I should perhaps be focusing on Coats’s newest book, the middle-grade fantasy The Green Children of Woolpit, but it’s just come out and well, I haven’t read it yet. But I really want to, based on how much my daughter and I enjoyed Coats’s earlier novel, The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming. I can’t …
Thanks to the hard work of festival organizers, volunteers, authors, and illustrators and the enthusiasm and patience of thousands of attending book lovers, the Seattle Children’s Book Festival was a tremendous success. The festival, held in playground tents and in the gym of Greenwood Elementary in Seattle, was full from opening at 11:00 beyond the …
The first Seattle Children’s Book Festival will be held Saturday, September 28, 2019 from 11:00- 3:00 at Greenwood Elementary (144 NW 80th St) in Seattle. The event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by The Innovation Press, Madison Books, Phinney Books, Seattle Public Schools, Seattle Milk Fund, the Seattle Office of …
After being diagnosed with brain cancer as a teen, Seattle writer Jeff Henigson made an unconventional Starlight Children’s Foundation wish. He wanted to (and did) travel to Moscow to talk with Gorbachev about nuclear disarmament. But this memoir is less about cancer and the Cold War than it is about surviving high school and searching …
Not long ago a book sneaked up on me. The paperback of Valerie Trueblood’s Terrarium hit the shelves of Madison Books, which served as a reminder that I’d had the hardcover sitting unread on my nightstand for far too long. I tried one story in the collection, then another, and kept going until the characters began …
From the Madison Books newsletter I hurried past Cal Anderson Park this week in time to join a crowd gathered in front of the light rail station there. It was a joyful throng, although it was a death that had brought us all together. We were present to honor the memory of Barbara Bailey, a …
It’s a commonplace (at least with me) to say that sometimes the best way to describe reality is to distort, enhance, or otherwise defamiliarize it through fantasy and speculation. Helen Phillips seems to agree with me, at least to judge by her intense, somewhat surrealistic fiction. The Need, a thriller about the anxieties of parenthood …
A classic of European literature unavailable in English for decades, Three Summers is perfectly timeless and perfectly seasonal. Set in the countryside of prewar Greece, it traces the doings and developing identities of a trio of sisters growing into adulthood, each of whom finds a different way to balance her desires for love and freedom. …
Seattle Public Library and Seattle Arts and Lectures put together another fun summer reading challenge this year– Book Bingo for adults and teens! Again this year, one of the squares is “recommended by a librarian or independent bookseller.” Many Seattle area stores have even printed out copies of the bingo cards for customers who want …
“1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian …
