Guest Post from Anne Shaw Heinrich, Author of House of Teeth

Anne Shaw Heinrich’s work has been published in numerous outlets, most recently, Writer’s Digest, Education Weekly, and Ms. Magazine, as well as The New York Times bestseller The Right Words at the Right Time, Volume 2: Your Turn (Atria 2006) and Chicken Soup for the Soul's The Cancer Book: 101 Stories of Courage, Support and Love (2009). Her debut novel, God Bless the Child, was the first in The Women of Paradise County Series published by Speaking Volumes. House of Teeth, the third book in the Series, releases in June 2026. Learn more at anneshawheinrich.com.

 

Follow Anne Shaw Heinrich on social media: 

Threads: @anne_shaw_heinrich | Instagram: @anne_shaw_heinrich | TikTok: @ash34249

Pushing Your Characters to Their Tipping Points 

When someone snaps and it seems like the break comes out of nowhere, those of us who have made a good number of trips around the sun know that such outbursts actually come from somewhere and everywhere. 

We understand overflowing buckets, and know how untended boiling water boils over, but we’re often startled if in the room when a person buckles under pressures, both seen and unseen. We’re uncomfortable, sometimes defensive or offended. If we’re interested, we can guess at the factors that brought on the boil. To do so is an act of humanity that the collective we should probably consider more often. 

One of the things I enjoy most about writing fiction is the chance to take those deep dives with characters and find ways to help readers consider the many factors that result in moments of unbearable tension. One of my favorite such moments takes place in God Bless the Child, the first novel in The Women of Paradise County Series. 

By the time readers get to the scene, they don’t know everything that has happened to the primary character, Mary Kline. Not even close; but they do know that she’s in way over her head, having taken in Pearl Davis, a vulnerable girl who has given birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. Mary believes herself to be the child’s mother until she sees the undeniable, biological truth: 

“ …I do indulge in forbidden emotions, like love and lust, and envy and anger. I exercise my rights as a part of the animal kingdom. Female animals often take on the role of mother to abandoned infants of another species. They feed these babies, hold them, love them, clean them, and naturally feel territorial… 

…Once, when Elizabeth was about seven months old, I hauled off and slapped Pearl as hard as I could. Mother and Daddy were already at the store, so it was just us three girls. I’d put water on to make hot chocolate. The teapot whistled, so I left the girls in the parlor. When I returned to the doorway with a tray of hot chocolate, I saw the thing I dreaded most… 

…Pearl stood there in her long nightgown, holding Elizabeth to her cheek. She was humming soft mama songs in her baby’s ear, swaying the instinctive mother-sway: back-and-forth, back-and-forth, foot-to-foot. She was a natural. Elizabeth snuggled into her mother’s neck, looking more contented than ever. I froze. 

 That sweet scene frightened me. Would I be relieved of my duties? Would Elizabeth and Pearl abandon  their captain with a mother-daughter mutiny? Was I to be confronted with a natural and understandable coup?...I would not allow it. I put the tray down on the coffee table and snatched Elizabeth from Pearl. I gently laid the baby on a blanket on the floor and worked myself back to my feet, finally reaching eye level with Pearl. She smiled dimly, that smile I’d grown so sick of seeing. I hated the simple stare she gave as she watched me lavish her baby with my love…My slap had more heft than I intended. Really. It was a full and jealous swing..I should never have slapped Pearl…She was just a confused child. Bewildered by all that had happened to her, she trusted me, and I guess that’s why I slapped her. Pearl was counting on me to make things right, but I knew nothing about this situation would ever be right.” 

Letting Mary describe what happened here was really valuable. Even she seems surprised that she’s behaved so irrationally, so violently, to someone she thinks she loves. The reader knows that Mary is not really backed into a corner. The only other people in the room are a baby and a childlike young woman, but letting the reader inside Mary’s head, we see all that she thinks she has to lose. The slap is an act of desperation, and it is just one of many surprises this character reveals throughout the book. 

In Books Two and Three of the Series, Violet is Blue and House of Teeth, readers

get a chance to be with a little boy-turned young man named Jules Marks, another primary character who gets pushed to the brink more than once. He’s quiet, intelligent and has come to understand in spades just how cruel and kind the world can be. He’s been beat up plenty, but still fancies himself protector of those he loves. 

When Jules learns that his own father, the feckless Lem Hauser, was the one who put a tattoo on the lower belly of his only friend, Violet, he makes a move that seems out of character. He comes to the confrontation committed to a verbal spat, but his father’s cruel taunts push Jules to a new brink that turns physical: 

I hated him. I hated every last thing about him. 

“Now, Jules, I hate to tell you this, but I got there first, you know. I saw that before you ever did. I saw that before your little gal let me work on her. I saw that clean and white as a brand-new sheet, my boy.” 

He laughed some more, nearly choking on the dark tobacco juice sloshing around in his mouth. The childish, but powerful nature of his laugh stung. He wasn’t taking me seriously. I lunged for him. I caught him off guard, and we both tumbled to the ground. I could feel the dust on my teeth and the smell of his wet tobacco breath. My body was on top of him. I started swinging as hard as I could. His ballcap had fallen to the ground, so I could see his greasy black hair, slicked down with pure meanness. I landed some good punches and kept swinging until he stopped me and pushed me off him. The push was hard enough to knock down the burn barrel…The air between us bristled. Hungry dogs barked in the distance. My face throbbed… 

“Hey, Jules, you come back any time and wrestle with old Lem. Anytime, Sir.” 

Angry tears started to pool behind my eyes. I didn’t want them to drip down my face until I’d put more distance between us. They started falling anyway.

Writing this part of Jules’ story challenged me, not because I thought the attack on Lem wasn’t justified. After the willful neglect and cruelty that this character and his five little sisters have endured, he deserves to throw a punch and have it land. Lem’s involvement with Jules’ only friend, Violet, pushes an already distressed Jules over a very natural edge. Showing readers this break makes a character who is beyond heroic by any standards, more believable and layered. 

The layers matter to me as a writer. Making decisions about how and when and who will reveal new pockets of humanity in a story is my idea of a good time, but there’s more to it. Giving fictional characters room to grow and to be fully human has the potential to do work beyond the page, and I think that has more value in the long run. Is it possible that by reading and writing stories that lay bare more than one truth, we expand our capacity to extend similar considerations to the people who live and breathe around us? To this, I say yes, yes, yes. 

Jules Marks and his five little sisters can finally relax. Their feckless parents from Shakey's Half are doing time in the Paradise County Jail, and their Uncle Larry, Aunt Sally and Aunt Clarice have swooped in to give them the safety and security they deserved all along. As they settle into the closest thing to normal they’ve ever known, their neighbors and classmates are quick to remind them not to get too comfortable. Poulson’s only dentist makes a generous offer to help the Marks children fix their long-neglected teeth, but many folks object to the free treatment they receive. Meanwhile, Jules is figuring out how to be a man as he holds onto an ugly secret involving his dear friend, Violet Sellers. When cancer strikes the family, Jules decides to right a wrong that’s gone unchallenged for far too long.

You can purchase House of Teeth and the other books in The Women of Paradise County series on Amazon.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? and Mailbox Monday - June 15

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is a place to meet up and share what you have been, are, and about to be reading over the week. It's a great post to organize yourself. It's an opportunity to visit, comment, and add to that ever-growing TBR pile! So welcome, everyone. This meme started with J Kaye's Blog and was then taken up by Sheila from Book Journey. Sheila then passed it on to Kathryn at the Book Date. 

Happy Monday, everyone! I am back, kinda, sorta. Life is probably going to kick my behind until we leave for North Carolina at the end of the month, but I will do my best to stay connected to all of you, whom I truly treasure. 

In the time since I've been away, I've co-taught my first real estate class, moved most of the Lil' Princess' things to her new apartment, and listed six properties with three more on the way. I have six pending sales, too, which is why my blogging time is so limited. I thank you for sticking with me as I caught up visiting your blogs and leaving comments. 

Here are a few photos:

Old Orchard Beach Inn

A Free Little Library down the street from the Inn

Moving day

The Lil' Diva's dance recital on June 13

Sunday with the zoo

In my reading world, I have two reviews that I need to write. I have an hour left of the audiobook, Digital Detox for Remote Workers: Reclaim Your Focus, Productivity, and Work-Life Balance in the Digital Age by Dr. Guenter H. Schamel. It's great, but it can be hard to follow some of the exercises and examples while driving. 

I didn't finish The Ladies Hall by Vanessa Miller in time, but I was able to download it again. Hopefully, I can finish it this time. 

I need to finish The Ledger by Steven Manchester, a companion to his novel The Menu. 

I didn't pick up The Eyes of River by Cindy K. Sproles, but it will come on vacation with us.

I started Love on the Shelf by Sheila Roberts, which came out in May. This will come on vacation with us. 

Staged by Caitlin Rother, which is the sequel to Hooked. Wanted to have it finished this month. Not likely, but will definitely keep reading. 

These are next:

The Ghost and the Key is the first book in Bill Cusano's The Old Cranberry Ladies Garden Club series. I am reading this series this summer. 

The second book of The Old Cranberry Ladies Garden Club is The Widow Murderess. 

Book three is The Sparrow and the Crow. All of these are July reviews. 

Massawa by Pam Weber is a book that I will take on vacation with me in July. 

Joyce McCullough sent me a copy of Max and Her Stacks and Look for the Pink Ribbons to review. 

Photo credit: Freepik

Mailbox Monday is a gathering place for readers to share the books they added to their shelves the previous week. This weekly meme is now hosted by Vicki at I'd Rather Be At The Beach. 

Nothing new! I am trying to behave. Not sure what will happen once I am in North Carolina. We tend to visit bookstores. 

Upcoming Events

The Ledger by Steven Manchester - June (Review)

Staged by Caitlin Rother - June (Review)

The Old Cranberry Ladies Garden Club: The Ghost and the Key by Bill Cusano - July 1 (Review)

The Old Cranberry Ladies Garden Club: The Widow Murderess by Bill Cusano - July 8 (Review)

The Old Cranberry Ladies Garden Club: The Sparrow and the Crow by Bill Cusano - July 10 (Review)

Massawa by Pam Weber - July (Review)

Love on the Shelf by Sheila Roberts - (Review)

Christmas Year Round

Last week's Journey through Christmases Past was about Christmas 2020. You can find it here.

The Children's and Teens' Book Connection

 Nothing new this week, but will be reviewing Joyce's books soon.

Laura's Little Houses

Nothing new this week. Likely won't be until vacation time in July. 

That's it for me. I will do my best to check out your blogs later this evening. I have inspections at a property an hour away, so not sure how quickly I will be back at my desk. Enjoy your day!

Interview with Caitlin Rother, Author of Staged

New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother has written or co-authored 17 books, ranging from narrative non-fiction crime to thrillers and memoir. After writing a dozen books about high-profile true crime cases, Caitlin is expanding into crime fiction with her new “Katrina & Goode” thriller series, which so far includes HOOKED and the sequel, STAGED. Her other recent titles are DOWN TO THE BONE, about the murder of the McStay family, and an updated edition of BODY PARTS, which was prompted by the identification of the first victim of serial killer Wayne Adam Ford via genetic genealogy. An award-winning investigative reporter for 19 years, Rother’s stories have been published in magazines and newspapers across the country, including Cosmopolitan, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The San Diego Union Tribune. Her more than 250 TV, radio and podcast appearances include 20/20, People Magazine Investigates, Crime Watch Daily, Australia’s World News, and numerous shows on Netflix, Investigation Discovery and Lifetime. Rother earned a bachelor’s in psychology from UC Berkeley and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University. She also works as a writing-research coach, enjoys ocean swimming, and plays keyboards and sings in a jazzy bluesy trio with her partner. For more information and Caitlin’s blog, please visit https://caitlinrother.com. 

To purchase STAGED, visit Amazon at: https://amzn.to/4vOUjHw 

To find Caitlin on

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/caitlinrother

Instagram: @the_real_caitlin_rother

Bluesky: @caitlinrother.bsky.social

Threads: @the_real_caitlin_rother

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlin-rother-8992455/

 

When did you begin writing?

I started keeping a journal as a teenager, but I didn’t start doing any creative writing until college. 

Do you write every day or when you can sneak in time?

After typing at a computer for nearly 35 years, my body has taken a beating and doesn’t let me write as much as my brain would like, so I have to pace myself. Some days I write as much as 6,000 words, other days I don’t write at all so that my body can rest. But I am a full-time author, so even when I can’t type, I am always thinking and plotting and planning. A lot of the work I have to do to remain relevant and to be successful as an author—marketing, promotions, public speaking, podcasts, book signings--have nothing to do with writing, but they are part of the job as well. 

What is this book about?

STAGED is Book 2 in the “Katrina & Goode” thriller series, which started with HOOKED. The series features surfing detective Ken Goode and investigative reporter Katrina Chopin, who work together and independently to investigate a series of murders in the beautiful, wealthy coastal community of La Jolla, starting with the deaths of two biotech executives who are developing a groundbreaking sexual enhancement drug. In this book, the investigative duo battle the romantic tensions between them as they dig into the cold-case murders of Katrina’s parents, two federal judges who were gunned down in their driveway, as well as her brother’s fatal overdose. The deeper they get into the investigation, they realize that the current string of suspicious deaths is related to the murders of Katrina’s family, and a cabal of rich white men who are up to no good. 

What inspired you to write it?

I’ve been working on this series for half of my life, rewriting Book 1 countless times, although Books 2, 3, and 4 (the latter two are still under submission) came must faster. The plots are pulled from stories, people, and cases I’ve covered my 20 years as an investigative reporter and the next 20 years as a true crime author, during which I’ve been drawn to stories involving suicide, addiction, and staged murder scenes, thus the title. 

Was the road to publication smooth sailing or a bumpy ride?

The road to publication was extremely bumpy and involved a LOT of rewriting, approaching new agents and new publishers until I finally found the right fit. During all the years that I was rewriting my novels, I wrote a dozen true crime books, which have helped inform my thrillers. 

If you knew then what you know now, is there anything you would have done differently?

You don’t know what you don’t know until you learn what you don’t know. And because I don’t live with regrets, I wouldn’t have done anything differently because then I wouldn’t have learned what I needed to learn and I wouldn’t be who I am today. But after writing all of those true crime books, I now know my material, so the writing is coming much easier. I just hope the publishing will come easier and faster too. Time will tell. 

What is up next for you?

While I wait for my publisher to decide if it is going to publish Books 3 and 4, I’ve been working on a new suspense novel that is also set in La Jolla.   

Guest Post from Mary Lawlor, Author of Fighter Pilot's Daughter

 We are thrilled to welcome back Mary Lawlor, author of Fighter Pilot's Daughter. 

FIGHTER PILOT’S DAUGHTER tells the story of the author as a young woman coming of age in an Irish Catholic, military family. Her father, an aviator in the Marines and later the Army, was transferred more than a dozen times to posts from Miami to California to Germany as the government demanded. For her mother and sisters, each move meant a complete upheaval of ordinary life. The car was sold, bank accounts closed, and, of course, one school after another was left behind. Friends and later boyfriends lined up in memory as a series of temporary attachments. The story highlights the tensions of personalities inside this traveling household and the pressures American foreign policy placed on the Lawlors’ fragile domestic universe.

The climax happens when the author’s father, stationed in southeast Asia while she’s attending college in Paris, gets word that she’s caught up in political demonstrations in the streets of the Left Bank. It turns out her strict upbringing had not gone deep enough to keep her anchored to her parents’ world. Her father gets emergency leave and comes to Paris to find her. The book narrates their dramatically contentious meeting and the journey to the family’s home-of-the-moment in the American military community of Heidelberg, Germany. The book concludes many years later, after decades of tension that had made communication all but impossible. Finally, the pilot and his daughter reunite. When he died a few years later, the hard edge between them had become a distant memory.

Remembering the 60s and the Cold War for Fighter Pilot's Daughter

By Mary Lawlor

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter was one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever undertaken. It was also probably the most important thing I’ve ever done for myself. Putting the book together was like a process of self-therapy: it had a powerful stabilizing effect that stays with me now. Part of this came with the clear account the research and the writing made of my family’s zigzagging past.

Like most military families, we moved a lot (fourteen times before I graduated from high school). And like other Army fathers, my Dad was away often. My mother and sisters and I would worry about his safety, especially when he was flying in war zones. He would write my mother fairly regularly for a while, then his communications would dwindle off under the weight of more pressing matters close at hand. This would leave us wondering how he was, and I often had nightmares of him being captured, imprisoned…

In spite of the fact that we missed him fiercely, Dad’s homecomings weren’t as easy as we expected them to be. Familiar as he was, his tall frame in the doorway and his blaring blue eyes with that far-away look were strange and frightening. After a while, we’d get used to him; but I wonder how long it would take him to get used to being home. He’d been in such a different, all-male world where violence reigned. At home, there were only women. My mother and sisters and I knew little about what he’d been through, not just because we were too young to know but because a lot of what he’d been up to was secret.

We never talked about any of this, so our house was a tense, uneasy place when Dad came home. Indigenous people in many parts of the world have rituals for bringing warriors home—practices aimed at diminishing the potency of trauma and other effects of prolonged exposure to violence. I guess we’re starting to see something like this in the debriefings and psychological attention given to soldiers and marines returning from war. But in the sixties there wasn’t anything like it. Dads just came home, still warriors, and now being asked not to be.

The story of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter had to have a plot—not just the order of our moves but the dramas that accompanied them. It was difficult enough getting all my father’s military records so I could see the crazy chain of our moves from one place to another. It was even harder to go back into memories that reawakened painful feelings of confusion and anxiety that came with being new all the time. All those scenes where I was a stranger, and everybody else belonged still stung.

Making a story out of my family life meant describing my parents, sisters, and myself as if we were characters. I had to give physical portraits, convey personalities and make us say things. The truth had to be the first priority, but the truth can be messy. These portraits had to be shaped so readers could make sense of who I was talking about. I think human character is, in the end, more complex than any literary character. Picturing human beings in their ordinary rawness is very difficult. A reader needs a writer to give their literary characters more specific shape and continuity than most of us usually have—features that allow a reader to recognize a person from one page to the next. In memoirs and biographies, those shapes and continuities have to be made from real materials—the habits and speech styles and surprising tics of real human beings. So my family members and I ended up appearing in the book in more definitive shape than we actually had. Still, these descriptions adhered to the truth of my memory as much as I could make them.

Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter gave me a chance to air the ragged feelings still running in my brain and heart from those days long ago. Some of these feelings had to do with the work my father did. As a teenager, I had a hard time understanding how I felt or should feel about the things he did as a warrior. When I went away to college, I drifted from my parents and made friends with people in left political groups and the anti-Vietnam War movement. In Paris, in May of 1968, I participated in demonstrations against, among other things, the war my father was fighting. At the time, he was posted outside Saigon. When I saw him again, the tension between us was almost too much. We had heated arguments, and then for a long we didn’t speak. Much later my parents and I got to be very close, and I’m deeply grateful for that. Being retired from military life, Dad had changed dramatically.

I wanted to write about all this so I could sort out those powerful emotions that were still with me. I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter strikes a chord with other military kids. And I hope it gives readers in general a better understanding of what military kids go through. When I tell people I grew up in an Army family, they often say, "Was it like 'The Great Santini'?" It’s surprising how often people ask that. The answer is no. Santini was an abusive father, and while many soldier fathers are professionally familiar with violence, they don’t necessarily bring it home with them. Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini, tells a great story, but as he says himself, it’s his story, not a representative account of military family life. His book is one of the few that features a Marine Corps pilot, his wife and children as the central characters, so it often gets taken as a model of military family life.

I hope readers of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter see that there are other ways of describing domestic life for service families. Many of the biggest difficulties for spouses and children are built into the structures of everyday life in military environments. I hope readers take from my book a sense of how complicated it is to maintain a healthy, optimistic family life when you’re having to move all the time and when a parent has to spend long months away from home on deployments. For all the good or ill the armed services might do for America, they can bear down hard on the lives of soldiers’ wives as kids. And they can make their lives wildly interesting, as I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter shows.

Mary Lawlor is author of a memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Bloomsbury 2015) and two books of cultural criticism, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (Rutgers UP 2000) and Public Native America (Rutgers UP 2006). She studied at the American University in Paris, the University of Maryland, and New York University. She divides her time between Easton, Pennsylvania and Gaucin, Spain. Her novel, The Translators, is set in 12th-century Spain and fictionalizes the experiences of Robert of Ketton, first translator of the Koran into Latin. She hopes to see it out next year. In the meantime, she has started a second novel, The Women’s Hospital, set in 18th-century Spain and inspired by the life story of an Irish woman whose family moved to Cádiz, escaping English oppression in their own country.

You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/ or connect with her on Twitter or Facebook.

I Cry Uncle

Welcome to Monday. You won't see my regular Monday post because...

1. Work is kicking my behind.
2. There is barely any reading going on.
3. I am too exhausted to think.

And my baby is coming home on Tuesday, so that we can move her stuff to her new apartment, so my focus is elsewhere. 

Before I get into my photos, what you should expect here this week is:

• A guest post from Mary Lawlor, author of Fighter Pilot's Daughter.
• An interview with Caitlin Rother about her latest book, Staged.
• A guest post from Anne Shaw Heinrich about pushing characters to their limits as she promotes her new book, House of Teeth. 

You will also find a new post at the Christmas Year Round blog for "Journey through Christmases Past." We take a peek at Christmas 2020. Wasn't that a fun one? Check it out here.

On Wednesday, I went to the doctor for what I thought was a routine allergy test. I've never been tested before. I've lived with allergies forever. Why bother? But I went to the ear, nose, and throat doctor a while back, and he noticed I was congested. So, he suggested two things: surgery on my nose and allergy testing. 

This random set of dots is from the allergy test. I was allergic to the serum they use. After sitting for 15 minutes with my arms growing red and itchy, the technician brought me back into the office and said that it looked like a failed test. She washed my arm, applied Benadryl cream, and then asked, "Do you have sensitive skin?" Because, as she told me, the test often fails in people with sensitive skin. So... I drive home wondering why asking a person if they have sensitive skin isn't done before ordering the test. It is Sunday night, and I still break out in hives occasionally. 

This is me on National Donut Day. I had to order from Dunkin' that day because Dunkin' was founded in Massachusetts. At least I got something to eat in between appointments. 

This was me Friday night, as I packed my car to drive to Weymouth to co-teach my first real estate class. I am working toward my instructor's license. 

And this is me moments ago. I have not stopped for weeks. Haven't had a day off in weeks. Today, I awoke exhausted. I will go to bed exhausted. Then I will have a full day of appointments starting at 8 am. Stick a fork in me. I am done. :) 

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Books I Can’t Believe I’ve Never Read & Tell Me Something Tuesday: What are your favorite beach reads?

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. 

Today's Top Ten Tuesday asks us to share the books we can't believe we have read. Oh, there are lots of those, but not a lot of blogging time, so here is a short and sweet list:

• Books by the Little House on the Prairie cast that I have owned for years
• More of the Cedar Cove series by Debbie Macomber
• The books before Smell of Death in the Tempe Crabtree series by Marilyn Meredith
• The books by Vannetta Chapman that I still have here from years ago when I was on her street team
• Any book about North Carolina history that I have bought on vacation
• Any Christmas fiction I own
• Any books I bought from authors at a writers conference 
• Any books by local authors that I've bought from book events
• The last book of Karen White's Tradd Street series
• Any nonfiction books by David McCullough

Thanks to Freepik (now Magnific) for the image

Tell Me Something Tuesday (TMST) is hosted by Jen Twimom at That's What I'm Talking About. TMST is a weekly discussion post where bloggers discuss a wide range of topics from books and blogging to life in general. Participation is optional, and you can leave your comments in the weekly post when you participate. Check it out if you're interested in joining.

Tell Me Something Tuesday asks: What are your favorite beach reads? 

This is a tough one, because I will read just about anything on the beach. It doesn't matter the genre. Just to be by the beach and reading means so much to me. Over the years, I've shifted to more Kindle reading (because lugging 10 paperbacks or hardcovers on vacation is backbreaking), but I am not picky about what I read. 

July 2025 - children's books

July 2024 - Christian romance, short story collection, and historical mystery

July 2023 - Personal growth, Amish romance, poetry, and devotionals

As long as it's a book, I will bring it to the beach.

On the road today, but I will visit as soon as I can. 

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? and Mailbox Monday - Jun 1

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is a place to meet up and share what you have been, are, and about to be reading over the week. It's a great post to organize yourself. It's an opportunity to visit, comment, and add to that ever-growing TBR pile! So welcome, everyone. This meme started with J Kaye's Blog and was then taken up by Sheila from Book Journey. Sheila then passed it on to Kathryn at the Book Date. 

Welcome to June! Can you believe we just started the sixth month of 2026? May went out like a lion with rain, wind, and cold. Yesterday, some of our towns lost power for a few hours because of the storms. I had my suit jacket and a raincoat, and I was freezing. It was not the day to show houses, but I had a full day of it. 

This is the express version of my post. I am tired and have an inspection in the morning. Work is kicking my tail. Tried to take a day off this weekend. Wasn't successful. Looking forward to vacation more and more. 

In my reading world, I listened to Eat That Frog! Action Workbook: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy. Great book! All this driving around is good for listening to books. 

I also started the audiobook, Digital Detox for Remote Workers: Reclaim Your Focus, Productivity, and Work-Life Balance in the Digital Age by Dr. Guenter H. Schamel. 

I didn't finish The Ladies Hall by Vanessa Miller, though I loved what I read. I will run out of time before it is archived. I will have to catch it when it's available for my Kindle. 

Need to write a review of Hi Honey, I'm Homo: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture by Matt Baume. 

I didn't read The Ledger by Steven Manchester, a companion to his novel The Menu. 

I didn't pick up The Eyes of River by Cindy K. Sproles.

I started Love on the Shelf by Sheila Roberts, which came out in May. 

These are next:

Staged by Caitlin Rother, which is the sequel to Hooked

The Ghost and the Key is the first book in Bill Cusano's The Old Cranberry Ladies Garden Club series. I am reading this series this summer. 

The second book of The Old Cranberry Ladies Garden Club is The Widow Murderess. 

Book three is The Sparrow and the Crow. All of these are July reviews. 

Massawa by Pam Weber is a book that I will take on vacation with me in July. 

Joyce McCullough sent me a copy of Max and Her Stacks to review. 

Photo credit: Freepik

Mailbox Monday is a gathering place for readers to share the books they added to their shelves the previous week. This weekly meme is now hosted by Vicki at I'd Rather Be At The Beach. 

I think I had an empty physical and virtual mailbox this week. See, I can be good about the book-buying ban sometimes. It just takes me working almost non-stop to do it. :) 

Upcoming Events

The Ledger by Steven Manchester - June (Review)

Fighter Pilot's Daughter by Mary Lawlor - June 10 (Guest Post)

Staged by Cailtin Rother - June (Review)

The Old Cranberry Ladies Garden Club: The Ghost and the Key by Bill Cusano - July 1 (Review)

The Old Cranberry Ladies Garden Club: The Widow Murderess by Bill Cusano - July 8 (Review)

The Old Cranberry Ladies Garden Club: The Sparrow and the Crow by Bill Cusano - July 10 (Review)

Massawa by Pam Weber - July (Review)

Love on the Shelf by Sheila Roberts - (Review)

Christmas Year Round

This week's Journey through Christmases Past is about family in transition. You can see photos from my family through the years if you click here. 

The Children's and Teens' Book Connection

 Nothing new this week, but hope to have something posted soon.

Laura's Little Houses

Nothing new this week. 

That is it from me. Hope you enjoy your day!