Pg. 69: Jane Tesh's "Death by Dragonfly"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Death by Dragonfly: A Grace Street Mystery by Jane Tesh.

About the book, from the publisher:

Flamboyant actor Leo Pierson’s Art Nouveau treasures have been stolen, including a one-of-a-kind Lalique glass dragonfly he claims is cursed. David Randall, 302 Grace Street’s private eye, agrees to recover the valuables before he realizes murder has raised its ugly head in the Parkland art community. Samuel Gallant of the museum board is missing, until Randall and his landlord/consultant Camden find Gallant’s body stuffed in a museum closet. When another board member suffers a fatal accident and the art critic for the Parkland Herald is attacked, Randall suspects the stolen dragonfly is indeed cursed. He investigates Richard Mason, curator of the Little Gallery, whose artwork consists of ugly mechanical sculptures, and Nancy Piper, finance manager at the Parkland Art Museum.

Meanwhile, Camden struggles against psychic visions he’s had since birth, taking pills to limit sudden intense visions. His wife, Ellin, fends off Matt Grabber, a television celebrity healer threatening to take over her Psychic Service Network and using his two large pythons to emphasize his bid. The pythons take a liking to Camden, upping his stress level, while he takes more pills hoping his visions—and the snakes—disappear. Kit, a new tenant at Grace Street, is a young rock star who is also psychic. As Camden becomes more addicted, Kit becomes an early warning system, alerting Randall to the next attack.

Randall works to solve the murders, find the jeweled collection, help Cam, deter Grabber and his pythons, romance the young lovely Kary, and avoid stray curses. A spirit on the Other Side surprisingly requests his help, a spirit with ties to the stolen pieces of Art Nouveau.

Learn more about the book and author at Jane Tesh's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Jane Tesh and Winkie.

The Page 69 Test: Mixed Signals.

The Page 69 Test: Now You See It.

The Page 69 Test: Death by Dragonfly.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top sibling duels in fiction

Maureen Lindley, born in Berkshire and raised in Scotland and England, was trained as a psychotherapist. She is the author of the novels The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel, A Girl Like You, and The Beloveds.

At CrimeReads she tagged "nine tales of sibling rivalry and woe, from classic literature to stories grounded in modern life, all with an affinity for the mysterious and the twisted." One title on the list:

Patrick De Witt, The Sisters Brothers

The book opens in 1851 in Oregon City when the lust for gold has the brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, on the road to California. On their journey they cross paths with a stunning list of characters: bad women, manipulators and losers, cheats and lovers. Charlie is a hard man who will do anything to get what he wants, Eli is influenced by Charlie but is in the midst of questioning his way of life. Think fireworks, think energy, think deeply dark and surprisingly funny, and you will be halfway to knowing all the goodies that await you in this book.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Benjamin Mangrum's "Land of Tomorrow"

New from the Page 99 Test: Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism by Benjamin Mangrum.

About the book, from the publisher:

American liberalism after the Second World War turned against the legacies of the New Deal era. Rather than extending the reforms of the 1930s, many expressions of postwar liberal thought recast organizational politics as enfeebling, alienating, or tyrannical. Land of Tomorrow examines the ideas and cultural sensibilities that caused this radical shift in the tenor of American liberalism.

To account for these changes in American liberal sentiment, Benjamin Mangrum looks to some of the most influential writers, critics, and intellectuals of the postwar decades-including Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Lionel Trilling, Flannery O'Connor, and Saul Bellow, as well as the American reception of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and many other European thinkers. By revising established accounts of this body of cultural work, Mangrum charts the legitimization of new political sensibilities within the nation's intellectual life. These sensibilities opposed a social democratic order and unleashed a new kind of liberalism, one which centered on ideas about authenticity, alienation, self-management, psychological templates for societal problems, and private judgments of value. This confluence of literary, intellectual, and political history gives us a window onto the basic assumptions and key conceptual terrain of liberal thought after 1945. Land of Tomorrow thus offers a provocative cultural prehistory of political thinking's forms that remain with us today.

Learn more about Land of Tomorrow at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Land of Tomorrow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top Irish science fiction authors

Jack Fennell is the author of Irish Science Fiction (2014) and editor of A Brilliant Void (2018). At the Guardian he tagged his top ten Irish science fiction authors, including:

Flann O’Brien (1911-1966)

In a 1963 letter to publisher Timothy O’Keeffe, the author professed “a horrible fear that some stupid critic will praise me as a master of science fiction”. I’ll avoid using the M-word, but the fact remains that a number of his works fit the definition comfortably. His early fiction and his later Cruiskeen Lawn column make fun of sci-fi tropes as often as anything else, and his undisputed masterpiece, The Third Policeman, is full of bizarre concepts derived from scientific principles taken to absurd extremes – see “the atomic theory” and the hypothesis that excessive use of a bicycle will turn a cyclist into their vehicle. When The Third Policeman was rejected by publishers, O’Brien reworked material from it into The Dalkey Archive, which features time-travel (of a sort) and a mad scientist who wants to end the world.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Third Policeman is among Jon Day's ten best books about cycling, A.F. Harrold's top ten imaginary friends in fiction, William Fotheringham's top ten cycling novels, and Michael Foley's top ten books that best express the absurdity of the human condition.

At Swim-Two-Birds is among Jonathan Coe's six favorite books.

Flann O’Brien is, according to Max McGuinness, one of four unjustly overlooked Irish writers.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Debra H. Goldstein reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Debra H. Goldstein, author of One Taste Too Many: A Sarah Blair Mystery.

Her entry begins:

I’m an eclectic reader, but my favorites are mysteries and biographies. Recently, I read Sally Field’s In Pieces, which tells the story of her childhood, acting roles, and relationships. Because of my fascination with the evolution of her acting career from Gidget and The Flying Nun to her Academy and Emmy Award winning roles in Norma Rae, Places in the Heart and Sybil.

For a more humorous relaxing read, I’m mid-way through...[read on]

About One Taste Too Many, from the publisher:

For culinary challenged Sarah Blair, there’s only one thing scarier than cooking from scratch—murder!

Married at eighteen, divorced at twenty eight, Sarah Blair reluctantly swaps her luxury lifestyle for a cramped studio apartment and a law firm receptionist job in the tired hometown she never left. With nothing much to show for the last decade but her feisty Siamese cat, RahRah, and some clumsy domestic skills, she’s the polar opposite of her bubbly twin, Emily—an ambitious chef determined to take her culinary ambitions to the top at a local gourmet restaurant...

Sarah knew starting over would be messy. But things fall apart completely when her ex drops dead, seemingly poisoned by Emily’s award-winning rhubarb crisp. Now, with RahRah wanted by the woman who broke up her marriage and Emily wanted by the police for murder, Sarah needs to figure out the right recipe to crack the case before time runs out. Unfortunately, for a gal whose idea of good china is floral paper plates, catching the real killer and living to tell about it could mean facing a fate worse than death—being in the kitchen!

Visit Debra H. Goldstein's website.

The Page 69 Test: One Taste Too Many.

My Book, The Movie: One Taste Too Many.

Writers Read: Debra H. Goldstein.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books that defined the 1990s

At LitHub Emily Temple tagged the ten books that defined the 1990s, including:

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1990)

The Things They Carried was O’Brien’s third book about Vietnam, but it’s frequently heralded as one of the best books ever written about the war. It sold “well over two million copies worldwide” and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. “The Things They Carried has lived in the bellies of American readers for more than two decades,” A. O. Scott wrote in 2013. “It sits on the narrow shelf of indispensable works by witnesses to and participants in the fighting, alongside Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Tobias Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army, and James Webb’s Fields of Fire.” As far as its enduring legacy, Scott goes on:

In 1990, when Houghton Mifflin published the book, Vietnam was still recent history, its individual and collective wounds far from healed. Just as the years between combat and publication affected O’Brien’s perception of events, so has an almost exactly equal span changed the character of the writing. The Things They Carried is now, like the war it depicts, an object of classroom study, kept relevant more by its craft than by the urgency of its subject matter. The raw, restless, anguished reckoning inscribed in its pages—the “gut hate” and comradely love that motivated the soldiers—has come to reflect conventional historical wisdom. Over time, America’s wars are written in shorthand: World War II is noble sacrifice; the Civil War, tragic fratricide; Vietnam, black humor and moral ambiguity.

I’d argue that The Things They Carried is now itself a one-volume shorthand for the Vietnam War—or the closest thing to it.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Things They Carried is among Emily Fridlund's six top books about self-deception, Janine di Giovanni's top ten books of war reportage, The American Scholar editors' eleven best sentences in literature, Simon Mawer's five top war novels, Olen Steinhauer's six favorite books, and is one of Roger “R.J.” Ellory's five favorite human dramas. Melinda L. Pash, author of In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation: The Americans Who Fought the Korean War, says The Things They Carried changed her life.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Shannon Withycombe's "Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America by Shannon Withycombe.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Lost, medical historian Shannon Withycombe weaves together women’s personal writings and doctors’ publications from the 1820s through the 1910s to investigate the transformative changes in how Americans conceptualized pregnancy, understood miscarriage, and interpreted fetal tissue over the course of the nineteenth century. Withycombe’s pathbreaking research reveals how Americans construed, and continue to understand, miscarriage within a context of reproductive desires, expectations, and abilities. This is the first book to utilize women’s own writings about miscarriage to explore the individual understandings of pregnancy loss and the multiple social and medical forces that helped to shape those perceptions. What emerges from Withycombe’s work is unlike most medicalization narratives.

Learn more about Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top family gatherings from literature

Julie Myerson is an English author and critic. At the Guardian she tagged six favorite family gatherings from literature, including:

Few do it better than Anne Tyler, especially in her masterpiece, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Tyler finds great intensity and urgency in parent-sibling relationships, so when Beck Tull suddenly abandons wife Pearl and three small children, the loss reverberates down the years in inevitable, unpredictable and unending ways. The novel’s heartbreaking climax, which has the remaining family members gathering for a meal at the eponymous restaurant, has to be one of the most tenderly written family dinners in literature.

Read about another entry on the list.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is among four books that changed Stephen Giles and Peggy Frew’s top ten books about "bad" mothers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Kitty Zeldis's "Not Our Kind"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Not Our Kind by Kitty Zeldis.

About the book, from the publisher:

With echoes of Rules of Civility and The Boston Girl, a compelling and thought-provoking novel set in postwar New York City, about two women—one Jewish, one a WASP—and the wholly unexpected consequences of their meeting.

One rainy morning in June, two years after the end of World War II, a minor traffic accident brings together Eleanor Moskowitz and Patricia Bellamy. Their encounter seems fated: Eleanor, a teacher and recent Vassar graduate, needs a job. Patricia’s difficult thirteen-year-old daughter Margaux, recovering from polio, needs a private tutor.

Though she feels out of place in the Bellamys’ rarefied and elegant Park Avenue milieu, Eleanor forms an instant bond with Margaux. Soon the idealistic young woman is filling the bright young girl’s mind with Shakespeare and Latin. Though her mother, a hat maker with a little shop on Second Avenue, disapproves, Eleanor takes pride in her work, even if she must use the name "Moss" to enter the Bellamys’ restricted doorman building each morning, and feels that Patricia’s husband, Wynn, may have a problem with her being Jewish.

Invited to keep Margaux company at the Bellamys’ country home in a small town in Connecticut, Eleanor meets Patricia’s unreliable, bohemian brother, Tom, recently returned from Europe. The spark between Eleanor and Tom is instant and intense. Flushed with new romance and increasingly attached to her young pupil, Eleanor begins to feel more comfortable with Patricia and much of the world she inhabits. As the summer wears on, the two women’s friendship grows—until one hot summer evening, a line is crossed, and both Eleanor and Patricia will have to make important decisions—choices that will reverberate through their lives.

Gripping and vividly told, Not Our Kind illuminates the lives of two women on the cusp of change—and asks how much our pasts can and should define our futures.

Kitty Zeldis is the pseudonym for a novelist and non-fiction writer of books for adults and children. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.

My Book, The Movie: Not Our Kind.

Writers Read: Kitty Zeldis.

Coffee with a Canine: Kitty Zeldis & Dottie.

The Page 69 Test: Not Our Kind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten heroines who played the secret motive game

Jane Corry is a writer and journalist and has spent time as the writer in residence of a high-security prison for men–an experience that helped inspire My Husband’s Wife, her suspense debut.

Corry's new novel is The Dead Ex.

At CrimeReads she tagged ten classics where the heroines are mistresses of the “secret motive game,” including:

Delia: Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years

Some heroines adopt secret motives for very understandable reasons. Tyler is one of my favorite authors. When Delia disappears, her family fears the worst. But Delia is only trying to find out who she is and how to go forward. “Why wasn’t there an etiquette book for runaway wives?” There’s a publishing opportunity out there…

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alan Cumyn's "North to Benjamin"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: North to Benjamin by Alan Cumyn.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hatchet meets Maybe a Fox in this piercing novel about Edgar, a boy who has lost the ability to speak and can only bark, and his dog Benjamin as they travel through the freezing Yukon wilderness in order to stop Edgar’s mother from making a huge mistake.

Eleven-year-old Edgar knows whenever his mother gets “the look” they won’t be staying wherever they are for much longer. Soon it will be another town, another school, and, for Mom, another man. This time they’re leaving Toronto—and Roger—behind for the wilds of northwestern Canada.

For once, though, Edgar is excited. They’ll be housesitting, and with the house comes Benjamin, an old Newfoundland for Edgar to take care of. Soon after landing in Dawson, Edgar and his mom meet Caroline, a girl Edgar’s age, and her dad, Ceese. The moment his mom and Ceese meet, Edgar knows She’s going to make him the next Roger; the next man his mom will leave. It doesn’t matter that Ceese has a longtime girlfriend, or that Edgar and Caroline are becoming friends—his mom always gets what she wants.

Edgar talks to Benjamin about his concerns, and to Edgar’s great surprise, Benjamin not only understands, but wordlessly answers. Just as surprising, Edgar loses his ability to speak to anyone but Benjamin; whenever he tries to talk to a human, his voice becomes a bark. But his mom and Ceese begin to take things too far, and Edgar needs his voice, his human voice, more than ever. Desperate to stop his mother from ruining other people’s lives and upturning their own once again, Edgar embarks on a dangerous journey across the frozen Yukon River with only Benjamin by his side.

But the wilderness is not kind. Edgar and Benjamin find themselves in a situation right out of Edgar’s favorite Jack London story. With cracking ice, freezing water, bone-chilling temperatures, and looming, lurking wolves, Edgar must find a way to survive before he can stop his mother from wrecking everything.

Visit Alan Cumyn's website.

Writers Read: Alan Cumyn.

My Book, The Movie: North to Benjamin.

The Page 99 Test: North to Benjamin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nathan Englander’s ten favorite books

Nathan Englander is the author of the novels Dinner at the Center of the Earth and The Ministry of Special Cases, and the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank—winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

His forthcoming novel is kaddish.com.

One of Englander's ten favorite books, as shared at Vulture.com:

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

Feeling like your world is currently imploding? Here’s an I-couldn’t-put-it-down dystopian novel that makes the end of days kind of cheery (in the end). I just finished reading it, and am glad to have a place to sing its praises.

Read about another entry on the list.

Station Eleven is among M.L. Rio’s five top novels inspired by Shakespeare, Anne Corlett's five top books with different takes on the apocalypse, Christopher Priest’s five top sci-fi books that make use of music, and Anne Charnock's five favorite books with fictitious works of art.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Sarah Bailey reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Sarah Bailey, author of Into the Night.

The entry begins:

There has been quite a diverse mix of books on my reading pile recently which I always enjoy. It’s nice to dive into completely different worlds and I certainly feel like I’ve met some characters I won’t forget.

Hidden Killers, Lynda La Plante

I am on a Lynda La Plante binge at the moment because I am lucky enough to be interviewing the master of the police procedural in Australia this February! I love her female protagonist Jane Tennison and it is interesting to read about her navigating her role as a junior police officer in the 1970’s. I love how smart and assertive she is while still being so...[read on]

About Into the Night, from the publisher:

After the shocking murder of a high-profile celebrity, Gemma Woodstock must pull back the layers of a gilded cage to discover who among the victim’s friends and family can be trusted–and who may be the killer.

Troubled and brilliant, Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock finds herself lost and alone after a recent move to Melbourne, brokenhearted by the decisions she’s had to make. Her new workplace is a minefield and Detective Sergeant Nick Fleet, the partner she has been assigned, is uncommunicative and often hostile. When a homeless man is murdered and Gemma is put on the case, she can’t help feeling a connection with the victim and his lonely, isolated existence.

Then Sterling Wade, an up-and-coming actor filming his breakout performance in a closed-off city street, is murdered in the middle of an action-packed shot, and Gemma and Nick have to put aside their differences to unravel the mysteries surrounding the actor’s life and death. Who could commit such a brazen crime? Who stands to profit from it? Far too many people, and none of them can be trusted. Gemma can’t imagine a pair of victims with less in common–and yet as Gemma and Fleet soon learn, both men were keeping secrets that may have led to their deaths.

With riveting suspense, razor-sharp writing, and a fascinating cast of characters, INTO THE NIGHT proves Sarah Bailey is a major new talent to watch in the world of literary crime fiction.

Visit Sarah Bailey's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Dark Lake.

My Book, The Movie: The Dark Lake.

The Page 69 Test: Into the Night.

My Book, The Movie: Into the Night.

Writers Read: Sarah Bailey.

--Marshal Zeringue

Debra H. Goldstein's "One Taste Too Many," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: One Taste Too Many by Debra H. Goldstein.

From the entry:

It is a good thing [this] is a wish list because not every actor who could play the role perfectly is either the right age now or still alive.
Plot:

Married at eighteen, divorced at twenty-eight, Sarah Blair reluctantly swaps her luxury lifestyle for a cramped studio apartment and a law firm receptionist job in Wheaton, Alabama. With her feisty Siamese cat, RahRah, and some clumsy domestic skills, she’s the polar opposite of her bubbly twin, Emily—an ambitious chef determined to take her culinary ambitions to the top at a local gourmet restaurant.

Sarah knew starting over would be messy. But things fall apart completely when her ex drops dead, seemingly poisoned by Emily’s award-winning rhubarb crisp. Now, with RahRah wanted by the woman who broke up her marriage and Emily wanted by the police for murder, Sarah needs to figure out the right recipe to crack the case before time runs out. Unfortunately, for a gal whose idea of good china is floral paper plates, catching the real killer and living to tell about it could mean facing a fate worse than death—being in the kitchen!

Space only allows casting consideration for a limited number of roles here. The rest will be filled by auditions and casting agent recommendations.

Sarah Blair – tall, willowy, clumsy and inept in the kitchen – age 28 –younger Sandra Bullock (think Ms. Congeniality or Ya-Ya Sisterhood) or perhaps Jennifer Garner or Claire...[read on]

Visit Debra H. Goldstein's website.

The Page 69 Test: One Taste Too Many.

My Book, The Movie: One Taste Too Many.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Sonja Thomas's "Privileged Minorities"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Privileged Minorities: Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India by Sonja Thomas.

About the book, from the publisher:

Although demographically a minority in Kerala, India, Syrian Christians are not a subordinated community. They are caste-, race-, and class-privileged, and have long benefitted, both economically and socially, from their privileged position. Focusing on Syrian Christian women, Sonja Thomas explores how this community illuminates larger questions of multiple oppressions, privilege and subordination, racialization, and religion and secularism in India.

In Privileged Minorities, Thomas examines a wide range of sources, including oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and legislative assembly debates, to interrogate the relationships between religious rights and women's rights in Kerala. Using an intersectional approach, and US women of color feminist theory, she demonstrates the ways that race, caste, gender, religion, and politics are inextricably intertwined, with power and privilege working in complex and nuanced ways. By attending to the ways in which inequalities within groups shape very different experiences of religious and political movements in feminist and rights-based activism, Thomas lays the groundwork for imagining new feminist solidarities across religions, castes, races, and classes.

Learn more about Privileged Minorities at the University of Washington Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Privileged Minorities.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine novels that examine the wounds of rural America

Susan Bernhard is a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship recipient and a graduate of the GrubStreet Novel Incubator program. She was born and raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, is a graduate of the University of Maryland, and lives with her husband and two children near Boston.

Winter Loon is her debut novel.

At Lithub she took "a look at contemporary fiction that taps into Americana mythology and storytelling, that is unafraid to turn the body over and examine the underbelly for wounds and scars," and tagged nine novels. One title on the list:

Susan Henderson, The Flicker of Old Dreams

Henderson explores the idea of the American Dream, how we pursue it, how we lose it, in this novel set in small town Montana. When a high school hero dies in a tragic farm accident, his brother disappears, only to return years later to a town dying and still dealing with the death of this boy. The narrator—a mortician daughter of a mortician, whose life has been about death from the moment of birth—lovingly breathes hope into this book of small gestures, of anguish and loneliness, about dying and grief, and the isolation of rural America.

Read about another title on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Flicker of Old Dreams.

My Book, The Movie: The Flicker of Old Dreams.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Debra H. Goldstein's "One Taste Too Many"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: One Taste Too Many: A Sarah Blair Mystery by Debra H. Goldstein.

About the book, from the publisher:

For culinary challenged Sarah Blair, there’s only one thing scarier than cooking from scratch—murder!

Married at eighteen, divorced at twenty eight, Sarah Blair reluctantly swaps her luxury lifestyle for a cramped studio apartment and a law firm receptionist job in the tired hometown she never left. With nothing much to show for the last decade but her feisty Siamese cat, RahRah, and some clumsy domestic skills, she’s the polar opposite of her bubbly twin, Emily—an ambitious chef determined to take her culinary ambitions to the top at a local gourmet restaurant...

Sarah knew starting over would be messy. But things fall apart completely when her ex drops dead, seemingly poisoned by Emily’s award-winning rhubarb crisp. Now, with RahRah wanted by the woman who broke up her marriage and Emily wanted by the police for murder, Sarah needs to figure out the right recipe to crack the case before time runs out. Unfortunately, for a gal whose idea of good china is floral paper plates, catching the real killer and living to tell about it could mean facing a fate worse than death—being in the kitchen!

Visit Debra H. Goldstein's website.

The Page 69 Test: One Taste Too Many.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five books that shaped Louise Penny's life

Louise Penny shared with CBC Books "some of the books that have played an important role in her personal and professional life," including:

Charlotte's Web by E. B. White

"Charlotte's Web by E. B. White introduced me to the power of storytelling... I was a very fearful child. I was afraid of everything, so reading in my room was the only place on Earth I felt safe. I was reading Charlotte's Web and one of the things I was most afraid of was spiders. Like for most children, it almost was a phobia... But halfway through the book I realized that I really loved Charlotte. I didn't want anything bad to happen to her. And this was a spider! In that instant my fear of spiders disappeared. I understood, at that moment, the power of the word and the power of storytelling. For a fearful child to have such a principal fear lifted because of a story was beyond imagining. I knew I wanted to be part of that world forever. I'm not sure if I initially thought I wanted to be a writer then, but I knew I wanted to be a reader for the rest of my life. Writers start off as readers, and that's where it all began.

Read about another entry on the list.

Charlotte's Web is among Swapna Haddow top ten unappreciated animal heroes, Lara Williamson's top ten goodbyes in children’s literature, BBC.com Culture’s critics' eleven best children’s books (for ages 10 and under) ever published in English, Holly Webb's ten top children's books on death and bereavement, Sara Brady's top six talking-animal characters she’d like to have a drink with, Joel Cunningham's favorite talking animals in fiction, Scott Greenstone's top twenty books with fewer than 200 pages, Mohsin Hamid's six favorite books and Sarah Lean's top ten animal stories; it is a book Kate DiCamillo hopes parents will read to their kids.

Visit Louise Penny's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Louise Penny & Trudy.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Yona Zeldis McDonough reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Yona Zeldis McDonough, author of Courageous.

Her entry begins:

I just started The Subway Girls by Susie Orman Schnall. Part of the novel takes places in 1949, and focuses on the Miss Subways beauty contest, which offered its contestants a shot at a little Park Avenue luster and local fame. I can still remember those seeing those placards for Miss Subways in the1960s and early 1970s and so I was immediately...[read on]

About Courageous, from the publisher:

Aiden is the son of a fisherman on the south coast of England, and he's been afraid of the ocean since his oldest brother was killed at sea. But that doesn't matter when he and his best friend, Sally, hear chatter on their radio. It's May 1940, and British troops, including Aiden's surviving brother, George, are trapped in northern France, surrounded by Nazi forces. The Allies have come up with a daring plan to rescue their troops. But in order to get their boys out of France and back across the Channel, they'll need every boat they can get their hands on.

Aiden's parents forbid him from volunteering, but he and Sally are determined to help, and they secretly set off to join Operation Dynamo. It's a deadly journey, and the friends are in grave danger as they help ferry the troops from Dunkirk, all the while desperately searching for George. But can Aiden find the courage to keep going, or will he, Sally, and George be lost forever?

From Yona Zeldis McDonough, author of The Bicycle Spy, comes a gripping story of courage under fire on the high seas.

Learn more about the author and her work at Yona Zeldis McDonough's website.

The Page 69 Test: You Were Meant For Me.

My Book, The Movie: You Were Meant for Me.

Coffee with a Canine: Yona Zeldis McDonough & Willa and Holden.

The Page 69 Test: The House on Primrose Pond.

My Book, The Movie: The House on Primrose Pond.

Writers Read: Yona Zeldis McDonough.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels that tell the story of NYC's Gilded Age

Simon Baatz is a New York Times-bestselling author and award-winning historian.

His latest book is The Girl on the Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder, and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.

At CrimeReads Baatz tagged seven novels that tell the story of Gilded Age New York City, including:

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)

Johnson, an editor at the New York Age, a weekly newspaper based in New York, wrote this fictional account of a young biracial man who moves from Georgia to New York sometime after the Civil War. The protagonist earns his living playing ragtime at clubs and private parties, then moves to Paris, and returns to the United States where he witnesses a lynching. He is able to pass as white and he marries a white woman, abandoning his calling as a musician and going into business.

Read about another entry on the list.

Also see Rosemary Simpson's six favorite historical crime novels set during The Gilded Age.

--Marshal Zeringue