Year Round Stories with Good Endings by Charmaine Barber: Finding Meaning in the Ordinary Moments of Life
Not every story needs some huge adventure, an impossible mystery, or a dramatic twist to land in your head. Sometimes the stories that feel the most familiar are the ones pulled from ordinary life, passing thoughts, remembered experiences, changing seasons, and little moments that seemed almost nothing when they happened. But later, somehow, grew more […]
The Puppy in Disguise by Daniel Silverhawk: A Playful Return to the Animal Kingdom Through Poetry
There is something naturally poetic about the animal world, like it has a pulse under everything. Animals can be amusing without intending it, mysterious without any explanation, and surprisingly expressive even when they never speak a word. For children’s writers, they bring a near limitless landscape for imagination, and it’s there, between the facts and […]
Twelve Plus One by Marleen Rita Duckhorn: Poetry That Looks Toward Earth, Heaven, Time, and the Unknown
There is something wonderfully characteristic about a poet reaching a thirteenth collection and then deciding not to call it thirteen. Marleen Rita Duckhorn instead gives us Twelve Plus One: A Collection of Poems, a title with a touch of playfulness that feels like it hints at the temperament behind the pages. Still, beyond that little […]
The Diagnostic Manual for Cats (DMC-I) by Jeannette Murray: Finally, a Diagnosis for Your Cat’s Questionable Behavior
Every cat owner has experienced that moment. Your cat stares at an empty corner like someone is standing there; it knocks an object from the table and keeps direct eye contact. Then it rushes through the house at a truly unreasonable hour, refuses the premium bed you purchased, climbs with gusto into the cardboard box […]
Ten to One, and It Has to Be, It Can Be No Other by D. N. Greenwald: Are We Living by Chance, Choice, or Design?
Why are we born into the lives we end up having? It is one of humanity’s oldest, and honestly most unsettling questions. One person enters the world with all sorts of opportunity, steadiness, and privilege. Another starts out with hardship, poverty, illness, conflict, or just plain circumstances that are totally beyond their control. In Ten […]
Sea Stories: How the Tiny Gobies Saved Their Coral Homes by Danielle Dixson and Maural Sowlat: Tiny Fish, a Fragile Reef, and a Remarkable Story of Survival
The ocean’s greatest heroes are not always its largest creatures. In Sea Stories: How the Tiny Gobies Saved Their Coral Homes, Danielle Dixson and Maural Sowlat turn a fascinating example of marine ecology into an accessible story for young readers. Against the spectacular backdrop of a coral reef, tiny gobies become unlikely defenders of the […]
Rebuild Your Spiritual Wall by Lerone Dinnall: A Call to Restore Faith, Covenant, and Spiritual Discipline
Walls have a lot of symbolic weight throughout Scripture. They stand for protection, separation, security, order, and belonging. When a wall is damaged or broken though, the sign is a little different, there is vulnerability there, maybe immediate. Dinnall applies this kind of picture directly to spiritual life. His main point is that when God’s […]
I Will Take You to Broceliande by Elizabeth Muhlhaus: Searching for the Origins of Peace in a World That Keeps Destroying It
What if the search for peace starts not with asking how peace can be made, but with trying to understand why human beings keep, again and again, breaking it? This spicy turnaround idea sits right at the middle of Elizabeth Muhlhaus’s I Will Take You to Broceliande: Threads of Insanity in Humanity, a work that […]
Guardian of Our Stars by Danielle Gao: A Cosmic Adventure That Asks Us to Look Beyond What We Think We Know
We think we know what aliens look like, or at least we think we do. For years, popular culture has been feeding us an image: enormous black eyes, green or gray skin, odd hands, bodies that seem unfamiliar. But what if our expectations are exactly the thing that keeps us from noticing something extraordinary when […]
Under the Banyan Tree by Lenore McKelvey Puhek: When First Love Finds Its Way Home
Some love stories are defined by the moment two people meet. Others by what comes after, even when they are forced apart, and there is this lingering, unseen weight to it. In Under the Banyan Tree, Lenore McKelvey Puhek looks closely at that second kind, with a tender tale of wartime romance, remembrance, sorrow, and […]