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“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world. I guess you can find that in there, if you dig around.” – EB White

I love this story. It is woven into my days as beautifully as Ruth’s life was woven together with Boaz’s.

With all that previous exposure, this retelling is my favorite time reading it yet.

When someone mentions a summer reading list, I think of the year I switched schools. It was before fifth grade, and I had never heard of a summer reading list. I felt the full impact of that terrible list. The books were hard. They were boring. They were long. “But you love reading!” my mother…

On picture book biographies and imagining adulthood When our kids were little, I found it hard to imagine them as big kids, let alone teens or—gasp!—adults. But they’re prone to point out things like, oh, that our second-born daughter will be old enough to vote in the next presidential election, or that when our youngest…

List-making is practically a hobby with me, and books are a passion, with children’s literature a high-ranking subcategory. Creating lists of the latter is thus a delight accompanied by the danger of disappearing into long, winding passageways papered over by picture books. This is especially true of a topic as fascinating and fruitful as women’s…

You can read Part One of this series here: https://storywarren.com/twenty-one-books-for-african-american-history-month/ Stories of those who have suffered injustice and resolved to reverse it inspire awe and admiration. Likewise worthy of respect are those who create profound art from sorrow and loss. In his treatise Art and Faith, painter Makoto Fujimura references artists who draw upon their…

Lightsabers. Ninja stars. A sword named “the Destroyer.” —And brothers with so much energy that even front teeth end up on the floor! This is where McCaulley’s picture book starts, and it never loses a childlike exuberance for life, even when the Johnson family is challenged to participate in a march for justice, hosted by…

Researching the collection that follows has renewed my awareness of the inescapable, tragic history of slavery in America. Conceiving of our country as it might have been apart from the scourge of slavery is enticing; possibly even redemptive, if the exercise edges us toward that vision. But deepening our knowledge of the actual past holds…

Several years ago I landed on fairy tales as my preferred winter reading genre. Though I can relish a string of rainy Pacific Northwest days, they don’t combine well with heavy doses of hard reality. Not that fairy tales don’t harbor their share of darkness; traditional ones can be downright grim (no pun intended). But…