Superior Reads

A PLACE FOR READERS AND WRITERS

I read so many great books this year, but these were among my favorites. My favorite interviews were with Dani Shapiro (I’m a big fan!), Jane Smiley (can you say Pulitzer Prize!), and Staci Lola Drouillard (because I love her book and her aunts and her perspective!) Check out my blog (a new webpage coming …

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I read a lot of books this year, but these were my favorites. My favorite interviews were: Peter Heller, Jai Chakrabarti, Maggie Shipstead, and Klecko. You can listen to my interviews here, of course, or on WTIP Radio the fourth Thursday of every month at 7:00 pm and the following Saturday at 6:00 am. Here’s …

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In Walking the Old Road, A People’s History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe, author Staci Lola Drouillard tells the stories of a community of 200 Anishinaabe families at the turn of the century. Beginning in 1987, Drouillard had the prescience to begin interviewing Chippewa City elders preserving for future generations what would …

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Until she was seventeen years old, Hyeonseo Lee believed that North Korea was the greatest country in the world, but during the famine of 1997 her eyes were opened wide. The Girl with Seven Names recounts her escape. Growing up in a privileged family insulated Hyeonseo from the inhumane treatment that many North Korean’s endured. …

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Cash Blackbear is back in the second book in Marcie Rendon’s series, Girl Gone Missing. It’s not necessary to read the first in the series, Murder on the Red River, but you will want to. Rendon sprinkles enough of Cash’s backstory throughout the second book so that you’ll never be lost. In Girl Gone Missing, …

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The star of Marcie Rendon’s Murder on the Red River is Renee Blackbear, who goes by the nickname Cash. She’s nineteen years old and a survivor of numerous foster homes — one of the many Native children removed from their homes and placed with white foster parents. When Cash was three, her mother lost her …

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As Deborah Appleman enters the maximum security prison where she teaches prisoners, she hands off her license, jewelry, shoes — all the talismans of her identity – and walks through the metal detector; one that she says puts airport security scanners to shame. Her materials are in a clear plastic book bag and her right …

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NOTHING MORE DANGEROUS by Allen Eskens is a coming-of-age mystery that reads like literary fiction. Boady Sanden is a fifteen-year-old freshman at Ignatius High School in Jessup, Missouri. If you’ve read Eskens other novels, you may recognize Boady’s name from The Life We Bury and The Heavens May Fall, in those books, he is older …

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