As we traveled home from family Thanksgiving in North Mississippi a few years ago, I was struck by the bleakness of the landscape. The memory of commuting to finish my last two years at Ole Miss brought back a vision of late Octobers and early Novembers that would rival anything New England in the fall has to offer.

Claudia in the Storm written by Denise McConduit and illustrated by Francesca Ficorilli, exemplifies the idea that an author who has lived through an event can write about it from that perspective in a way that draws a believable experience for the reader. While the book is fictional, it is set in New Orleans in the reality of Hurricane Katrina as the levees broke and the city flooded.

Evidently, inanimate objects may not celebrate 20 years the same way the rest of us do. At the twentieth anniversary celebration of the opening of the Oak Grove Public Library, my library card gave up the ghost.

Attorney Robin Lockwood begins her case with connections to some of the principal characters in the murder mystery Betrayal by Phillip Margolin.

Four years ago, we signed a check.

Four years ago, we received a deed.

The place was OURS,

or so we thought.

It’s a bonus when a good book plants thoughts that linger long after the book is finished. Our de Grummond Book Group recently read Jason Reynolds’s The Boy in the Black Suit. I will just recommend the book without reviewing it so I can get to the lingering thoughts.

I wish a belated book birthday to Anna E. Jordan’s Shira and Esther’s Double Dream Debut that came out on October 10. The author takes her own background to weave a story that becomes an enjoyable mirror for Jewish middle graders and a delightful window for those who are not familiar with Jewish customs.

My Facebook memory noted seven years. The boy was three and loved his bubbles. He also loved helping me cook even at that age.

Erica Bauermeister cites an epigraph before she begins her book, No Two Persons, and uses it as her basic premise.

“No two persons ever read the same book, or saw the same picture.” The Writings of Madame Swetchine, 1860.

In her wonderful family free verse collection, my friend Sharon Gerald recently posted a Facebook entry about daughters who had daughters in her heritage. I’m borrowing (or stealing) the idea with a bit of twist and only going back as far as memory takes me.

Gill Hornby takes what is known about Jane and Cassandra Austen and weaves a novel, Miss Austen, around their relationship.

The truth is that you can sign up for a library card any month you want to, but September has been set aside to highlight the benefits of a library card. These are a few that I know from personal experience.

As I review Kin: Rooted in Hope, a verse novel by Carole Boston Weatherford that is beautifully illustrated by her son Jeffery Boston Weatherford, I am going to suggest starting with the author’s and illustrator’s notes in the back. These notes will give a glimpse of the heart and perspective behind the book and set the stage for the book’s story.

One might wonder what a bare green pepper plant has to do with the newly crowned US Open women’s champion.

I’ll start with the pepper plant.

In my experience, most families with siblings raise children who claim that one or the other had a distinct advantage in the discipline department. Our two youngest children who are five and six years younger than their older brother vowed that he had a distinct advantage because he found a way to make me laugh when he got in trouble. It is possible that they have a point.

With Impossible Escape, Steve Sheinkin has done it again as he takes a true story and makes a page-turner out of it. The story begins with classmates and friends Rudolph Vrba (Rudi) and Gerta Sidonova as their normal lives in the 1939 Slovakia begin to be disrupted.

For some of us, the year is divided into two parts – College Football Season and The Rest of the Year. Thursday night the fun started with Jackson State vs. South Carolina State.

In 1925, Ida Bidson gets the opportunity to leave her rural one-room elementary school after she graduates and serves briefly as its teacher to go to high school in Steamboat Springs. She knows her destiny is to become a teacher, not to spend her life milking cows.

The Mississippi Book Festival’s Facebook post on August 20th read – “Happy Book Festival Recovery Day” to all who observe. I am guessing a number of people observed who didn’t even see the post. I know that I did!

Place has always been key in Kimberly Willis Holt’s middle grade novels. The Hurricane Girls is no exception. The newest edition to her collection takes place in New Orleans and draws from her own experience living there during one of her father’s military assignments.