How do you do things your own way when the rest of the world expects you to conform? Moniquill Blackgoose has been writing science fiction and fantasy since the age of twelve. According to Fantasy Cafe, she loved reading stories from the two genres growing up, but any representation of …
Can you trust information at face value when it’s being given to you? While working on a separate book, author Sulari Gentill consulted with a beta reader for fact-checking and other notes on how to improve her work. Among the research he sent her was a video of a crime …
What are the benefits of creating and consuming art? Funny story: A few days before writing this review, I stumbled on J.R.R. Talkin’s video essay What Was The Office All About? I thought Michael Schur’s sitcom The Office was fine, if too cringe for me, but out of curiosity I …
“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 …
