It is very appropriate in this Drop Everything and Read Day set in honor of Beverly Cleary’s birthday, that I review a book whose characters would have been good friends with Ramona, the star of many of Beverly’s books.

April has long been designated as poetry month. My fondness for this genre goes back to my earliest memories with Mama reading poetry aloud to us – some we understood and some we did not. I loved the sounds even when the words took flight right over my head.

Ava Morgyn begins her debut novel with abundant problems for seventeen-year-old Cat when her adored grandmother dies. Ten years before, her unstable mother had dumped Cat off with the grandmother with nothing but a deck of tarot cards – minus one.

My daughter Anna, teacher turned librarian, and I don’t usually have serious disagreements about books. And truthfully, this one isn’t major. We are both in mourning with the death of Beverly Cleary at 104 this past weekend.

In her debut novel, The Sweet Taste of Muscadines, Pamela Terry puts words in the mouth of her protagonist Lila Bruce Breedlove to set up the premise of the book as she returns home after her mother’s unexpected death.

With the latest atrocities in Atlanta, saying “Tut-tut” and shaking my head doesn’t seem to be nearly enough.

The verse novel, Home Is Not a Country, is labelled for young adults and teens, but we shouldn’t let them have all the enjoyment.

Coming as no surprise to anyone would be a comment that I love words. I do show partiality in that I like some better than others. Maybe they tickle my throat, maybe they sing as they emerge, or maybe they nail an idea perfectly.

I have just listened to a book recommended to me long ago by my mother and wondered what she was thinking to give that book to a child hardly past her first decade. Recently, I have heard several references to Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton.

This week seems to have set people everywhere thinking about an anniversary that comes mid-March if not on the exact same day for everybody. One news group even suggested sharing the last photo taken before Covid confinement began.

In Classified: The Secret Career of Mary Golda Ross, Cherokee Aeorspace Engineer by Traci Sorell, Mary Golda Ross ignores expectations and plunges right into a mathematical world.

Vivian Kirkfield describes herself as a writer for children and has books out that have received good reviews. She threw out a challenge that she calls “50 Precious Words” on her blog.

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.