Once upon a time, Lita “turned from star-stuff thrown off a meteor into a girl” and became “to everyone around” the daughter of the local curandera Bruja Lupe. That meteor gave the New Mexico town its name – yes, Meteor – as well as the...
Short stories can be the perfect antidote to these days of winter blues, pandemic panic, and cabin fever. Deesha Philyaw’s debut short-story collection – The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, a much-lauded, National-Book-Award-finalist – illuminates the lives of nine Black woman with a performance from Janina...
*STARRED REVIEW This 20th-anniversary edition features a 10-reader cast performing the original 10 stories, with additional "Bonus Content" that includes a dozen "Tributes" by literary luminaries, including Christopher Myers, Lois Lowry, and Jason Reynolds, extolling the late, great Walter Dean Myers's enduring legacy to diverse children's...
*STARRED REVIEW A half-dozen Latinx readers voice Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s superb 11-story debut collection, which features mostly Colorado-domiciled Latinx/Indigenous characters hoping, demanding to be seen and acknowledged by a society in which women are routinely dismissed, threatened, and destroyed. Aural aficionados will especially thrill at the “read...
Despite calling the small coastal community of Port Coral ‘home,’ Rosa has always avoided the water. She – and maybe the rest of the town – believes she’s been cursed by tragedy, since both her grandfather and father drowned as young men. Raised mostly by...
