A review by wendymcclure
In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown by Amy Gary

3.0

I enjoyed this enough to get past the slightly creepy narrative style that related a lot of MWB's intimate diary angst in the omniscient third person. Like I wouldn't have minded a direct quote once in a while instead of constant "Margaret secretly despaired that deep down blah blah blah" paraphrase. But I am pretty obsessed with reading about the children's literature scene in 1940s New York and the clever weirdos who populated it, and this delivered. A good portion of it is well-heeled literary lifestyle porn, which is fine, I guess. I mean, I've read three or four books about this world now and from what I can tell, everyone was constantly stumbling across ramshackle old farmhouses and/or quaint coldwater flats and buying and/or renting them for a song and filling them with charming antiques (apparently MWB furnished one of her places with FURS) and that all sounds like fun. I wish the book had been a little more gossipy (I have the feeling MWB herself would have dished) and/or more lit-critical, though I'll probably check out the Leonard Marcus bio of Brown at some point for that reason. Overall this was fine; just not quite as chewy as I like them.