Joan Baez Smith, nicknamed “Baezy” (“rhymes with daisy”), is very excited about her upcoming birthday present. Her physicist mother has used her connections to allow her to pass through a Time Insertion Protocol portal to go back to Bethel, New York, in 1969 to see the famed Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Not only will […]
Thirteen-year-olds Eowyn Becker and Jules Marrigan became best friends during their first Wisconsin camp summer. Over the years, though, their friendship has developed cracks. Talented Eowyn suffers from severe stage fright, desperately misses her deceased mother, and resents her doctor father and Broadway-star brother, who have little time for her. She covets Jules’ supportive family […]
Ollie has ambitious intentions for dog sitting Milo, her grandmother’s puppy, but those plans are spoiled when he chews up her drawing, a gift intended for Grandma when she returns from visiting friends. The girl scolds the little dog and then takes some time to herself, leaving him behind and walking farther and farther away […]
Historians Gabriele and Perry did so well with The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe that they have followed it with a narrower focus on the ninth century. Perhaps the best-known figure of that era is Charlemagne (reigned 768-814), who assembled much of Europe into the largest empire since Rome’s and had himself […]
Salem, Massachusetts, is home to Charlene Morris’ haunted bed-and-breakfast. Dr. Jack Strathmore, the ghost in residence at the house he used to own, loves and watches over Charlene. Dane Stallone, a photographer originally from Salem, and 12 international models of both sexes are staying at the B&B while they shoot a Cupid-themed calendar Dane hopes […]
Eleventh grader Jordan is struggling in the wake of his mother’s death from cancer. He’s also being bullied at school for being a small, quiet boy. His father sold their old house and moved them into an apartment after their loss, a change Jordan has found upsetting and destabilizing. He copes by reading his mother’s […]
Following on Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Hurston spent years studying the life of Herod the Great, the famed Jewish leader. Her editor rejected the resulting book, which wound up in a trunk and then, following her death, in flames—the trunk burned by a crew hired to clear out her house—and miraculously rescued by […]
Kalaichandran, a pediatrician and journalist, starts by revisiting her travails working at an Ontario hospital where, she says, the hostility of senior staff caused her to develop anxiety, depression, and high cholesterol levels. The ordeal prompted her to research connections between mental and physical healing and embark on a tour of alternate therapies. The journey […]
Born and raised in Scotland, Isla MacKenzie has traveled to Japan to learn more about the Japanese branch of her mother’s family. She hopes to discover whether family lore is true and she’s descended from a warrior who served alongside legendary rebel samurai leader Takamori Saigō. When a strangely out-of-season typhoon hits the town of […]
Yuknavitch, whose previous memoir The Chronology of Water (2011) has been both a viral sensation and a touchstone for students of the genre, returns to personal writing after several novels. “What if we could read our past, our memories, even our bodies, as if they too were books open to endless interpretation?” The point, she […]