Nonfiction generally doesn’t keep the reader on the edge of the seat, but Three Ordinary Girls by Tim Brady often does just that. Beginning with the Third Reich troops swarming into the Netherlands in May 1940, the progress of World War II sets the stage for three unlikely heroes in three teenaged girls.

To be clear from the outset, this blog was triggered by my friends Dr. Rosemary Woullard and Dr. Sharon Gerald who have put their hearts and lives into community colleges, not Dr. Jill Biden, though she seems to have done the same.

Debut author Hope Adams puts one hundred and eighty condemned women on the Rajah, a convict transport ship leaving London in 1841 and heading to Australia in her novel, Dangerous Women.

Our world feeds the work ethic and I have bought in. From an early age, I knew the adage, “Make hay while the sun shines.”

Well-known writer Susan Goldman Rubin teams up with debut illustrator Richie Pope for Mary Seacole: Bound for the Battlefield, a picture book biography of a nurse during the Crimean War.

Weather this week won’t get any prize.

Nor will my doggerel, I surmise.

The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles comes out tomorrow on February 9th and has been named a “Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Library Journal and Goodreads.

Another Virginia wrote a letter to an editor of The Sun when she needed her belief in Santa Claus verified. I didn’t even have to write a letter for The Saturday Evening Post to address the reality of the tooth fairy and her relatives.

Any time the master of nonfiction for children, Carole Boston Weatherford, is paired with superb artist Floyd Cooper, a wonderful children’s book is guaranteed.

Recently, I saw a meme that brought back vivid memories from my childhood, “You don’t know what fear is until you have been chased by a rooster.”

A number of reviewing sources have called The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah “the most anticipated new book of 2021.” If you are like me and read The Nightingale and The Great Alone, you might have it on your list as well.

My first walks at our new address on Windwood Trace were in the dead of winter. I discovered quickly how well the street was named. Biting cold wind blew through every layer and turned my nose into an icicle.

When the daughter-in-law next door sends a message asking if you can take the two grandsons for a couple of hours and feed them lunch, it will be very helpful to have a copy of Great Grub from the Meerkat Café: a Safari Adventure in Your Own Burrow on hand.

On Tuesday, December 15, her name was Cyan. She stopped, properly distancing herself from the car window and asked, “Did you get your list of substitutions?” and then, “Were they all right?”

Move a generation beyond the Vietnam War and Toby’s summer in When Zachary Beaver Came to Town and pick up with Toby’s daughter in the 9/11 era in The Ambassador of Nowhere, Texas. A reader who loved the first book will have to wonder if the second measures up.

Notification of former governor William Winter’s death came from my Mississippi Today link, but it felt personal. My first knowledge of him came when I was a first-grader in his mother’s classroom.

Michael Rosen, well-known for his children’s books like the classic We’re Going on a Bear Hunt!, takes a different turn in The Missing: The True Story of My Family in World War II.

Let me begin by saying that 2020 was not my fault. I had my black-eyed peas and cabbage on New Year’s Day as I have every year. As this crazy year comes to a close, I have challenged myself to think of 20 positives and 20 negatives.

Shannon Hitchcock’s editor Andrea Pinckney said her middle grade novel about a Syrian refugee was missing something when she turned it in, but she offered to read it again. In the meantime, Shannon discovered the book Escape from Aleppo by N. H. Senzai and wondered if the missing piece was a Muslim voice.

Joseph has lost his staff. The moss on the manger roof is splotchy. The donkey has no ears and the cow only one of her horns. Since the nativity scene came from Sears and was inexpensive in the first place, why don’t we just replace it?