Roshani Chokski was a new name with young adult titles that were unfamiliar to me when I went to the Mississippi Book Festival, and there is a reason for that!

Petina Gappah’s novel,Out of Darkness, Shining Light, begins oddly with the death of David Livingstone, the great explorer missionary.

A recent short-lived energetic round of cleaning out and tossing turned up a favorite teaching memory.

I’m going to recommend something unusual, but then this is an unusual book. Before you begin, take a peek at the authors’ note at the end, and yes, I have the apostrophe in the right place.

I anticipated the blooming of my Asiatic lily this year, knowing it wasn’t an Easter lily and would come later.

A good read is a given when Kimberly Willis Holt produces a new book.

In a discussion with Peppermint Patty, Charlie Brown explains that security is sleeping in the back seat of the car at night riding home.

The beginning of The Yellow House: A Memoir takes the reader on a New Orleans map trip to find the house where the author grew up.

For the most part, I refrain from ranting on this blog, but I can’t let this issue go without speaking up. 

For an avid reader of a wide-ranging assortment of books, a good whodunit serves a role similar to an appetizer compared to an entrée reading of literary fiction or nonfiction, but who doesn’t love a good treat now and then?

Let’s just be honest and say that sometimes a word or two in the preacher’s sermon takes my mind far afield. This time the word was “fig.”

Four disparate characters populate Cara Wall’s debut novel, The Dearly Beloved, as co-equal protagonists. In the prologue, Charles Barrett has died after forty years ministering together with James MacNally.

Susan Orlean, an author I admire, passes along a piece of advice she received from a writer she admires in the July/August issue of Writer’s Digest. (I’ve found the writing community a congenial one in this way as they encourage and advise one another.)

Sleepovers don’t always come with a theme, but with two boys and two new picture books featuring green dinosaur pancakes that come to life at the hands of a magical grandmother, a theme happened.

When the University of Southern Mississippi OLLI group embarked on a two-hour tour of the Mississippi gulf coast aboard the Betsy Ann, comparisons to Gilligan’s Island ensued.

Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo opens her debut novel with twelve-year-old Ruby watching the people in her life disappear. Her father is gone, and now her mother gets handcuffed and placed in the back of a police cruiser.

Some historical events leave that “I remember where I was” kind of feeling. The Sunday morning newspaper and several news shows and documentaries are bringing reminders of one of those occasions this week as they focus on the first moon walk.

Sophie Blackall, Caldecott Award winner for Hello, Lighthouse, already had the crowd for the 2019 Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival in the palm of her hand as she spoke, even before she had her assistants unroll the scroll across the stage.

I contend that there is much more in a name than Shakespeare recognizes. A rose just might not entice one as well if it were called an onion. Kimberly Willis Holt stirred a memory just by the name she chose for a character in her latest book.

It will be obvious to the reader from the start that The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt, a debut novel by Andrea Bobotis, is not her first writing.