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Those who have ever struggled with questions about family and tradition and what it means to respect the past while embracing the future will likely find themselves in the pages of We Walked the Sky by Lisa Fiedler.  This poignant and well-crafted novel engenders a range of emotions—from anger to exasperation and from sorrow to exhilaration!  It not only leads readers to their own popcorn-scented memories and emotional free-falls but reminds us of personal failures and triumphs, revealing that joy really can trump tragedy if we remember to absorb the losses and store them in our hearts, because when the sun comes up, the showRead More →

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All the Greys on Greene Street by Laura Tucker tells the colorful story of Olympia, a twelve-year-old artist who is named after a painting by French painter Manet.  Olympia’s (aka Ollie) dad Graham is an art restorer and her mom Doll is a sculptor.  The family lives in the Soho neighborhood in Manhattan, New York. Ollie’s best friends are Alex, an agile young man who Spiderman’s his way up a wall and who practices jumps like a stuntman in training; and Richard, a monster aficionado fascinated by science who is developing a scrapbook that he calls the Taxonomy.  Using her sketching talent, Ollie will occasionallyRead More →

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What does happily ever after really mean?  Perhaps fairy tales promise happy endings to distract people from how awful life can be.  Or perhaps they gift us with hope.  These are topics that Julie Buxbaum explores in her newest novel, “Hope and Other Punch Lines.”  She also considers the roles that humor and love play in our lives as we struggle with those moments that cleave our lives, and perhaps us, into befores and afters. Abbi Hope Goldstein calls herself a fern, nothing exotic or flashy, just a standard issue brunette with basic tastes and a natural inclination to blend in.  Her more audacious andRead More →