1318 - 1322 (2026 #28 - #32). June 2026

Manufacturing a Duchess by Tracy Wise

Subtitled "A Novel of the Regency Era," I'd classify this as Regency historical romance, in that it's not a Traditional Regency romance in the vein of the genre's pioneer, Georgette Heyer.  Wikipedia's description of Regency historical romances notes that they 

may include more social realism, or, conversely, anachronistically modern characterization, ... their general setting is in Regency England, but the plot, characterization, or prose style of the work extends beyond the genre formula of the Regency romances published by Heyer and her successors. Characters may behave according to modern values, rather than Regency values.

That's certainly the case with Manufacturing a Duchess (clever title, by the way), especially with the main (title) character.  Aurora Hardcastle is the only child of a country doctor turned cloth manufacturer, and, although a heiress, is not your typical duchess-to-be.  Alec Raeburn is a widowed Scottish duke with a young daughter and no money.  He's looking for an heiress who can also be a mother to his beloved daughter.  Aurora's parents send her to London for the season and put her in the care of the parents a former classmate of Aurora's, the gorgeous Millicent ("Missie") Wentworth, whose family needs the money Aurora's parents provide - Lord Wentworth is a gambler.  Meanwhile, Alec is accompanied by his wealthy cousin, Finlay ("Finn," aka Lord Henry, Duke of Galloway), as they are all entering the "marriage mart."  The four, along with Alec's precocious daughter Marjorie, all meet early on at the Tower of London, where Aurora and Marjorie bond.  Both men are smitten with the beautiful Missie, but Alec knows he should focus on Aurora, needing her money.

This was predictable, but still a light, fun, summer beach or vacation read.

I think my mother read every single book written by Heyer - at least, I seem to remember seeing hardbound copies of her other books on our bookshelves when I was a kid (1960s and early 1970s), and I probably read at least one of them.  My mother asked for Cousin Kate (originally published in 1968) for Christmas sometime after it was republished in 2009, and I know I read that one.  It is described as "one of only two Heyer Gothic Regency romances," because of its elements of suspense and horror.  I'm not a fan of either Regency romances or the Gothic genre.

Lost Treasures of Houston by William Dylan Powell

In late February 2025, I was contacted by author William Dylan Powell, requesting permission to use a couple photos of the long-gone Peppermint Park (a kiddie amusement park) in Houston in his upcoming nonfiction book, Lost Treasures of Houston.  He found the photos in a post I wrote about the park for my genealogy and family history blog, and I really appreciate his asking my permission first before using them. 

In January 2026, Powell sent me a copy of the book in gratitude.  As he said in his email, the book "celebrates 200+ beloved places, people and phenomena around town that are now sadly gone."  I'm finally getting around to reviewing it.

Lost Treasures of Houston has 176 large-format pages (9" x 12"), and each page covers two items at most.  The book is divided into five large sections, which are designated with different colors along the head and top of the fore-edge (opposite the book's spine).  The sections are Food and Drink, Entertainment, Retail, Media, and Community, and a table of contents further subdivides these.  (The book also has an index.)

My mother's roots in Houston go back to 1897.  Although I'm not a native, I lived there from infancy in 1958 through 1976, and visited a lot in following years, as I still have family and friends living there.  The book covers places and people that had come and gone both before I lived there and after I moved away, but I found plenty of memories.  There's something in this book for Houstonians of all ages, current and former, and it would be a great gift and/or coffee table book.  It's attractive and easy to read.

The photo I contributed is on page 57, and I'm also credited by name.  Powell also listed all the contributors in the acknowledgements section at the front of the book (page vii).  My one little gripe is that he also should have indicated that the abbreviation HHRC refers to the Houston History Research Center (part of the Houston Public Library), as that is the source for many of the great old photographs in the book.

The Paper Princess by Elisa Kleven

This is an inspiring story about a little girl who creates a paper doll that is blown away by the wind and has a number of adventures, before returning to the little girl.  Elisa Kleven's mixed-media illustrations (watercolor, colored pencils, ink, crayon, collage) are wonderfully colorful and detailed.  This story was originally published in 1994, and my review copy is the beautiful deluxe gift edition being published in June 2026, featuring gold foil stamping and an embossed image of the originally-blank side of the paper princess.  In a 2015 interview, Kleven discussed the origins of the book, and how it helped her make sense of the early losses of her mother and brother.  Recommended - I look forward to giving this book to my great-granddaughter.

The Fourth Princess by Janie Chang

I'm not a big fan of the Gothic subgenre and haven't read much of it.  I've read a couple other historical fiction books by Janie Chang, so I decided to request this one from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, as it was the only book that appealed to me in the February 2026 offerings.  I just received it this month.

The book is set in Old Shanghai, China, in 1911.  The story opens with nineteen-year-old Lisan Liu, an orphan whose guardian since childhood is the wealthy Master Liu, applying for a job as secretary to Caroline Vessey Stanton, an heiress American who has moved into the remote Lennox Manor with her husband Thomas.  The Manor belongs to Thomas' uncle Mason Burnett, with whom Thomas is investing in a Chinese railway venture.  

Lisan gets the job and goes to live at the manor, with Master Liu requiring that she come home on her days off.  At the manor, Lisan is haunted by her dreams, and by a vision of a woman in a red dress that she often spots on the manor grounds.  However, her days are brightened by the presence of Yao, a former gardener of Master Liu's now working for the Stantons.

It soon becomes apparent that all the main characters have secrets - or, as in the case of Lisan, others have secrets about her.  Perhaps because I read so few Gothic novels, I have to admit I was surprised by some of the turns of events in the story.  

In an author's note at the end of the novel, Janie Chang admits that the Gothic subgenre required that she:

... really had to hold back on history.  During the first iteration of the book, it just didn't seem gothic enough, and I realized that there was too much about what was going on in China outside Lennox Manor.  It's 1911 and the Qing empire is on its way out (China becomes a republic in 1912), there is talk of revolution, China is fragmenting into a nation carved up by warlords, and political intrigue abounds.  My characters are aware of all the tumult around them, but in gothic fiction the focus has to be the danger from within: the location and/or its residents.  One revision later, less history, more atmosphere, and the story was starting to feel like a gothic novel.

I guess I would have preferred more history, less atmosphere.  The author's note does go on to explain some of the history, as well as other aspects of the novel.

James by Percival Everett

I've been wanting to read this book for some time, given that it was the National Book Award winner for fiction in 2024 and the Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction in 2025 (among other awards).  It's a sort-of retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain from the point of view of the slave Jim (the James of this title).  If I read Huck Finn, it would have been back in high school, and I don't remember it.  So that's next on my list to read.  Regardless, I know enough about Twain's novel to know that James stands on its own.  Incredibly thought-provoking, and a short, easy read (I finished it in thirty-minute increments over six days).

© Amanda Pape - 2026 - e-mail me!

1313 - 1317 (2026 #23 - #27). May 2026

Are You Speedy by Tim Button, illustrated by Ana Martín Larrañaga

This is a cute and colorful board book featuring various pieces of construction equipment (plus a tow truck and race car) being asked the same question, "Are you speedy?"  My great-grandsons will love it for that reason alone, along with the mirrored page at the end.  I like that each piece of equipment is named, but I'm not so fond of the made-up words (like diggy, mixy, lifty, scoopy rolly, towy) and two others (dumpy and pushy) that don't have the book's intended meanings, all used to correlate with the adjective speedy.  I don't think their mothers - my teacher granddaughters - will like that either.

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

At 638 pages (in my advance reader edition), this book is almost half again as long as Kathryn Stockett's first book, The Help - but oh so worth it.  Set mostly in Oxford, Mississippi (home of "Ole Miss" University), all the action happens in the months of July through September, 1933, when the Great Depression was affecting almost everyone.

The story is told by two narrators:  Birdina “Birdie” Calhoun, a 24-year-old single woman from the small Mississippi Delta town of Footely, and Margot “Meg” Louise Lefleur, an eleven-year-old apparently abandoned by her mother two years earlier, and living in an Oxford girls' orphanage run by the sadistic Garnett Pittman.

Birdie is living with her mother and grandmother and they're getting low on money, so Birdie is sent to Oxford to see her younger sister Frances, who's supposedly married into money.  That turns out not to be the case, and Birdie ends up staying in Oxford longer than originally planned. 

Before she learns this, Birdie is asked to help with the bookkeeping at the orphanage, where Frances volunteers.  There, she meets Meg, and is appalled by her treatment. Considered unadoptable, when Meg turns twelve, she’ll be sent to work in a Biloxi cannery for no pay.  Birdie tries to help Meg get adopted - and not long after that happens, Meg's mother Charlie reappears.

Charlie and Birdie come up with an outrageous plan to help themselves, Frances and her family, and other women raise money.  I don't want to give too much away in this review - suffice to say "The Calamity Club" is one of the names considered (but not adopted) for their enterprise, and there will be a whole lot of calamity if it fails.

Granted, parts of the plot are a bit unbelievable, but the fantastic characterizations and attention to historical details (I especially loved the descriptions of food Birdie prepared) kept me reading.  This book made me both laugh and cry - there are a number of serious themes addressed in the novel.  It's definitely worth the 638+ pages.

This would be a great book for discussion groups.  One reviewer even created a playlist of songs mentioned in the novel.

The Women by Kristin Hannah

Earlier this month, I was looking for something to read (having at that point finished all the books I had that needed reviews) and I checked Libby, the app used by most libraries for their patrons to check out e-books.  One of the options was to see what skip-the-line books were available.  One of those was this one.  I'd read some of Hannah's books, most recently The Nightingale, which I really liked, so I decided to try this one.  The e-book checkout period was only a week, but I was able to get a print copy at the local library.

This book was just okay.  The main character is Frances "Frankie" McGrath, growing up wealthy on California's Coronado Island.  She's 20 and studying to be a nurse when the book begins in May 1966 at a going-away party for her older brother and only sibling, Finley, who has recently graduated from the Naval Academy and is heading to Vietnam.  She's feeling a bit sad and retreats to her father's office, where he has a "heroes' wall" of all the men in the family who have served in the military.  When Finley's best friend Joseph Ryerson "Rye" Walsh finds her there, he questions why there are no women on the wall outside of wedding photos.  He comments, "Women can be heroes."

That comment sticks with Frankie and is the theme of the book.  Right after Frankie enlists as an Army nurse, she learns her brother was killed in action.  Nevertheless, she serves two tours of duty.

The parts of the book set in Vietnam are the strength of this book.  The action and events involving her nursing and life on base in the midst of war are realistic.  Her romances with a married doctor and with Rye, who turns up later, are the book's weaknesses.

Almost halfway through this 471 page book, Frankie returns home.  She's suffering from PTSD and spirals downward.  Once again, the focus on her (failed) romances weakens this part of the book too.  I would have preferred more focus on her two best friends from Vietnam, Ethel and Barb, with more about what happened in their lives after returning home.  They were only in the story when they seemed to drop everything to help Frankie, in California and elsewhere.  

In addition, Frankie's family wealth gives her things (like a car and a beachfront cottage) and privileges (such as a way out of some legal troubles) that most women returning from Vietnam (especially Barb, who is Black) did not have.  But perhaps that is some of the point of the book - even with her advantages, PTSD nearly destroys Frankie.

I did like the numerous references to the music of the era.  I was nine in 1966 so I recognized all the songs mentioned.

Midnight, at the War by Devi S. Laskar

I won this book in Bookreporter's Spring Reading Contest.  I enter these contests for anything that sounds remotely interesting.  This novel, by former journalist Devi S. Laskar, was inspired by journalists like Christiane Amanpour and likely the author's own experiences as a woman of color.

The narrator is American journalist Rita Das, born Elena Keppler, who is half-Bengali.  The prologue is from March 2003, with Rita about to head overseas again, estranged from her husband and recently living with an old flame.  The story then flashes back to April 2001 and an earlier trip overseas and continues on through June 2003.  She's going to the same unnamed war-plagued country, somewhere in the Middle East - really, it could be anywhere.  

Besides battling misogyny and racism, Rita is also dealing with the aftermath of 9/11 - on travel, on being a journalist, on working in the Middle East, and in her personal life.  Her efforts to help her interpreter and his wife on 9/11 caused her to be late flying home - and she missed saying goodbye to her mother, dying from cancer.  Besides the marital and love life problems, there's also issues with her father, the loss of her best friend in the Twin Towers collapse, and the kidnapping of two fellow female journalists (one of whom dies after her release).  There's also trauma from her childhood - a violent death the family witnessed while visiting India, and various incidents of racism as her father's work takes the family to different college towns, many of them conservative towns in the South.

The Last Bookstore in America by Amy Stewart

This was a fun read.  In a Q&A on Goodreads, author Amy Stewart said this about writing The Last Bookstore in America, published in 2011:

I wrote it as a lark, really: We had just bought our bookstore (Eureka Books in Eureka, CA*) and it was a stormy day in January, raining so hard that you literally couldn't see anything outside our windows. It felt like we were a ship lost at sea. We hadn't had a single customer all day--not a promising start to owning a bookstore! I said something like, "It feels like we're the last bookstore in America right now." Then we got to talking about WHY a bookstore would be the last bookstore in America--like, what had happened to all the others--and why a bookstore in a little town like Eureka would be the last to survive. Ebooks had just come on the scene, and I have to say that I predicted many things that came later, including, most recently, Amazon opening brick and mortar stores! So yes, that's what it was all about--plus the gardening!

* Stewart no longer owns this bookstore, but it looks just like the building on the book's cover.

This is Stewart's only fiction title (so far) besides her Kopp Sisters series (of which I've read two so far).  That series was inspired by some historical research for Stewart's The Drunken Botanist (which I've also read).  Like the latter, most of her nonfiction works are related to plants and gardening in some way.

Indeed, there's a secret garden in The Last Bookstore, where a main character grows something that makes the bookstore - also located in Eureka - unique.  The reader catches on pretty quickly on what's going on - unlike the primary characters, Lewis - who has inherited the bookstore from his Uncle Sy - and his wife Emily.  Eureka residents trying to keep the secret from them provides most of the humor in the book.

It's amusing that I read this book as a library loan on a Kindle (although I think the "Gizmo" in the novel that leads to the demise of bookstores is actually a smartphone).  In my thirteen years as a university librarian, I also watched our collection of print materials shrink.  With the exception of children's picture books (which really can't be replicated on a phone or Kindle's tiny screen), students and faculty weren't using them much any more.

I liked this book's ending.  Bookstores (and libraries) have had to reinvent themselves, and have enjoyed a renaissance.   I was bothered by various errors in the text; it would have benefitted from more thorough editing.

© Amanda Pape - 2026 - e-mail me!

1308 - 1312 (2026 #18 - #22 ). April 2026

Family Drama by Rebecca Fallon

I didn't really like this novel I requested (and got) from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.  There weren't many books offered that month that interested me, and maybe I would have been better off winning the other one I requested.

The story starts in November 1997 with the funeral of soap-opera actress Susan Byrne. She is Susan Bliss - Mrs. Al(cott) Bliss - to her history professor husband and seven-year-old twins, Sebastian (Seb) and Viola (Lola) - yes, named for the twins in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.  Susan has died too young, of cancer, after a career that necessitated traveling back and forth from her work in Los Angeles and the family home on the Massachusetts coast.  The novel then goes back and forth in time, from 1983 (when Susan and Al met) to 2013, and various years in between.  

A part of the story I had trouble with was Viola meeting one of her mother's co-stars, Orson, at age seven - and then falling in love with him when she was in college in London at age 20, when he's a big star.  It felt creepy to me, given that Orson was in his late 20s when they first met.  I also didn't care for the way he treated her, particularly a scene in Massachusetts when they accidentally meet up with Orson's and Susan's former producer.

Unlike some other reviewers, I actually have some sympathy for her husband Al.  As a recent widow, I could very much relate to the feelings he had after Susan's death, particularly right after the funeral.  The "certainty is eroding" (page 14 in the advance proof) that it was love at first sight:

Desolate questions.  What he would give to know what she was thinking.  His mind seeks absolutes and absolution, definitive confirmation that it all meant something.

Given everything else that happens in the novel, I could understand Al throwing away the videotapes of Susan's soap opera episodes, the "evidence of Susan's other life" (page 15 of the advance proof).

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

I read this book for Tarleton's No-Stress Book Club, where we don't all read the same book - just the same genre.  This month's genre was science fiction, and, while I could have just talked about some books I've read in the past (and did), I needed to start a new book anyway, and found this one in the "skip the line" tags in Libby.  It said it was a Hugo Award nominee, and I've always been a sucker for time travel books, so I decided to read it.

In this one, set sometime in the near future, the narrator, an unnamed female British government worker, is offered a well-paying position in the new "Ministry of Time" as a "bridge" to an "expat" - a companion to a person brought from the past into the present via a time door recently-acquired by the British.

The narrator is assigned to "1847" - British naval officer Graham Gore (a real person in history), who was about to die that year on Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition looking for the Northwest Passage in Arctic Canada.  The book is interspersed with segments relating Gore's experiences with the expedition, as his backstory is relevant to near-future plot.

The best part of the book for me was the interactions of the two main characters with the other "expats" - two other men and a woman brought from 1645 (Cardingham, Battle of Naseby), 1665 (Margaret, the Great Plague of London), and 1916 (Arthur, the Battle of the Somme).  Unlike Graham Gore, none of these were historical persons, but like him, all were pulled from their time period just before their deaths, in order to not affect the history from their eras.  Their adaptations to modern life provide much of the humor and heart in the book, and I would have like to see more of their adjustments and interactions.

These four - and three others who did not survive in the novel (two died in transit and one, Anne from Robespierre's Paris in 1793, died in an escape attempt) - were brought forward partly to test whether time travel is feasible for a human body.  As the book continues, the reader feels that something else is going on with this project - Cardingham and Gore are allowed to train with guns, for example.

In an article, author Kalianne Bradley explains that she got hooked on "a) Graham Gore b) Franklin’s Arctic expedition c) polar exploration in general" late in the pandemic.  Essentially, the book started out as a fanfiction piece, as the unnamed narrator is much like the author (part-Cambodian; her mother is a refugee, and time travel becomes a metaphor for the immigrant experience). The narrator and Gore have a hot romance.  

I had trouble following parts of the book - I'm sure I missed some clues as to what was going on along the way.  There's a twist near the end of the book that I did not see coming, but the conclusion was disappointing for me.  I think I may need to read it again to better understand it, but read Rogue Male (by Geoffrey Household, a book belonging to the narrator that Gore picks up and reads) first.

The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali

I read this book because Reading Group Guides said it was (one of) the most discussed books in 2024 - and, by this point, the only one of the most discussed books from 2000 through 2024 that I had not read.  It's rather timely with the current (stupid) war with Iran.

This story begins in 1981, when Ellie (a nickname for Elaheh), an Iranian now living in New York City, gets a call from her old, estranged friend Homa.  Then the novel goes back to 1951, when seven-year-old Ellie and her mother have to move after the death of Ellie's father from their nice home into the slums of Tehran.  There, Ellie meets Homa, a girl about her age, and they become friends.  But Ellie's mother later marries Ellie's father's brother, and they move back into a wealthy part of Tehran.  Ellie forgets about Homa, until she shows up years later as a scholarship student in Ellie's elite high school.

The girls both get into the University of Tehran, where Homa plans to study law and become a judge, meanwhile becoming a communist activist, like her father (who'd been arrested).  But naïve Ellie (studying English) shares too much information with the wrong person, and Homa winds up arrested too.  During her six months in prison, she is raped and later has the baby, a girl named Bahar.  A college friend, Abdul, marries Homa before the birth and claims Bahar as his own, but he is killed in the Cinema Rex fire in August 1978.

Meanwhile, Ellie has married a fellow student and they moved to New York City when he is offered a research position there, just before the Islamic Revolution breaks out.  They are unable to have children, and Ellie works at a cosmetics counter in a department store.  It's not long after this that Ellie gets the phone call.  The book ends with an epilogue set in 2022.

This book reminded me a lot of A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, which was set in Afghanistan and takes place from 1973 through about 2003, primarily in Kabul.  With that book, I found myself eagerly looking forward to finding out what happened next (there were some surprises).  With this book, not so much, although I definitely admired Homa, the true shir-zan (Farsi for lion woman) of this story.

The Medicine Woman of Galveston by Amanda Skenandore

It's 1900, and Tucia (what an awful name), a female doctor who made a fatal mistake in the operating room during her residency and is unable to practice medicine, has lost her job in a corset factory.  Needing to support her disabled son, she joins a traveling medicine show, as her medical degree provides its owner with some credibility.  The show has interesting characters with their own backstories, a somewhat unrealistic romance (for the time period), and climaxes during the great 1900 hurricane in Galveston. There's a happy ending for Tucia and the likeable characters of the story (and the villain, the owner of the medicine show, gets his comeuppance).  

I was disappointed because, despite the title, very little of the story takes place in Galveston, and I really didn't get a feel for the devastation of the storm.  Also,  I did not care for Tucia.  First - what an awful name!  Is it pronounced too-sha, kinda like tushy, or tuh-sha, or too-see-uh, or what?  She suffers from trichotillomania (pulling hairs out from the roots when stressed), and her frequent panic attacks and descriptions of this trait became tiresome.  It almost seemed like the author felt she had to give Tucia even more burdens (raped by the doctor who set her up for failure, a disabled son as a result, and then trichotillomania on top of all that).

Prickles and Prides by Wendy Barron, illustrated by Katherine Blackmore

Prickles and Prides is a rhyming picture book about collective nouns, specifically those used to describe groups of animals.  Author Wendy Barron's text has her anthropomorphic animals taking actions that often create alliteration in her lines of poetry, such as, 

A troop of chimps swings near a swarm of bees

as a scurry of squirrels scamper from a pack of coyotes.

 

Katherine Blackmore's illustrations bring out the wordplay in the text.  I especially liked the illustration for the line, "Who knew a company of moles loves to play in the dark," where the moles are dressed in Elizabethan outfits and appear to be acting in a Shakespeare play on a stage with a starry backdrop.

This book reminded me so much of Ruth Heller's A Cache of Jewels, another rhyming book on collective nouns (and not just those for animals), the first book in her World of Language series.  Similarly, this is Barron's first book in her Tales of Fins, Wings, and Tails series, "which whimsically explores the sounds, movements, homes, and groups of various animals."

This book could easily be incorporated into lessons on vocabulary and parts of speech, as well as on animals.  Even adults are bound to learn new words from this book - prickles (a group of porcupines - how fitting!) was a new one for me!

© Amanda Pape - 2026 - e-mail me!

1302 - 1307 (2026 #12 - #17). March 2026

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

This was an intense book about the escape and journey of a widow (Lydia) and her son (Luca) from Acapulco to Arizona after a Mexican drug cartel kills her journalist husband Sebastian and nearly every other member of her family (her family as well as her sister's were visiting their mother's home for a niece's quinceañera).  Lydia and her son Luca happened to be in the bathroom when the assassins arrived, and survived by hiding in the shower.

Lydia knows who ordered the hit.  Javier was a man who came to her bookstore and became her friend.  She was horrified to learn from Sebastian that he was the boss of the (fictional) Los Jardineros cartel, but thought Sebastian's piece about him was okay.  Instead (for a reason explained later in the story), it sets off the murders and Javier's continuing pursuit of her.

The journey of Lydia and Luca is harrowing, exposing many of the obstacles and dangers migrants experience on their journey to the United States.  

There was a lot of controversy when the book came out in 2020 (also the year it was one of the most discussed books according to Reading Group Guides), because author Jeanine Cummins is not Mexican, nor (like some of the other migrants in the story) Honduran.  Her grandmother is Puerto Rican, and Cummins married an illegal immigrant in 2005.  

Cummins was aware even before her book came out (it took her four years to research and write it) that (as she states in her author's note), "my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I’d get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a non-migrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then, I thought, ‘If you’re a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, whey not be a bridge.’ So I began.”

A really good review that addresses some of this controversy is here:
https://www.librarything.com/work/23294391/reviews/179442250

I'm glad I read this book, and give it five stars.  I learned a lot from it, and I think more people should read it.

Lena the Chicken (But Really a Dinosaur!) by Linda Bailey, illustrated by K-Fai Steele

This is a fun book about a chicken who thinks she's a dinosaur - and sometimes acts like one! The amusing story is followed by a page (reviewed by a renowned paleontologist and with some suggested nonfiction books) explaining how birds are in fact descended from dinosaurs. The illustrations in pencil and watercolor by K-Fai Steele are whimsical and really add to the story (I especially like the baby chicks). My two great-grandsons loved author Linda Bailey's recent The Great Dinosaur Sleepover - I think they will love this book too!

National Parks ABC! by Gus D'Angelo

I was so pleased to see this book offered by Mountaineers Books. For the 21 years I lived in the Seattle area, I used their trail guides extensively for backpacking and day hikes. National Parks ABC is a board book for little ones, featuring an animal that (not always) can be found in a particular park, with both beginning (usually) with the same letter. There are no national parks beginning with Q, U, or X, so author Gus D'Angelo, had to get creative - and in a few cases, it's the second word in a park's name that starts with the letter in question. For most of the pages, D'Angelo also employed alliteration - having the animal doing something in said park - for example, Bison backpacks in Badlands. The illustrations are lively and feature 27 national parks (there are two for the letter Y). I was pleased to see I have visited 13 of them. For those wanting more details about the parks or animals, try D'Angelo's picture book for older children, National Parks A to Z: Adventure from Acadia to Zion!

The Story of Ice by Jon Nelson and Sam Nelson

The Story of Ice is a comprehensive book about ice - the good kind that can be water or vapor in its other forms - written by a retired ice physicist who taught meteorology and cloud physics.  Chock-full of fascinating and fun facts, intriguing illustrations and photographs, and helpful diagrams, one could build an entire science unit with this book.  

The book begins by explaining the differences between ice, water, and vapor, and is followed by topics checklist that doubles as a table of contents.  The book ends with experiments and observations children can do with some guidance from adults.  In between, the reader learns about different types of ice - I had no idea there were so many!  (Ribbon ice is especially pretty.)

Like another reviewer, my only complaint about this book is really a suggestion:  a larger format with larger photographs would be nice, as well as a hardcover edition, as this book would get a lot of use in the teacher-training library collection I used to manage.  I'm looking forward to giving this paperback to my two great-grandsons (and their teacher mother).

Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel

At age 77, Pepper Mills (yes, that is her name, thanks to parents named Basil and Rosemary and a marriage to a Mills) is forced by her three children to move into a retirement center in Austin, Texas, after a minor fender-bender.  Worse yet, her ex-husband Roger also lives there.  But Pepper quickly makes friends, including Timothy, nicknamed Moth.  Pepper and Moth hit it off, and not long after, Pepper learns she is pregnant - thanks to a drug trial she participated in years earlier while undergoing treatment for breast cancer.

Unfortunately, Pepper - like me - lives in Texas, where pro-birth laws make it impossible to get an abortion, even with the life of the mother at stake.  Pepper's primary care physician thinks she'll probably miscarry.  When she does not, an unscrupulous pro-birth male gynecologist threatens her, violates HIPAA, and soon Pepper's story is public, making it impossible for her to travel out-of-state to get an abortion.  So she has no choice but to try to carry the baby to term.

That's not all of the story, of course, but I don't want to give too much away.  I loved this book for its focus on choice and control, both for women and their bodies as well as for all of us as we age.  It's also surprisingly funny.

I couldn't help but wonder while reading this book - what if something similar had happened to me?  I reunited with the late love of my life when I was 49 and he was 64.  What would have happened to us if I'd become pregnant so late in life, if the laws in Texas had been effective even earlier?  

Coded Justice (Avery Keene, #3) by Stacey Abrams

Although I'm not fond of mysteries and thrillers, I decided to read this book after listening to an interview with author Stacey Abrams (politician, lawyer, voting rights activist, former member of the Georgia House of Representatives), primarily because artificial intelligence is a major factor in the book.  My son makes his living with AI, and I'm trying to learn more about it.

This is the third book in the Avery Keene series.  Avery is a lawyer with a prestigious firm who has just been hired by the Camasca corporation to do an internal investigation after the death of one of their employees in mysterious circumstances - before the company goes public.  Camasca, owned and operated by Rafe Diaz, a veteran, uses AI internally and to manage a Veterans Administration clinic, the latter as a test case in its effort to eliminate bias and marginalization in medical treatment.  Avery is a great negotiator and gets to bring in her own team - her tech wizard boyfriend, and her two best friends, a doctor and another lawyer.

There are scenes in the book not involving Avery and her team that hint at the problems to come - primarily, AI that is more agentic than just generative.  So I could anticipate a little of what was coming, but that did not make it any less scary.

© Amanda Pape - 2026 - e-mail me!

1297 - 1301 (2026 #7 - #11). February 2026

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

This fantasy is mostly a coming-of-age story with a bit of historical fiction and speculative fiction / alternate history.  I'm not much into dragons and fantasy, but this book grabbed me with the first two paragraphs in chapter 1:

I was four years old when I first met a dragon. I never told my mother. I didn't think she'd understand. 

(I was wrong, obviously. But I was wrong about a lot of things when it came to her. This is not particularly unusual. I think, perhaps, none of us ever know our mothers, not really. Or at least until it's too late.)

The protagonist is Alex[andra] Green, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.  It's 1951 when the book begins, so Alex is about ten years older than me, but I could still relate to many of the things she (and especially her younger cousin/"sister" Beatrice. who is only about two years older than me) experience in those eras.  

Alex is eight when the first “Mass Dragoning” occurs in 1955, with thousands of women in the United States suddenly turning into dragons - including Alex's aunt, who took care of her while her mother was ill.  But as the opening paragraph indicates, dragons had been around prior to that.  It's just that no one talked about it, and the government tried to cover it up.

In an interview, author Kelly Barnhill said

I began this book during a critical time in American history, as the United States Senate – along with the rest of us – listened, riveted, to the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, as she recounted the sexual assault that she experienced, perpetrated by a man [Brett Kavanaugh] who was about to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. She shared her story as an act of bravery, in an attempt to stop her country from making a terrible mistake, putting the fate of millions of women – our autonomy, our privacy, our capacity to make our own medical decisions – in the hands of the man who harmed her. In the end, her testimony failed. He was confirmed and all of our fears were realized. As I listened to her, realizing that the die was set and knowing with grim certainty how the next few years would play out, I found myself nearly exploding with rage – for myself, for my children, for my nieces, for the next generation that would grow up with less freedom than I had. I decided then and there that I would write a book about women turning into dragons, and that’s exactly what I did.

This was a good book to read after Lessons in Chemistry, also set in the 1960s, as it had similar themes about the treatment of women in that era.  As with Elizabeth Zott in that book, I grew to really care about Alex Green in this book.  Her characterization is the strength of the book.

A few quotes that stuck with me, because they are timely:

From chapter 9, page 56:

"But it is difficult for any propagandic apparatus, no matter how advanced, to counteract the force of millions of eyewitnesses."

From chapter 33, page 255:

"The beautiful thing about science is that we do not know what we cannot know and we will not know until we know."

From chapter 44, page 334:

"In any successful marriage, one partner must face the reality of being very old, and very alone.  What is grief, but love that's lost its object?"

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon

I read this book partly because Reading Group Guides said it was (one of) the most discussed books in 2023.  

This historical fiction novel opens with a mystery.  A body is found frozen in the Kennebec River near Hallowell, Maine, in November 1789.  Martha Ballard, one of the local midwives, is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death.  The body is one of two men named by the wife of a local minister as her rapists.  Martha determines it's a murder, but a new (male) doctor in town claims it was an accident, and the local judge - the other accused rapist - concurs.  So over the winter, through the next six months, Martha investigates the murder on her own, with the complications of friends and family being suspects (at least for her) at various times.

The mystery part moves slowly, but that's because the book is mostly historical fiction based on the real Martha Ballard, who kept a diary for 27 years, starting the year she turned fifty (1785) right up until her death in 1812.  Diary entries play a big part in this story, but there are flashbacks to events earlier in Martha's life.  The day-to-day life in post-Revolutionary New England, especially for women, is the most interesting part of this book.

In the author's note at the end, author Ariel Lawhon is careful to tell the reader what's true and what's fiction.  A major source for Lawhon was the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, published in 1990.  I was able to read this later this month.

There is an online version of Martha's handwritten diary (microfilmed original images), and there was also a PBS docudrama on it (based on Ulrich's book and also called A Midwife’s Tale) in 1997, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

I read this book because Reading Group Guides said it was (one of) the most discussed books in 2019.  It was .... okay.  

Two white orphaned white boys are placed at a boarding school for Native American children in Minnesota in 1932.  The younger orphan, Odie (the narrator, who I found a bit annoying) is always getting into trouble  Things finally reach a point where he needs to run away - along with his older brother Albert, an orphaned Native American called Mose, and Emmy, the orphaned daughter of a teacher who lost her life in a recent tornado, who is "adopted" by the cruel superintendent of the school.  The children escape in Emmy's family's canoe, traveling down the Gilead River on their way to the Mississippi and St. Louis, where Odie and Albert have an aunt.  

Of course there are adventures and misadventures along the way, as well as a lot of luck.  In his acknowledgments, author William Kent Krueger states that the book was "envisioned as an update of Huckleberry Finn," with "the Great Depression ... as the perfect, challenging setting."  Charles Dickens and Homer were inspirations too - Odie is short for Odysseus.  There's a lot for book clubs to discuss in this novel.

The Shy Mouse's Wish by Wendy Camarillo

I received a copy of this book to review thanks to the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.  There, author and illustrator Wendy Camarillo wrote, "Looking forward to your honest reviews on LibraryThing. I am a new author and this would really help me."  So here goes.

This picture book tells the story of a lonely mouse who wants friends, but needs to be encouraged to leave her den to find them.  The illustrations of the mouse and little animals she meets, particularly the hedgehog, bug, frog, and fox, are lovely - especially the eyes.  However, the font used for the text, which is written in all capital letters, is difficult to read, making this book more appropriate as a parent or teacher read-aloud than for young children to read themselves.

A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

This book won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for History.  I read it because it was a major source for Ariel Lawhon's The Frozen River, as Martha Ballard was the main character in that novel. 

Martha Ballard kept a diary for 27 years, starting the year she turned fifty (1785) right up until her death in 1812.  She was a midwife and traditional medicine practitioner in the Kennebec River towns of Hallowell and Augusta in Maine (then a part of Massachusetts), and in those years, attended 814 births.  But Martha's diary also documents other aspects of her life - raising six children to adulthood, managing a family weaving business, as well as all the endless household tasks of that era.

This well-researched book is interspersed with maps, illustrations, tables and graphs.  There is a twelve-page appendix of medicinal ingredients mentioned in Ballard's diary.  There are also 47 pages of endnotes citing sources, four pages of acknowledgements, and a 28-page index.

A 32-page introduction provides background about Martha, her origins and family, the time and place, and her diary.  The shorter (seven pages) epilogue tells what happened to the diary after Martha's death, and discusses two of her famous relatives, great-great-granddaughter Mary Hobart (a physician who donated the diary to the Maine State Library) and nurse Clara Barton, her great niece.  

In the ten chapters between, author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich takes diary entries from a roughly one month period in different years between 1787 and 1809 as the starting point for chapters on different subjects, incorporating her vast research.  

Ballard's midwifery and healing practices as well as medicine in this era are the focus of three chapters.  Two chapters focus on major events in the area, a rape trial (October 1789) and a mass murder (April 1806).  Others focus on family affairs, (with associated commentary on the era):  

- the weaving business Martha and her daughters operate (the female economy),

- three family marriages in 1792 (marriage customs and laws on fornication - I found it interesting that 29% of the women whose babies Martha delivered were pregnant before marriage, and 2.4% of the deliveries were to single women),

- a difficult year, 1796 (her husband Ephraim's surveying work),

- more difficulties in 1804 when Ephraim is in jail for debt (laws and prison), and 

- gardening and Martha's last years.

This book was incredibly interesting.  I learned a lot about life in New England in the early Federal period (post Revolutionary War, pre-War of 1812), especially for women, who are so underrepresented in our history.

© Amanda Pape - 2026 - e-mail me!