Lynette has been saving for three years for a down payment to buy the North Portland house she lives in with her mother and developmentally disabled brother. The owner is giving them a good deal, but Lynette has lousy credit, so her mother has to take out the loan. However, at the last minute they …
From Rebel Heart Books, Jacksonville, OR [TW: suicide] “The pressure to be great, not just good, is unrelenting.” –from What Made Maddy Run Not long ago, a fifteen-year old girl came into the store and stayed awhile. After picking out a few books, she shyly asked if I could set aside the books she …
From Broadway Books in Portland, OR: The only words we’re more tired of hearing than “pandemic” and “pivot” are “supply chain disruption.” We suspect you’re feeling much the same way. Sadly, the disruption is very real and definitely affecting the book world too. Between paper, ink, and labor shortages, as well as large container ships making circles around ports trying …
After writing YA books early in her career, Charlotte McConaghy leaps into the work of adult fiction with Migrations, her stunning novel about Franny and her obsessive quest to follow the world’s last Arctic terns across the hemispheres. Set in a near future in which almost all animal life is extinct, Franny hitches a ride aboard one …
You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive. ~ James Baldwin Since I …
In 2011, Laura Moulton founded Street Books, a mobile library serving people living outside in Portland, Oregon. That summer, Ben Hodgson became one of her most dedicated regulars, setting the still-unbroken single-season record for borrowing. Then Ben’s routine’s changed, and he didn’t cross paths again with Laura for almost two years. Loaners is the story they began to tell when they reconnected, …
From Third Street Books in McMinnville, OR: UFO FEST! I’ve missed the UFO Festival, haven’t you? It is one of my favorite events in McMinnville. Have you seen our window display? Window display queen Shay received some otherworldly inspiration. This year, the festival … look[ed] a little different (no parade – sad face) but there …
Graphic storytelling is the perfect format for this book, as its message is simultaneously complex and painfully simple: we are killing our planet, and the means of our destruction is so embedded in our society that we can’t fully see the extent of its influence. Gasoline Dreams makes difficult and urgent truths digestible and actionable. –Keith …
From Rebel Heart Books in Jacksonville, OR. By Eileen Bobek I didn’t always carry Romance at Rebel Heart. When I was younger, I used to read the Romance books that my mother had, kept behind the wired door of her bedside table: Nora Roberts, Lavyrle Spencer, Catherine Coulter and my all time favorite, Kathleen Woodiwiss’s …
From Third Street Books, McMinnville, OR: A few weeks ago, Jeff Bezos and three other humans flew into space for a brief moment. Much was made of this event. A few days later, a report was released here that addresses Amazon’s share of the book market. It was sobering, to say the least (more on this below). …
