Saxton Reads! & Reviews

If you’ve been using BookBrowse from our website, I wonder if you have read or signed up for the newsletters. There are several and I love them all. This week I got email notification that the latest copy of BookBrowse Recommends was available and was just blown away by the content. What I love is that in addition to some great book suggestions, there are these incredibly detailed sidebars with truly interesting information. 

Take Snakewoman of Little Egypt: A Novel by Robert Hellenga. The sidebar is all about religious snake handling and it is a fascinating history. Need more? There’s also an embedded video featuring snake handlers at Jolo, West Virginia. Snakewoman has earned two thumbs up from the critics and two thumbs up from the folks at BookBrowse. I personally don’t take their good words lightly. Snakewoman’s on my list of TBR’s and can be found at our library.

You’ve got to take a gander at Heliopolis by James Scudamore. The side bar here describes the favelas of Brazil as this is part Scudamore’s novel. Also included are some eye-opening pictures of what some real favelas look like.

Dark Water, a young adult novel by Laura McNeal is about Fifteen-year-old Pearl DeWitt and her mother live in California, where her uncle owns a grove of 900 avocado trees. Migrant workers are hired regularly and Pearl pays little attention to them until Amiel comes along. The two begin a forbidden romance. The, a searing wildfire strikes and a mandatory evacuation is executed. BookBrowse points out that this story is based on two true events. Laura McNeal has experienced her own wildfire and not been able to reenter her home for several days. “The plot of the book, she said, came from an actual rumor that spread through the migrant workers in her community. Many of them wouldn't evacuate during the fire because they were afraid that the border patrol would apprehend them.”

The sidebar provides some fascinating information about a condition called Heterochromia as Pearl has one brown eye and one blue eye.

Read the newsletter at http://www.bookbrowse.com/. You can find current editions of BookBrowse Recommends under the heading Online Magazines. While on the site take a look around. There is so much more than I mentioned in this short bit of praise.

BookBrowse is not your grandfather’s plain ol’ vanilla book site. So if you need a good book to read give BookBrowse a try. BookBrowse is available to all residents of Columbia, free of charge, 24/7.