The Lost King of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson

The Lost King of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson

The Lost King of Oz (1925) is the nineteenth in the series of Oz books created by L. Frank Baum and his successors, and the fifth written by Ruth Plumly Thompson. It was Illustrated by John R. Neill.
Old Mombi, formerly the Wicked Witch of the North, is now stripped of all her magic and working as a cook in the land of Kimbaloo. One day she comes across Pajuka, the former prime minister of Oz, transformed by Mombi into a goose years before. She sets out with Pajuka and a boy named Snip to find Pastoria, the former king of Oz, whom she also enchanted in the past.
I read the Project Gutenberg edition of The Lost King of Oz to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its publication in 1925.

Martin's Father

Martin's Father by Margrit Eichler

Martin's Father is a 1971 childrens book published by Lollipop Power in Chapel Hill, NC. They were a feminist collective that published books to counteract sex-stereotyped behavior and role-models. The author, Margrit Eichler, was a professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Toronto; her research areas included non-sexist research methods, new reproductive technologies, contemporary families, and related issues. She wrote and published extensively on these subjects, as well as authored the children’s book, Martin's Father, while she was working on her PhD at Duke University.
The book portrays a typical day in the life of a single parent father and his son Martin. The father cooks breakfast, they play, do laundry together, go for a walk in the park, feed pigeons, and eat lunch. In the evening his father bathes Martin, puts him to bed, and plays him a song. Martin believes he has the best father in the world.
This book was very popular with my children when they were young and is still a powerful memory for them as adults. It is a simple yet powerful statement about single parent father families.

Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss

Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss by Pat Schwiebert and Chuck DeKlyen

Tear Soup is a large format illustrated children's book that is well suited to reading aloud and, despite its childrens format, is suitable for all ages. It is a guidebook in story form for dealing with grief. Illustrated with color drawings by Taylor Bills, it tells the story of how Grandy deals with a crippling loss by making tear soup from the tears she has cried. As she makes the soup, she flavors it with memories and the caring thoughts of friends and relatives, mapping out ways to deal with grief on every page. After the story ends, there is a list of "Cooking Tips" and two pages of Real Life resources for "Where to find help."

The Messenger Boy Murders

The Messenger Boy Murders by Perihan Mağden

Returning home from his travels, Stravrogin is asked by the local book store owner to investigate a disturbing string of messenger boy murders that has recently plagued the city. As he unwillingly takes up the case of the mysterious deaths, he is met at every turn with unusual people and circumstances. It is like an adult fairy tale where the rules of life are gently suspended and you are immersed in a strangely mysterious, yet logically consistent, place and time. I was enthralled and look forward to reading more by Perihan Mağden.

Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians

Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson

On his 13th birthday Alcatraz Smedry received his inheritance, a bag of sand sent to him by the father he has never seen. He thought the sand was a strange joke until the evil Librarians came to steal it.
We all know that Librarians are nice people who recommend good books, but in this book meant for young children, that’s just what they want you to think! In this book they’re actually dangerous. In this book they are a cult of evil librarians keeping people from the truth and secretly ruling the world. They control what gets read, what gets seen, and what gets learned, and because of that they have power over everyone. In the world the author has created most governments don't even know that they're being manipulated by these evil librarians. Alcatraz was fooled like everyone else until his Grandpa Smedry shows up and talks Alcatraz to go with him to the main public library to retrieve the stolen bag of special sand before the librarians can melt the sand down and turn it into a glass lens of power. I don't like that the author portrays librarians as evil, deceitful, and cruel to young children who probably will come in contact with this book in their local public library. These days librarians are being attacked by small minded adults who do not want any views but their own to be available to the public, but to turn that story around and blame librarians for preventing freedom of information rather than championing it seems sinister. Do a little mental exercise and change the librarians in the story to priests and ministers, and imagine what kind of reaction this book would get.

Cheshire Crossing

Cheshire Crossing by Andy Weir

Cheshire Crossing takes characters from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan, and follows Alice Liddell, Dorothy Gale, and Wendy Darling after they are united at "Cheshire Crossing" by the mysterious Dr. Ernest Rutherford and Miss Mary Poppins. Originally writen and illustrated by Andy Weir from 2006 to 2008 as a four issue fanzine, it was later released as a graphic novel, illustrated by Sarah Andersen, from Ten Speed Press in 2019.
Dr. Rutherford believes that the girls can travel to other worlds and wants to study how they do it. The girls end up travelling to and between their three destination worlds, along with good and evil characters of these worlds as well, stirring up troubles as they go. Things can get confusing but they always remain fun and all ends up well.
Andy Weir is best known for his science fiction novel The Martian and his short story "The Egg". This is a much more playful early work.
The original 4 issue series is available free online.

The Hotel Dick

The Hotel Dick by Axel Brand

The Hotel Dick is the first of a series of four detective novels that follows the exploits of Lieutenant Joe Sonntag of the Milwaukee Police Department and are set in the late 1940s. The novel starts off when a hotel detective named J. Axel Brand is shot in the hotel brbershop while getting his morning shave. The only witness to the crime is the barber who swears that the movie actor Spencer Tracy is the shooter. A quick check with Tracy's studio reveals that he has an alibi and could not be the murderer, leaving Sonntag to puzzle over the eyewitness account as they begin questioning anyone who might have had a reason to dislike the hotel dick.
Full of atmospheric references to Milwaukee in the late Forties supplied by the author who grew up there, this is a puzzling mystery and a good introduction to this series.
Axel Brand is a pseudonym for Richard Shaw Wheeler (1935 – 2019) who is known for his award winning novels set in the American West.

Night Medicine

Night Medicine by Axel Brand

Night Medicine is a one of a series of detective novels that follows the exploits of Lieutenant Joe Sonntag of the Milwaukee Police Department that are set in the late 1940s. The title refers to the kinds of medicine that are illegal, such as abortions and assisted suicide, and therefore often provided in secret. The police in this novel are called in when the patients of such "night medicine" die from their treatment. It starts when a young woman's body is found drained of blood lying at the Milwaukee City Zoo. The pathologist believes she had a botched abortion that caused her to bleed out, but there is no clue as to who washed and dressed the girl's body and left her there in the zoo next to the big cats cages, arranged almost as if in a funeral home on a bed of ferns.
In the 1940s, abortion and suicide were considered murder, and those who assisted in them were murderers. When a patient died, the police were called in to find those involved. During the course of his investigation, Sonntag deals with not only legal, but also ethical and political issues, and the novel provides a window into the debate at that time over a woman's right to choose as he investigates the death of this young woman.
Axel Brand is a pseudonym for Richard Shaw Wheeler (1935 – 2019) who is known for his novels set in the American West. Night Medicine is the third of four detective novels set in Milwaukee that he wrote in 2015 as Axel Brand.

Transitions: A Mother's Journey

Transitions: A Mother's Journey by Élodie Durand

This English translation of a French graphic novel deals with a parent's learning that their child is a transgender man. Told from a mother's point of view, it portrays a lot of the questions and concerns that parents of transgender offspring often face while their child is transitioning. It will be useful to heteronormative adults, especially family members, who want to understand the transition process.

Still Life

Still Life by Louise Penny

Still Life is the first of a long series of mystery novels by Louise Penny that feature Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec. In it a secretive artist living in a small rural village is killed after entering a painting for the first time in a local art competition and Gamache is called in to investigate. The village is full of quirky characters and many may have a motive ond the opportunity to have comminnted murder. Gamache and his team leave no stone unturned in seeking to find out what happened and by whom. As a fan of Agatha Christie's mysteries, I found that Louise Penny is a worthy heir to the Christie legacy.

Run, Rose, Run

Run, Rose, Run by James Patterson and Dolly Parton

This is the story of a young woman on the run from her past, seeking to make it as a singer/songwriter in Country Music. She meets a man with an equally dark past who is also a singer/songwriter and just happens to be a studio musician for the most famous woman performer in Nashville history. As she starts to make it, she fears the demons of her past will catch up with her.
I enjoyed the audiobook edition where the famous female performer is read by Dolly Parton herself. This is the first book I have ever read that is accompanied by a soundtrack CD. With three singer/songwriters turning out the lyrics and chords to song after song in the book, Dolly Parton records all the songs and has put out a Run, Rose, Run CD.

Queer: A Graphic History

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker & Jules Scheele

Activist/academic Meg-John Barker and cartoonist Jules Scheele provide a history of Queer Theory and action in this illustrated guide to this new and controversial area of study. Providing a history of Queerness as it has evolved and is currently thought of, the book introduces the reader to the leading thinkers and theories that will provide a grounding in the meaning of queer Theory and its place in modern thought.

Back to the Garden

Back to the Garden by Laurie R. King

Laurie King creates a new detective, Raquel Laing, to work on a cold case murder that may be related to a string of unsolved murders. Human remains are found under the cement base when the Trustees of the Gardener Estate have a statue with a failing foundation moved. Fifty years ago when the statue was placed at the Estate, it was home to a countercultural commune.
Detective Laing has been working on a series of unsolved murders of young women whose bodies were found under poured cement foundations in the San Francisco area, all linked to a serial killer known as The Highwayman. The alleged killer is dying of cancer and she is trying to get him to help identify the remains of his victims.
With chapters titled THEN and NOW, the author delves into the backstory of the commune, leading up to the day the cement foundation was poured, while she interviews the few members of the group remaining. All the while trying to coax a dying serial killer to identifying his victims.
It is nice to see a new character emerge from the imagination of this gifted writer. Hopefully this book will become the first volume of another succesful detective series for Laurie R. King.

Riviera Gold by Laurie R. King

Riviera Gold by Laurie R. King

Riviera Gold is the 16th in the Mary Russell series of mystery novels that are based around the growing relationship between the young Mary Russell and a much older Sherlock Holmes after he moves from London to a rural Sussex cottage to take up beekeeping. In this installment set in the summer of 1925, Russell takes advantage of Holmes visit to Romania to go to Monte Carlo looking for Mrs. Hudson. Hudson, who left her employment as Holmes housekeeper and did not leave a forwarding address, has gone to live in Monte Carlo to be close to her old friend Lily Langtree and to live in her favorite city. In this novel we learn a lot about Hudson's backstory before she met Holmes, including a mysterious inheritance from her father that draws Hudson and Russell into contact with Monte Carlo's underworld.
I am very fond of Laurie King's writing style and this book is a worthy addition to this long running series.

No-No Boy

No-No Boy by John Okada

No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro, a Japanese-American young man from Seattle, after he is let out of prison at the end of World War II. Before the war started he was in college studying to be an engineer, but when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, he was sent to a series of Japanese internment camps for two years. At that point, he and many other young male Japanese-Americans were asked two questions by the US government: would they swear allegiance to the United States, and would they serve in the US armed forces. Those, like Ichiro, who answered no to both questions were sent to jail for an additional two years and became known as No-No Boys.
This book portrays what it was like for these resisters when they returned home and faced discrimination for their choice. He is surrounded by a Japanese community that is trying to fit back into American life and does not want to dwell on the unjust treatment they received during the war. And yet his No-No status does not allow him to put the past behind him. He needs to come to terms with it. Which is what he does in this book.
Originally published in 1957 No-No Boy was ignored by a country that did not want to come to terms with the injustice of the internment and its effect on the Japanese-American community. Only later in the 1970s did people start to take notice, leading to its republication in 1976. It has been in print ever since and is a seminal work on the Japanese-American internment and its effects on the people of Japanese heritage living on the West Coast. I bought my copy of this book during a visit to Seattle's Wing Luke Museum, which is dedicated to preserving Asian-American art and history.

Citizen 13660

Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo

After the United States entered World War II all Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were forcibly relocated to internment camps. Miné Okubo was one of over one hundred thousand people swept up from their homes. She and her brother were first sent to to the Tanforan relocation center, a former racetrack, in San Bruno, California. There they shared a horse stall that smelled of manure and given sacks to fill with hay for their beds. Eventually she was tranferred to the Topaz internment camp in the Sevier Desert of central Utah; it was a dry, windy environment with harsh winters. During the war over 11,000 people were sent there.
A professional artist, she made over 2,000 drawings in charcoal, watercolor, pen, and ink, depicting her everyday experiences in these camps.
In 1946, after the war ended, she published Citizen 13660 (her government assigned number while in the camps) which contains 206 drawings from her internment, each narrated with a short text describing what is depicted in the picture.It covers her life from the years before the war to her final day at the Topaz internment camp, showing the day-to-day lives of her fellow internees of Japanese descent as she lived it. It was the first published account of the experience from an internee and won the American Book Award in 1984. This edition includes a Preface she wrote in 1983.

Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist

Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist by Angelica Shirley Carpenter

Matilda Joslyn Gage was one of the three most prominent suffragists of the 19th Century, along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Early leaders of the movement to get equal rights for women, these three started the seminal work on the movement History of Woman Suffrage. Too Radical for her time, her research on the history of female oppression fueled the Second Wave Feminist Movement. Yet today Matilda Joslyn Gage is the least known of the three. Angelica Shirley Carpenter's biography does a lot to bring Gage's accomplishments to a modern audience. Of the three, Gage was the most radical, tracing women's oppresion to a coordinated effort of organized religion and civil governments. She was also the most scholarly, looking into the hostory of women's oppression. Her writings on this appeared in the first volume of History of Woman Suffrage, and in much greater detail in her later work Woman, Church and State
This book relies a lot on papers preserved by Gage's children who settled in the Dakota Territory in the 1880s. This may explain why the book was published by the South Dakota Historical Society. The title is based on Gage's assertion that, lacking the basic right to vote, women were treated similar to criminals by society.

The Kitchen Madonna

The Kitchen Madonna by Rumer Godden

The Kitchen Madonna is a 1960s children's book about Marta, a middle aged female Ukrainian refugee, who has taken a job as a nanny/housekeeper for a London married cople who are professional architects. They have two children, Gregory (9) and Janet (7), and have had a series of one-year contract foreign nannies that have left Gregory introverted and shy. When Marta arrives seeking a home rather than an address in London, she becomes the secure center that Gregory has been missing. However, when Gregory finds out that Marta is not happy because their new modern home doesn't have a "good place" in the kitchen, a small shrine with an icon, candle, and flower vase, he sets out to find her a Ukrainian icon in busy, modern London. See how it all turns out in The Kitchen Madonna.
Given the current war in Ukraine and the vast number of Ukrainian refugees, this book has a special value today for understanding the good hearted nature of the Ukrainian people and their simple faith and values.

Book Uncle and Me

Book Uncle and Me by Uma Krishnaswami

Book Uncle and Me is a childrens book about a street corner librarian in India and a young girl who visits him every day to get e new book to read. When Book Uncle gets into trouble she rallies to his defense.
This is a great book for librarians to share with young readers. It shows young people how they are never powerless or too young to speak up against injustice. It also shows how important free access to books is to a community
It has great illustrations by Julianna Swaney.

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I have long been a fan of movie versions of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, enjoying watching one or more versions every holiday season. This year I saw the Disney version which claimed to be the most true to the text movie adaptation made. That got me wondering what gets left out of Dickens' original work when Hollywood decides to put their ow spin on it. So this year I downloaded the text onto my iPhone and read the story as he told it in 1843. I am glad I did. I will keep watching new movie adaptations in years to come, but now I will know I am rooted in the original text.

I did find one exchange that I have never seen in any Hollywood retelling. I found this anti-church exchange between Scrooge and Christmas Present while they watched the poor people of the town bringing their holiday dinners to be cooked in the bakers' ovens, a routine activity in the 19th century for those too poor to have their own ovens.

“Spirit,” said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought, “I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent enjoyment.”

“I!” cried the Spirit.

“You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,” said Scrooge, “wouldn’t you?”

“I!” cried the Spirit.

“You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day,” said Scrooge. “And it comes to the same thing.”

“I seek!” exclaimed the Spirit.

“Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,” said Scrooge.

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us, and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

Scrooge promised that he would …