If anyone has the brain capacity to read this blog post on Election Day 2016, I doff my cap to you! On this most volatile, most important of election days, the children of our nation will be privy to all of the anxieties and hopes (and fears and stress and overeating) of the grownups around them. They deserve a window into this world of American citizens’ often hard-won, and sometimes denied, right to vote.
Here are some new and recent books for younger children that offer entertaining, informative, inspiring and powerful stories of what voting is and why it matters.
Oh, and have you voted yet? If not, this post will self-destruct in five seconds. Please stop reading immediately and go exercise your right and responsibility to help shape our nation’s future. Thank you!  Continue reading →

One of my favorite customers came in last week with a huge smile on her face. Susan is usually a cheery person, but the grin was something special and I could tell something fabulous was about to be shared when she came over to the register. Susan has been shopping at our store since the very beginning. She is a huge proponent of getting rid of educational testing in schools to focus on actual, real-life learning. Susan also fully understands the struggle with Amazon that all indies face. In short, she is a perfect example of an indie customer who just gets it.  Continue reading →

Bookstore events are not without tension, drama, despairing lows and fabulous highs. Wednesday night we hosted James Rebanks, author of the wildly popular The Shepherd’s Life and his newest book, The Shepherd’s View. The story of how an English shepherd and bestselling author came to Shelburne, Vt., is a story that is more than a year in the making and culminated in a standing-room-only event at Shelburne Farms with more than 225 people in attendance.  Continue reading →

The idea of the Hero’s Journey often involves transformation. Whether involving a trip to the phone booth, slipping behind a hinged bookcase, or sliding down a pole into a cave, the journey involves a pendulum like transformation of persona. Kendra Levin, executive editor at Viking Children’s Books by day, has not only studied the Hero’s Journey in the context of the creative writing process, she has dramatically put it into practice. Yes, when she leaves her office at Penguin at the end of the day, Kendra transforms into a professional Life Coach. Not satisfied with that simple proof of concept, intent in fact on being as existential as possible, Kendra took matters even further by writing a book on using the Hero’s Journey to write books, The Hero Is You: Sharpen Your Focus, Conquer Your Demons, and Become the Writer You Were Born to Be.
These are deep waters, clearly. Furthermore, Kendra is the editor of some personal and store favorite authors, such as Curtis Jobling and Kersten Hamilton, and it seemed a pressing matter to find out more about her heroic journey.
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Happy Candy Hangover Day, pumpkins! Time to put aside the tiny chocolate bars, the slim rolls of little round sweet-tart Smarties, the loose scatterings of off-brand Starbursts, the Tootsie Roll midgies, and the Holy Grail of dark chocolate, mini Kit Kats, and think about books again.
November has the most Mo’ of any month in the calendar; it actually puts the MO in MOnth.
There’s Movember, for one thing; that’s the moustache-growing celebration for men’s health (and no reason we women of a certain age can’t join right in). That’s the first No(vember) Mo. But in the literary world, there are several giant Mo’s:
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