Snow cones! Corn on the cob! Baby animals! Midway games! Get your young readers ready for the Great Minnesota Get Together with Astrid and Apollo....
Book Club
And This Is About Love
Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet in the game room of a Los Angeles hospital, where Sam is recovering from a bad car crash and Sadie’s sister is...
A Multigenerational Adventure
In this middle grade novel, Maizy Chen’s mother brings her from Los Angeles to Last Chance, Minnesota, to help her grandparents and their Chinese...
Now Is Not the Time to Panic
Four years ago, I attended Library Journal’s Day of Dialog and Book Expo in New York. For me, it was like attending the Academy Awards. I heard a...
Finding Beauty in a Midwest Spring
Is there anything beautiful in this early part of spring, when everything is gray and pale and mucky and melty? In Molly Beth Griffin’s 2021 picture...
Love Marriage Book Review
The novel Love Marriage by Booker Award–finalist Monica Ali opens in the London bedroom of 26-year-old Dr. Yasmin Ghorami. The delicious scents of...
A Buzz-Worthy Picture Book
We are out for honey with a hungry bear! Warm, woodsy illustrations of a sneaky bear and an industrious bee fill the pages of A Bear, a Bee, and a...
Author and Illustrator Creates Worlds of Imagination
Local brings imaginary worlds to life with his stories. Author, illustrator and Edina resident Derek Anderson is a natural creator. Beginning his...
Father-Daughter Cruise: ‘The Unsinkable Greta James’ Book Review
Jennifer E. Smith is a beloved teen author. If you haven’t read her, you may well know a young woman who has. Like Gabrielle Zevin and...
Supper at Six: ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ Book Review
In the early days of television, the period of time after lunch and before dinner was considered a vast desert for producers. These hours reflected...
Voices Carry: ‘The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World’ Book Review
The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina was translated from Italian by Lucy Rand and published in the U.S. in 2021. The novel...
Putting Grief to Paper
Creative pursuits can help people process grief and rediscover hope—as this local author can attest. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is something...
Secrets in the Library: ‘The Personal Library’ Book Review
' In late 1905, a Princeton University librarian named Belle da Costa Greene was interviewed by banker and financier J. Pierpont Morgan. Morgan was...
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Amor Towles’s first novel, Rules of Civility, made the best book lists of 2011. A Gentleman in Moscow did the same in 2016. Five years later, his...
A Delightful Summer Read
June Jones, 28, is the library assistant at the Chalcot Library in rural England. Built in the 1870s as the village school, the library is a red...
A Meditation on Love, Loss and Survival
In 1968, Congress made Memorial Day a national holiday to be celebrated on the last Monday in May. Originally, it was a day set aside to clean and...
Celebrating National Poetry Month
Before cave paintings, hieroglyphs on stone, parchment, quills, Gutenberg’s press or any concept of reading, there was poetry. Poetry—stories,...
Author Jayne Allen’s Debut Novel
It’s not easy to be a woman in your 30s. Potentially all at once, you’re climbing career ladders, dating and looking for a spouse, saving to buy a...
Cloud Cuckoo Land
A novel full of mystery and surprise. Anthony Doerr is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All The Light We Cannot See. In his latest novel, Cloud...
Reflections on Identity and Illness, Persistence and Hope
Playwright Sarah Ruhl and her husband, Tony Charuvastra, are taken by surprise when they learn that they are expecting twins—and when serious...
