After the festival’s over comes a week of recovery. The Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival has been a highlight of every year for me since 2002 until it was cruelly interrupted by the coronavirus. This year it was back, entailing leaving home about 8:30 AM and returning about 9:30 PM. That was last week. This week was recuperation and relishing the memories.

Chelsea Sedoti writes a mesmerizing young adult mystery in Tell Me What Really Happened. Part of the intrigue is her use of only the voices of the four friends of Maylee, the murder victim, as they answer interrogation questions in solitary first person police interviews.

Given that I have only had one signing for my book, feel free to question my expertise as I give hints about how to have an enjoyable one. Nonetheless, I go right ahead with my suggestions.

Start with a bit of island culture, throw in a love of music, and finish off with a plea for recycling trash and see if an interesting children’s book can happen. In The Girl Who Heard Music with words by Marni Fogelson and Mahani Teave and pictures by Marta Alvarez Miguens, the team does exactly that.

Evidently, there is now a day for almost everything. Today is the day for my favorite office supply – Paper Clip Day! You could spend a while on Google looking at paper clip usages and meanings. Some early versions had a patent, but the current model seems not to have been patented at all. It has been in production at least since the early 1870s by the Gem Manufacturing Company. 

In the book, The People’s Hospital, Dr. Ricardo Nuila takes a look at our broken medical system, focusing on the challenges and inequities in the health insurance world. He focuses on six case histories of people whose treatment has been affected by their income, immigration status, or twists in state Medicaid law.

It’s the middle of March and up pops a bud on our traditional family favorite milk-and-wine lily that blooms off and on all summer! Admittedly, we have had a few warm days, but on the day I discover the bud, the high is 49° with a freeze warning for the night.

My two for one picture book review today features two picture books from the same publisher to help children deal with some of life’s struggles. They are neither preachy nor didactic but approach real problems in a child friendly way.

Today, March 11, 2023, marks the 107th anniversary of the birth of a premature baby in Brooklyn, New York. His chances for survival were precarious. As a child of Jewish immigrant parents in a daily struggle to make ends meet, his chances for making a name in the world were even less probable.

Jennifer Zeigler begins her book, Worser, with a title that is a play on words. Middle schooler William Orser acquired the nickname long ago when someone noticed that his first initial combined with his last name made “worser.” The name stuck with an additional irritation to him because it is so ungrammatical.

Obsessions, compulsions, manias, urges, impulses, yearnings, desires, hankerings – we call them by a lot of names. Some have positive connotations and some are negative. Some are sophisticated words to go in technical manuals, and some might be spit out by a straw-chewing guy in overalls, sitting atop a wood rail fence.

Mark Dawidziak sets the tone for his search for the cause of death of Edgar Allan Poe as he begins his account with Poe’s passing from this life on an appropriately stormy night on October 7, 1849 when he was only forty years old, adding that nobody knows the precise cause.

Twenty-five feet of crumbly brick walk in need of replacement. Our walk was an open invitation to tumble and spend time recuperating from a bad fall. The brick beauty was long gone, replaced with broken shards interspersed with weeds. But just try to get a brick and concrete expert out to restore it. Not twenty-five feet.

It started with a note in a package from our librarian daughter back in 2016, “Dad, you’ll recognize yourself on page 140 especially (and other pages as well). You’ll both enjoy this.” Inside the package was A Man Called Ove. Page 140 said, “When he was driving somewhere, he drew up schedules and plans and decided where they’d fill up.

Rez Dogs, by noted author Joseph Bruchac, is an example of my contention that some of today’s best writers are doing their work for middle graders. The verse novel begins with Malian, on a visit to her grandparents on a Wabanaki reservation, when she notices a dog. Her connection to the modern world comes immediately.

Bucket lists of various lengths have gotten a lot of hype since the movie back in 2007. My very short bucket list contained important items. My husband Al and I completed the first item of visiting all fifty states several years ago. Yesterday was a big day as proof came early and late that an even more important item could get that marvelous checkmark.

Erika Bolstad begins her eight-year memoir with curiosity about her great-grandmother. “Her name was Anna Josephine Sletvold. That’s about all I knew when all of this began during the darkest days of the Great Recession.”

The mail still runs. Stores are open. Nobody gets cake. Still, today, we are celebrating a day that is dear to my heart. Read Aloud Day has been official for only 14 years, but reading aloud became a favorite activity for me by the time I was ten years old. My nine-years-younger sister Ruth became my willing audience.

In case you’ve ever wanted to read a story that you’ve already read, but told from a different viewpoint, this is your chance. Little Women, written by Louisa Mae Alcott, told her story based largely on her own family from Jo’s viewpoint. Since she was the model for Jo, she knew the narrator well. In Marmee, Sarah Miller returns to the setting with the same story but told from the viewpoint of Jo’s mother who is Marmee in Little Women.

Following has become a big thing on social media platforms, but it has been around in other forms for a long time. I can’t even guess how many times I’ve heard people talk about “following the career” of someone who started as a barely known and moved on to great success. I’m using this meaning for my blog today.