Lessons at Blackberry Inn: Adventures with the Gentle Art of Learning (TM)

Love this book! Such a wonderful book for mother culture. Karen Andreola is a fantastic author and she did not disappoint with this book. Such an encouraging book for the home educating momma.

I am not a fiction book reader. When I first bought this I was a bit skeptical, but to my surprise it has been a delight read! I love how I can relate to the characters and how it inspires my homeschooling and being a homemaker. It brings joy and inspiration with each passing page. It has become one of my favorites reads.

If you liked pocketful of pinecones than you will probably like this one too. Same illustrations and mother culture style. However it is NOT in diary form and I felt like that took away from it

It was refreshing to spend another season with Carol in her gentle homeschooling adventures. I love rereading this book each summer to remind myself to slow down and let learning unfold in natural ways.

I have enjoyed Andreola's other books, Pocketful of Pinecones and the Charlotte Mason Companion, so was really looking forward to spending some time with her insights about homeschooling the Charlotte Mason way. Instead, I got a meandering, uneventful, poorly written piece of fiction with only the barest hint of homeschooling in practice.The focus of the book is on Carol, a 1930s woman and her young family who live with an elderly woman named Emma, helping her run a B&B. There is a flavor of Depression-Era issues, including an episode with a hobo and his search for his lost family, the hard work and simple food, growing and preserving and cooking food from the garden and woods. But don't think any of this is in-depth. Not even the few examples of how she teaches her children (and, at one point, all the village children) in the Charlotte Mason approach are presented with anything more than brief snatches -- the whole description of this could have been distilled into one or two pages of a blog. Since this is what I bought the book for, I was disappointed to say the least.Perhaps it will be argued that the book was supposed to be about "gentle living" more than gentle learning, but if that's the case, then were I to judge it on its merits as fiction, it would be sorely lacking. The dialogue is often stilted and uninteresting, the drive for the story is almost entirely missing (if there is any question at all, it's whether or not Carol will feel able to think of the house as partly her own rather than only Emma's, and I suppose this is sort of resolved at the end -- after the most gentle and, to my mind, unrealistic natural birthing experience on record), and the character of Carol is lacklustre.Sorry to be such a kill-joy. I wanted to like the book and wanted to enjoy reading about homeschooling in action, but this wasn't the forum for it. I persevered till the end, and I'm still wondering why I bothered.Definitely one to get from the library, if at all.

So very delightful to read.

Good lessons for all in this heartwarming story filled with ideas for homeschoolers and lots of nostalgia for the rest of us. Very well written and a pleasure to read. Wonderful illustrations also, done by the author's son.

This book was motivation to get my kids outside and use nature as our classroom. A sweet story for homeschool moms.

This is just a sweet and lovely book for homeschool mommas (and other mommas too!) to read. I really enjoyed it.