholars with a vocabulary specific to a field of study instead of to the Charlotte Mason education community at large. Maybe that was her intent, I do not know. The book is one I had to wade through, bit by bit. It left me wishing for a dear friend who would come alongside me to share what she had learned of notebooks and how they can relate to Charlotte Mason’s methods. I wanted a practical, friendly companion and what I received was a drawn out treatise. As an in the trenches homeschooling mother with eight children I appreciate clearly written books that include theory and practice for an idea. I do not want to labor over obscure meanings for words surrounding what is, in reality, a simple and effective practice Charlotte Mason used. Charlotte has always seemed eminently practical to me, with well thought out reasons for her methods and a directness to her writings. The Living Page took Charlotte’s sensible, clear methods and waved a fog of words around it to mask the simplicity. My copy of The Living Page will be finding a new home. It is not a book I will add to my home library. I need a library of encouragement for this homeschooling journey and this book did not work for me. {Disclaimer: I bought this book with my own money. I read it. I am sharing my personal opinion. You may love the book. You may not. That’s okay – everyone likes different things!}