“What was it like for authors growing up?” This is the question author Kevin Henkes asked. He then wrote a book in response to that question, the story of young Martha Boyle who wants to be a writer. Olive’s Ocean would later be published in 2003, and go on to …
How do you modernize a story from a hundred years ago? In 1908, Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery published Anne of Green Gables. The novel would later become a beloved classic, garnering sequels, film and TV adaptations, and tourist attractions. Eventually, HarperCollins editor Tessa Woodward put a call out on …
How do you accept new love in your life after devastating loss? In mainstream storytelling, queer romance remains unconventional. Despite the many strides made towards equal representation, it’s rare when LGBTQ+ stories told by LGBTQ+ authors are given a platform to stand on, and even rarer that they break into …
“What Are You Looking For?” This is the question that reference librarian Sayuri Komachi asks of every patron who visits her desk in the community house library. She asks them further questions to get a better feel for which books they would find useful, and then she prints out a …
How do you get your family through hard times? That’s a question the Karangalan family has to answer for themselves in Tess Uriza Holthe’s 2002 historical fiction novel, When the Elephants Dance. The year is 1945, and the nation of the Philippines is in the final days of Japanese occupation …
Is love something you go looking for, or does it find you? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that question, but rather plenty of ways to explore it. And Adriana Herrera does just that in her 2022 historical romance novel A Caribbean Heiress in Paris, the first installment in her Las …
What can we learn from Shakespeare’s plays centuries after his time?That is the question Gary D. Schmidt asks in his 2007 book, The Wednesday Wars. The book has since sparked many companion books featuring the story’s secondary characters, including Okay for Now (2011) and Just Like That (2021).In the school …
In 2019, I became a founding member of a group called Building Emotional Regulation Through Storytelling (BERTS). Made up of writers, illustrators, teachers, and social workers, we came together with the goal of writing a series of children’s books, akin to Arthur or Frog and Toad. Our hope is that …
Katniss Everdeen’s story in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy is one of survival, perseverance, and complex trauma. She grew up in an oppressive dystopia where the rich overindulged, the poor fought each other for scraps, and twenty-three children died every year as punishment for the rebellion of their ancestors. She …
Hello. My name is LG Alfonso. We’re talking about The Princess Bride. Prepare for spoilers. Is The Princess Bride still as good as it was in 1987? I’m probably going to get a lot of flak for even asking that question. Most who’ve seen the cult classic at least once …
