Outlander is a timeless tale about Claire Randall — a 1946 WWII nurse who travels back in time through a circle of stones in the Highlands of Scotland. The year is now 1743: English soldiers hunt Highlanders and Claire lands in the hands of Clan Mackenzie, and is forced to marry the young Jamie Fraser for …
In Zumas’s all-too-familiar dystopia set in a small Oregon coastal town, Roe v. Wade has been overturned. The narrative explores the complexity of childbearing — both the desire for and not for — and the reduction of a woman’s identity to such choices, braiding together the perspectives of a pregnant teen, a single teacher who …
Every morning lately, it seems we wake to a bleaker world than the one we inhabited yesterday. Fortunately, Rebecca Solnit has been keeping an eye out for little pinpricks of light, untold or forgotten kindnesses that quietly continue to make our world a good, compassionate place. From grassroots movements to spontaneous personal sacrifices, Solnit’s subjects …
I never planned on moving so much. For almost twenty years, my husband (and eventually our daughter) and I have been moving every few years. To a new house, a new county, a new town. All the while trying to figure out which, of all these places, to call home. We weren’t locals anywhere, not …
The conservation of gray wolves in the western U.S. has been an uphill battle for years, but it remains that this keystone predator is essential to the health of an ecosystem. As in the case of this book, sometimes it takes a personal narrative to understand this fraught issue. Blakeslee follows the life and death …
Matthew Pearl clearly loves reading and literary history. Some of his prior historical thrillers involved Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Dante. The Last Bookaneer takes place in England and Samoa, where a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labors over his last novel while two infamous “Bookaneers” plot to steal it before the new international copyright …
In Katherine Arden’s debut novel you will travel to a small village in the Russian wilderness, where during the long winters you gather by the fire and tighten your belt against hunger. Where fairy tales are told as warnings and superstitions are high, and wise Russians fear Morozko the frost demon of winter. In this village …
Tiffany Harlan, Manager/Book Buyer at Grass Roots Books & Music in Corvallis, OR, recently gave an annual Fall Children’s Book Roundup book talk for educators of the Mid Valley Reading Council of Oregon. As part of the talk, Tiffany created thematic displays in the children’s area, including one highlighting books about diversity, kindness, and community. …
Literary Witches is a tribute to a pantheon of women authors like no other– part biography, part grimoire– envisioning their conjuring of words and worlds as sources of magic. Jamaica Kincaid becomes “the sorceress of islands,” Mary Shelley “the alchemyst of monsters.” Virginia Woolf “understood the longing of cupboards when no one was looking into them.” …
Have you ever wondered what it would have been like to fall in love with Edgar Allan Poe and his dark soul with all its demons? Lynn Cullen’s novel Mrs. Poe is probably as close as you will ever get. In this historical mystery you follow a young poet Frances Osgood as she meets her …
