Mary Grace McGeehan and Deborah Kalb met in college and have been talking about books together ever since. On Rereading Our Childhood, they revisit the books they loved as children. As well as discussing how the books have held up over the years, they look into the lives of the authors, talk about what the children in the books read, and delve into issues such as “Was the silent movie the Half Magic children saw real?” (yes, and it was completely inappropriate for children) and “Where were these kids’ parents while they were spying/solving crimes/doing witchcraft?”

Mary Grace, a former U.S. diplomat, has lived in Mexico, South Africa, Cambodia, Haiti, Laos, Honduras, and Namibia. She received an MFA in creative writing from NYU in 20017. In 2018, she spent the year reading as if she were living in 1918, and she continues to recount her adventures in the world of a century ago on her blog, My Life 100 Years Ago. She divides her time between Cape Town, where she lives with her South African husband, and Washington, D.C.

Deborah is a freelance writer and editor and a former journalist. She is the author of The Presidents and Me, a series of magical time travel adventures including George Washington and the Magic Hat, John Adams and the Magic Bobblehead, and Thomas Jefferson and the Return of the Magic Hat, and the co-author, with her father, Marvin Kalb, of Haunting Legacy, the story of how presidents from Ford to Obama dealt with the legacy of the Vietnam War. Her adult novel Off to Join the Circus was published in 2023. She has interviewed thousand of authors for her blog, Books Q&A by Deborah Kalb. She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her family.

(Please note that this podcast is intended for an adult audience. Many episodes include discussion of issues of a troubling nature, including now-outdated views on race that were often present in children’s books of the past. We suggest that parents wishing to listen to an episode with their children first listen to it themselves.)

Artwork for the podcast and the website banner is from the 1921 Children’s Book Week Poster by Jessie Willcox Smith. Podcast music is “Fractal of Light” by Chris Haugen, used under a Creative Commons license.

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