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!

1291 - 1296 (2026 #1 - #6). January 2026

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

I read this because Reading Group Guides said it was (one of) the most discussed books in 2022.  I REALLY liked this book.  Set in the 1960s, Elizabeth Zott is a chemist, and like most women in science in that era, is underpaid and taken advantage of (not just professionally, but sexually as well).  But she's also a woman out of her time, with an unconventional lifestyle.  She and a fellow chemist, Calvin, fall in love, but he dies in an accident just about the time she finds out she's pregnant.  Trying to support herself and her daughter, she agrees to host a television cooking show that's really more lessons in chemistry than cooking.  I found this book funny but also poignant, reminding me a lot of the early years (1977-1986) in my career (state and local government) - things hadn't improved much for women in male-dominated careers between the 1960s and the 1980s.

I was pleased to learn that Garmus is just two weeks younger than me, and this novel, her first, was published a few days before her 65th birthday.  There's hope for me!  And I really liked the cover of the ebook I read, with the periodic table in the background, and a (headless) woman in a 60s-style dress and heels carrying an old-fashioned television with antennae.  

Butterfly Games by Kelly Scarborough

When I read the description of this book in the LibraryThing Early Reviewers list for December 2025, I knew I had to request it.  It's about Jacquette Gyldenstolpe, who was involved with Prince Oscar Bernadotte, heir to the Swedish throne, from about 1811 to 1817.  Author Kelly Scarborough was inspired by the 1951 (in German) / 1953 (American edition) novel Désirée by Annemarie Selinko, which I first read in the late 1980s and still reread periodically, as it is one of my favorite books.  Luckily, I won a copy of the book to review.

Jacquette is mentioned only once in that novel (first name without a c), on page 563, just 31 pages from the end of the book.  Scarborough was curious about her, and started doing research, including trips to Sweden, visiting the national archives there, and translating numerous letters and other writings by Jacquette and others.

I really appreciated the maps, and the historical note at the end where Scarborough explained some of the decisions she made while writing the book, particularly names and nicknames she used.  Her website includes a helpful timeline and a page with images and brief biographies of major characters.  In a September 2025 interview with Foreword Reviews, she explains the title and one of the names she came up with for a group of characters, and also hints at an upcoming sequel (which I would definitely read).

This is a good debut novel, although I feel it could have been tightened up a bit (and thus made shorter).  I found myself wishing to read some of Scarborough's source material (like Jacquette's letters and her husband Löwenhielm's diaries) myself - and that's always a good sign, that I learned something from the book and it captured my interest.

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green

I watched an interview about this book in 2025 with author John Green, best known for his award-winning young adult books,  and I immediately placed a hold on it.  I started 210th on the list.  I'd moved up to 127th when I was lucky to get a "skip the line" loan for this book this past week, when we had an ice storm and I felt I could definitely get it read in the shortened 7-day loan period.  It's a fairly short book and I read it in about three hours over four days.

It's a powerful book about a disease that most of us in developed countries don't think about because, as Green says, “the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.”  Tuberculosis still kills many in the world, and this book delves into the reasons why, centering the story on a personable young man Green met at a tuberculosis hospital in Sierra Leone named Henry Reider.

Besides fascinating information on the history of tuberculosis, the book how the focus in public health funding is in terms of cost-benefit analysis rather than the well-being of humans.  Under our current U.S. administration, it's only going to get worse, with its cruel and short-sighted cuts to international health programs.  Currently, tuberculosis continues to spread, especially in drug-resistant forms, and could someday be as deadly as it was before cures were developed.

Time Management by Charles Harvey, and Organization Strategies by Tammy Garner

These two short e-books had been on my Kindle for some time, so I read them in about 45 minutes before starting on a longer book.  Apparently I got them for free at some point, and that's what they're worth - nothing.  Time Management had nothing in it I didn't already know, and seemed to be promoting the Evernote software.  Organization Strategies was full of misspellings and grammatical errors, and seemed like it was originally written in another language and then translated.  At least now I can delete both books from my Kindles and my cloud storage.

Mattie by Kathi Jackson

This book was written by a friend and former coworker in Seattle.  I'd bought the book a long time ago and finally got around to reading it.  

I was disappointed.  The story is set before, during, and after World War II in Hudson, Texas - a real town east of Lufkin, although I'm not sure how much the town's history played into the book.  There was no author's note in the ebook, and Kathi's website is no longer active.  

Mattie is a young woman being sexually abused by her father - a church deacon - while raising her four younger siblings, as her mother is mentally ill.  She longs to escape to Dallas and become a nurse, but instead becomes pregnant with her father's baby.  Steve, the owner of a local general store where she works part-time, is in love with her and marries her, raising the child as his own.  Conveniently, both her father and the baby die.  But Mattie becomes very depressed, her husband has an affair, they make up, the war comes and he enlists, she goes to nursing school while he's gone, she's sent overseas, he conveniently goes missing, she falls in love with a doctor (James) and they reconnect post-war at the VA hospital in Dallas.  She becomes pregnant with his baby, Steve comes back (prisoner of war)  but is not the same, and the story ends not long after she has the baby and seemingly makes the decision to be with James - and that's where the book ends.  I would have liked to know what happened to Steve, even though he's the one who apparently called James to tell him Mattie had his baby.  

Kathi wrote good nonfiction - I've read her book on World War II nurses and a biography on Steven Spielberg for young people.  This book was fairly well-written (I did find some grammar and punctuation errors) but I just did not like the storyline.  Although it wasn't very good, there was some birth control available in the 1940s - and maybe Mattie and her partners should have used some.

© Amanda Pape - 2026 - e-mail me!

1286 - 1290 (2025 #38 - #42). December 2025

Educated by Tara Westover

I read this because Reading Group Guides said it was (one of) the most discussed books in 2018.  Reminded me a lot of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, only more horrifying.  I'm amazed that Tara, her parents, and some of her siblings didn't die with all the accidents they had and foolish decisions the parents made.  A story of covert parental abuse.

Danger Eagle by Jesse Wente, illustrated by Shaikara David

Danger Eagle is a stuffed penguin toy who thinks they are an eagle that can do stunts, with their human owner sending them on death-defying toy car jumps, and swinging over stairs.  A friend visits with a stuffed ostrich toy that challenges Danger Eagle to actually fly.

At first I was worried this story might actually encourage little kids to try dangerous stunts.  Then I watched my two great-grandsons, almost two and almost four, on Christmas Day, climbing the (slick!) wooden stairs with socks on, and using the banisters as monkey bars, and I decided this book is just right for them.

The cartoon-like illustrations were done with pencil, paper, and Procreate, an iPad drawing and animation app.

The Age of Calamities by Senaa Ahmad

There wasn't much that I liked to choose from in the November 2025 LibraryThing Early Reviewers batch.  I requested this one because it is a collection of short stories involving characters from history, which intrigued me.  However, the book's title, The Age of Calamities, should have tipped me off that I might not like this collection - it was a bit too dark for my still-grieving self.  I found I really only liked the first story, "Let's Play Dead," in which Henry VIII has Anne Boleyn killed over and over, and she won't stay dead.  In a way, that was the only story with a happy ending.  I think fans of fantasy or speculative fiction might enjoy this book more than this historical fiction aficionado did.

The Last Father-Daughter Dance: A Short Story by Lisa Wingate

It was too cold and windy today to go for a walk, and I was looking for something short to read (to add to my count for 2025), so I decided on this 57-page short story that was a bonus read in the December Amazon First Reads program.  A famous Olympic runner goes home to see her dad (and first coach) when his heart condition worsens, and helps him "relive favorite memories from all four seasons in just one month at their old farmhouse in the Blue Ridge Mountains."  

It's a touching story - especially since the dad, who's only 52, is suffering from congestive heart failure, and uses oxygen (hits close to home!).  However, I found the ending a little too predictable, but also a little too abrupt and surprising, given some of the messaging earlier in the story.

The One That Got Away: A Short Story by Mike Gayle

Another short story, 101 pages, that was a bonus read in the Amazon First Reads program, this one from April 2025, that I read to end 2025 with 42 books read.  This was a sweet little sorta-romance written from the guy's point of view, with a bit of a surprise (but not entirely unexpected) ending.

© Amanda Pape - 2025 - e-mail me!

1284 - 1285 (2025 #36 - #37). November 2025

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

I read this book because I didn't have anything on hand at the beginning of the month that I needed to review for LibraryThing, and none of the books I'd placed on hold had come in.  This book was on ReadingGroupGuide's 25th anniversary list of most discussed books (and was the one for the first year, 2000).  Ironically, the first book I read with my local book club (of which I am no longer a member) was Zadie Smith's On Beauty, so I decided to read this one.  It was the only one actually available as an e-book at my libraries; there were wait lists for the other six (although, to be fair, they were all from 2018 on).

I should have re-read my review of On Beauty first.  Didn't like it, and didn't like White Teeth either.  Too long, too wordy, too hard to follow.  But I did finish it.

This was Smith's first novel, at the age of 25.  There are some autobiographical aspects to it, in that one of the main characters, Irie Jones, is, like Smith, the daughter of a Jamaican woman and an older English man, and much of the novel is even set in the Willesden area of London, where Smith grew up.  Write what you know, right?

The book is an example of hysterical realism, which is described as a "genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other."  I didn't care for the absurdity.

The Pacifist by Lyn Bixby

Chris Thompson is a Vietnam War protester in Boston in autumn 1968 when he is drafted.  He reports to an army base but refuses induction, and winds up being taken away unconscious in an ambulance after a supposedly accidental fall.  His sister Lisa, living a back-to-nature lifestyle on the family's farm in Vermont, doesn't believe it, and enlists a black civil rights lawyer, a newspaper editor, a combat veteran, and a couple draftees who witnessed much of what happened to Chris in her fight against the Army and the FBI to find out the truth about his subsequent death.

Author Lyn Bixby is writing what he knows.  According to his website, he " protested against the Vietnam War before he received his military draft letter weeks after graduating in 1969 ... He passed his physical and was ordered to join the Army, serving at ... a number of bases ... before he was discharged because the Army couldn’t turn him into a soldier."  He became a newspaper journalist and worked "as an investigative reporter focused on corruption. Some projects gave him opportunities to dig into issues raised in his debut novel, The Pacifist. During his newspaper career he received a range of prestigious writing awards, including a shared Pulitzer Prize."  The book was also inspired by a classmate who died fighting in Vietnam.

This is both an intriguing murder mystery and a timely story, given the state of the United States federal government today.

© Amanda Pape - 2025 - e-mail me!