- May 22, 2025
Agnes and Daisy are high school best friends who have grown up together. An archive of their friendship has even been documented in a scrapbook Daisy’s grandma made for them when they were eight called “The History of Everything.” When Agnes’ mother announces that she has accepted a new job and she and Agnes will ...
Read more… - May 22, 2025
It’s 1955 and the constant “Duck and Cover” drills that teach students to take shelter under a school desk in the event of an emergency have paid off. Children are the only ones to survive a nuclear attack on the United States that leaves them blaming Russia and grasping for answers as they adjust to ...
Read more… - May 15, 2025
Dianaworld: An Obsession by Edward White
The 1990s was the decade of tabloid queens, blonde and doomed, despised and beloved in equal measure. To wait in line at the grocery store was to be besieged with a chronicle of the tragedies, disasters, scandals, and dietary minutiae of these women’s lives, dissected for public consumption alongside the ...
Read more… - May 8, 2025
Twentieth Century Ghosts is a great selection of short stories, including the one that was adapted into the film Black Phone.
My favorite short story so far has been You Will Hear The Locust Sing which draws inspirations from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, involving a young man’s transformation into a Locust due to living near an atomic bomb ...
Read more… - April 23, 2025
The Lost Dresses of Italy is a lovely historical fiction focusing on Victorian poet Christina Rossetti and her family. It’s an immersive Italian setting and I’m learning about the Pre-Raphaelites in a very entertaining way.
-Gia, Children’s Room
Read more… - April 14, 2025
April is Poetry Month, and to celebrate, I humbly offer for your consideration two recently published poetry collections from contemporary poets. When was the last time you read a book of poems? Who reads poetry nowadays, anyway? My thinking is, perhaps we should. Poetry stirs my mind to soften, to move from thought to thought ...
Read more… - April 3, 2025
In the spring, the staff here at PFL turn our thoughts to reading (which is maybe not surprising, because it’s at the top of most of our minds all year round). Check out the list below to see the titles we are turning to as we brave late spring storms and look for flowers peeking ...
Read more… - March 26, 2025
High school senior Lemon Ziegler is in a tough spot; she desperately wants to leave her small Pennsylvania town to go to college, but she can’t because she’s been chosen to continue her family’s secret business of faking lake monster (Old Lucy) sightings. Loyal to cantankerous Pappap, and aware that the town’s economy might collapse ...
Read more… - March 19, 2025
While discussing family history with Miss Mary, I learned that her grandmother Irene had diaries from her younger years, including during WW2, and she had turned some of them into a book several years ago. Based on what she had told me about this fascinating woman, I knew I needed to read this book.
Fire Burn ...
Read more… - March 13, 2025
Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack by Willa Hammitt Brown
Legend has it that the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan was born in Michigan, or Minnesota, or Wisconsin, or perhaps even our very own Bangor, Maine. Determining the birthplace of a mythical entity can be a tricky business, needless to say. Wherever he may ...
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