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KILLING SHAKESPEARE

Nathan, Isabel, and Suresh, a motley group of misfits, are trying to go back in time to the year 1613. Nathan, who got caught cheating in English class, wants to make sure Shakespeare’s plays are destroyed in the Globe Theatre fire so no one will ever have to study them. Isabel longs to meet her […]

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PONY CONFIDENTIAL

Twenty-five years after 12-year-old Penelope Marcus rode into the woods with Frank Ross, the owner of High Rise Farms, newly revealed evidence suggests that she bashed him to death. She’s arrested, extradited from California to New York, and uprooted from both Laus, her estranged husband, and Tella, the daughter who struggles with mental health issues. […]

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COLD

Rhyming couplets accompanied by nature scenes encourage youngsters to admire what the outside world has to offer in the colder seasons. Perfectly pitched and paced, McCanna’s elegant, well-chosen words would make this a pleasure to read aloud. “Cold is a feeling, / a quiver, a quake / that sinks to the bone till you shiver […]

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IMPRESSION SUNRISE

This sweeping, generous narrative takes its title from the Monet’s famous contribution to a groundbreaking 1874 group show in Paris in which he and a group of well-known colleagues, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Edgar Degas, introduced the world to impressionism. The author uses the long arc of Monet’s career, his many sales and […]

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PARANORMAL PERSPECTIVES

The story of the main character, Susan, begins before she is born. Susan, as a soul (with the name of Soonam), makes the decision to incarnate on Earth. Her arrival occurs in 1947. Even though this is a choice on her part, she often wonders as a child what exactly she’s doing on the planet. […]

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DODGE COUNTY, INCORPORATED

“Corporate agriculture has not only destroyed the rural spirit and harmony of living as one with the land but of living with one another as well.” So writes Trom Eayrs toward the end of her book, equal parts manifesto and memoir. A constant presence is her father, the grandson of a Norwegian immigrant who made […]

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WE WEAVE

When a youngster and his grandma receive notice that his school is switching to at-home learning, the boy becomes concerned. So far, the family has relied on his phone for their internet needs; now they’ll need a computer. His grandmother reminds him, “We weave to get what we need….It’s how we’ve always survived.” She shears […]

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BLACK REVOLUTIONARIES

It is a measure of both the Black Panthers’ renown and the fear its members inspired that Ross Perot, running for president in 1992, “claimed that the Vietnamese sent some Black Panthers to kill him in 1969.” Historian Street, the chief of police in Dallas, where Perot lived, refutes Perot’s story, saying, “There were only […]

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LIVING WEST AS FEMINISTS

Comer, author of Surfer Girls in the New World Order and Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing, tackles her subject as a never-ending project rather than an ultimate guide to the complexity of Western feminism. Using the metaphor of travel and road trips (à la Thelma and Louise), she guides […]

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NAZIS AT THE WATERCOOLER

World War II had barely ended, writes former Associated Press chief correspondent Petty, when German chancellor Konrad Adenauer declared impatiently, “This sniffing around for Nazis has to stop.” It did, quickly. As Petty notes, 24 major players in the Third Reich were put on trial “on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes […]