Most of us in America have read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird at sometime throughout our lives. It’s the clearest account of Jim Crow on Southern American culture and of the power of a few upright people to fix it. Lee’s Alabama roots are well known, but she actually wrote the classic in New York City. Beforehand, she wrote a series of short stories with themes that forecast her great accomplishment. Posthumously, those stories have come to light in this collection. The short stories include some tales from New York City but mostly tales from Alabama. Some of To…

I picked this up after seeing the mother-daughter duo on GMA, and they absolutely delivered. If Gossip Girl went to a New England boarding school, got a group chat, and discovered TikTok, this would be the story that ensued. The Academy is messy, glossy, rumor-soaked fun, and I was locked in almost immediately. The rotating POVs work surprisingly well. Instead of feeling chaotic, it feels like you are piecing together secrets alongside a very online, and very nosy narrator. The mystery of Cinnamon’s death hangs over the school like a storm cloud, even as Tiffin skyrockets in rankings and the…

I was surprised to see this book with Sparks and Shyamalan on the cover when I first saw it. So naturally when I saw it on sale recently, I had to get it. Grief is a major theme here, and thats what gravitated me to keep on reading this book, and it turned out to be the right call. In the words of the Vision “What is grief, but love persevering.” Also, to love and lose is better than not to ever done it at all. I am not sure I believe in that sentiment, but this story has perhaps…