Is there a place that changed your life? Think of someplace, any location at all, that has a lot of meaning for you. Maybe it was part of your childhood, and it brings you comfort whenever you think about it. Maybe you haven’t been there yet, and thinking about going …
How do you handle loss? I’ve read Kelly Barnhill’s 2016 Newbery Medal-winning book The Girl Who Drank the Moon twice now, once for pleasure and once for this review. The first time I read it, I was fixated on the storyline of the Day of Sacrifice, and the people being …
How do you build a life for yourself from scratch? Full disclosure: Studio Ghibli’s Kiki’s Delivery Service is one of my favorite comfort movies. It’s the perfect film to have playing when I’m feeling down or when I want to work on a crafting project. So when I found out …
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 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 …
