Click here to return to the series About the Book This month we travel to a fictional island in Jamaica–Bajacu–to talk with author Diana McCaulay, whose novel Daylight Come was published in September 2020. It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a grueling […]
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Depart, Depart by Sim Kern Young Adult Fiction Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen The boy first appears to Noah in the moments before Noah’s Houston neighborhood is engulfed by catastrophic flooding. He leads Noah to the relative safety of a parking garage, then disappears. In the wake of the flooding, Noah […]
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Back to the Indie Corner series I’m delighted to present Claire Datnow as this month’s Indie Corner author. Claire was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, which ignited her love for the natural world and diverse cultures. Claire taught creative writing to gifted and talented students in the Birmingham, […]
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Click here to return to the series Intro This month we travel to the world of Motswana author Tlotlo Tsamaase, whose short story “Eclipse Our Sins” rocked me in a good way. You can read the story at Clarkesworld. I featured this story in my last article at Medium, Part […]
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Back to the Indie Corner series February’s Indie Corner looks at the amazing Ryan Mizzen and his children’s fiction Hedgey-A and the Honey Bees! Mary: Tell us about yourself–your life so far and how you got started in writing. What else have you written or published? Ryan: My childhood was […]
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Strange Birds: A Field Guide to Ruffling Feathers, Celia C. Perez Middle Grade Fiction Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen In Sabal Palms, Florida, many girls join the Floras, a service organization begun in the early 1900s by some of the founders of the city. Even though her grandmother was a proud […]
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Click here to return to the series We’ll end the crazy year of 2020 on a positive note, with a look at the lyrical novel Fauna by Christiane Vadnais. Here, we travel to the Arctic Circle (as indicated by Ursus maritimus), but the novel’s setting is fictional and inspired by […]
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Young Adult Fiction Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen During junior year of high school, Liberty expects her focus to be on doing well in school and getting ready for college. Then her mom gets convicted of ecoterrorism and sent to jail, and Liberty finds herself moving to a rural mining town […]
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Click here to return to the series About the Book It’s my pleasure to talk with Catherine Bush, fellow Canadian and author of the new novel Blaze Island. It’s just a coincidence that we moved to the Maritimes and experienced our first hurricane shortly after Catherine and I began talking. […]
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Middle Grade Fiction Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Shuffled off to his aunt and uncle’s house in San Francisco while his mom takes a work assignment in China, everything looks bleak for 12-year-old Julian Carter-Li. No one besides his cousin and his best friend seem to care much about what happens […]
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Young Adult Fiction Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen The summer after senior year of high school should be full of magic, but for Julia Ducharme, it’s full of worry. Julia’s younger brother Caleb is still convalescing from a serious illness, her former summer fling has a new girlfriend and to top […]
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Click here to return to the series About the Book This July, we are fortunate to travel to Bangkok, Thailand, to explore Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain, published by Riverhead Books (US, 2020) and Sceptre (UK, 2019); in 2019 it was selected as a notable book of the year […]
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Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis Young Adult Fiction Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen From the very first line, Mindy McGinnis sucks the reader into an apocalyptic world in which water–and its scarcity–determines every move made by sixteen-year-old Lynn and her mother Lauren, two women surviving in what’s left […]
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Click here to return to the series This May, the world eco-fiction series travels back to North America as I talk with Andrew Krivak, author of The Bear. Andrew tells me that though the entire setting is fictional, the landscape of the novel was inspired by the mountains and woods […]
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For May’s Turning the Tide spotlight, I was thrilled to ask Clete Barrett Smith about his work with Dave Matthews (yes, that Dave Matthews) on their new children’s book If We Were Giants. Just published a couple months ago, this book is aimed toward a middle-grade audience, but all ages […]
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