Under the pen name Claire Sandy, Bernie Strachan wrote a wonderful book I recently had the pleasure of reviewing. What Would Mary Berry Do? is a delightful tale about a happy family trying to live life in a better way, namely by the female head of the household reaching out to her new found touchstone,… Read More Author Spotlight: Bernie Strachan
Community-building is a passion of mine–which makes sense, seeing as how it is one of two major concepts addressed in so many of the various features on this blog! As a writer, I have been puzzled for quite some time at the perceived dichotomy between the very personal business of writing and leading a social… Read More Author Spotlight: Lee Murray’s Return
In Katarina Bivald’s book, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend–which I reviewed last month–a small town is suffering the consequence of a mass exodus of its population. In the questions and attitudes of its remaining residents one can find the way such a exodus affects them; faced with their pain I found myself wondering how… Read More Author Spotlight: Katarina Bivald
The main character in Elizabeth Bass’ book, Life is Sweet, is a former teenage star of a hit ‘90s sitcom that decided she had enough of being in the limelight and most to Leeburg, Virginia, a seemingly perfect place to start over and, this time, to lead some sort of a normal life (read more… Read More Author Spotlight: Elizabeth Bass
In her Dirt Diaries series, the third and last installment of which I recently reviewed, author Anna Staniszewski continues to develop the character of tween-aged Rachel Lee in a refreshingly positive way. The narrative in this book is not watered down into a simplified, black and white, good versus evil story. Books such as The… Read More Author Spotlight: Anna Staniszewski
The quest to become a better writer is one that inspires many a conversation with authors one admires. A reviewer has the opportunity to meet many authors with whom one can have inspiring conversations. These conversations are increasingly feeding into the posts on this blog, so I thought it would be timely to start a… Read More Author Spotlight: Carina Axelsson