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The highly gifted, pretty precocious student Julia Severn is studying at the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology and lands the coveted gig of recording professor Madame Ackermann’s dream-like psychic episodes in Heidi Julavits’ novel The Vanishers. Sounds great, except Madame Ackermann is blocked. Nothing is happening when she is in this state. She is especially not [...]

How much did you like The Hunger Games? The extent to which you’ll enjoy Catching Fire hinges on your answer to that question. The second novel in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy about the dystopian world of flinty heroine Katniss Everdeen retains much of what was good about the first book and adds one or two new [...]

If you care at all about Rock & Roll or Pop music you should read Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music. If you ever subscribed to Spin or Rolling Stone you should read Out of the Vinyl Deeps. If you ever searched for most of your adult-life for a smart, female [...]

Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life as We Knew It scared the hell out of me. I am woefully unprepared for a natural disaster. Do you have bottled water just sitting around in case our water is compromised? How about canned food, do you have some disgusting canned green beans hidden behind your stashes of cheap Easter [...]

The bodice-ripper gets a gay makeover in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and, for the most part, the transformation works. The bulk of the novel coasts on the slow-to-consummate attraction between Patroclus, an exiled weakling of a prince, and Achilles, the great fighter who is destined to become a hero in the Trojan War. [...]

The last time we saw the Gladers in The Maze Runner they were being rescued and promised that the worst was over, but it all seemed very creepy. Like your skin is so soft it would make me a nice coat kind of creepy. Mere pages into James Dashner’s The Scorch Trials the Gladers are [...]

While setting up this little interview with Tim Brady author of Twelve Desperate Miles: The Epic World War II Voyage of the SS Contessa and The Great Dan Patch and the Remarkable Mr. Savage, I told him about working at my parents’ bowling alley, Dan Patch Lanes and how I’d often have to explain that [...]

On its surface, The Sweet Hereafter is a story about a disastrous bus crash and a town’s struggle as it tries to find a place for its own grief over the children who were killed. But it’s really more about the loss in a wider sense. Three of the four characters who narrate portions of [...]

Upcoming Minnesota Meeting speaker shares her thoughts on how to reframe the discussion on education.

For the past four years the carbon produced by the equipment used to maintain and groom the Banadad Ski Trail has been sequestered in tree planting.   According to the Banadad Trail Association- “tree planting is our way to insure that the maintenance and grooming of the trail remains carbon neutral”. We are planting 400 red [...]

You will find great skiing along the Gunflint.  The entire 41 kilometer Banadad Trail system is now tracked and open for skiing.  Located at the eastern end of the Banadad is Poplar Creek Guesthouse B&B. The guesthouse also operate’s the Banadad Yurts and two ski-in cabins along the trail. According to skiers just returning from [...]

There is something so delicious about scandalous lit from 1911. To wit: The beginning of Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dresier had me cackling like a fourteen-year-old boy. The Gerhardt’s are in the muck. Pa Gerhardt has been sick and unable to work. There are a handful of kids that need shoes and bacon. Mrs. Gerhardt [...]

What if God were a horny teenage boy whose libido causes natural disasters? That’s the premise behind Meg Rosoff’s There is No Dog. God, or Bob, falls in love with a beautiful human, and the more he tries to have sex with her the more his emotions mess with our weather. One day it’s torrential [...]

Reading Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron just hours after seeing the movie “Melancholia”: If you can sludge through the slo-mo setup to the movie, the first what-say ten minutes of abstract imagery involving horses tilting to a seated position and the ankle-deep muck of footprints across a putting green, you can [...]

Before I go gushy fangirl a few facts: You can see/hear Dylan Hicks read from Boarded Windows part of Coffee House Press’ Biblio Bash at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 5. They have a ton going on & you should follow that there link to get all the details. If you’re busy on Saturday you can [...]

It’s the summer of 1983 and Carmen is a red-dressed bride, a little pregnant and reluctant to join her new husband Matt on the dance floor, where he is awkwardly performing a hat dance. Her brother Nick is in a loft at the hippie farm commune. He’s wearing a white wedding dress, his date Olivia [...]

Minnesota Meeting with Wendy Kopp of Teach For America from Minneapolis Foundation on Vimeo.

Lanesboro looks good in snow.  We received a fresh covering in the past week that has transformed the Root River valley into a winter wonderland.  The Root River Trail is groomed for cross country skiing for over 20 miles.  There are also two great snowshoe trails nearby.   Schedule your two night winter getaway at the [...]

Twelve inches of snow now on the Ground after another three inches fell last night. The Gunflint’s Nordic trails are open. Along the Banadad Ski Trail System ten kilometers of trails are tracked on the eastern end. The BWCA longest tracked trail the Banadad has been packed and plans are to track the entire trail [...]

Mr. Moosewood, AKA Moose, a popular stoner-hippie teacher — ponytail and all — assigns the students in his AP elective a semester-long project of self-discovery that asks “Who are you and who are you becoming?” Fifteen-year-old Tina M. decides to keep a diary during the semester, letters to John-Paul Sartre, in Tina’s Mouth: An Existential [...]

Janie takes her role as eldest daughter seriously in Forgotten Country, Catherine Chung’s debut novel about a family that comes to the United States out-running potential political persecution in their home country, Korea. Hannah, her younger sister, has a bit more moxie. When the family’s traditions start to weigh her down, she runs away to [...]

Sunday as I finished Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail I kind of sighed sadly and wished this book had been around when I was a young twentysomething woman. While the story is uniquely Strayed’s the meaning, the lesson, the whathaveyou feels universal. Mostly it’s this: you are [...]

I read memoirs because it is more polite than staring at people, which doesn’t mean I do the latter any less. I like the what-has-it-been-like-for-you-ness of seeing someone’s bullet points and knowing it must all turn out reasonably okay, because they were able to pop a squat and push out these thousands of words afterward. [...]

I’m going go right ahead and put Jane Beckles right up on a pedestal next to Ramona Flowers & Zero Hopeless-Savage. These pedestals are reserved for kickass, young, female characters from graphic novels. After I complained last week about how difficult it is to find graphic novels written by women, LeAnn called on her posse [...]

It’s 1622. It’s 1902. It’s 2000 in Danielle Sosin’s debut novel The Long-Shining Waters the story of three women living on Lake Superior. Grey Rabbit lives with her two sons, husband, and mother-in-law in the winter of 1622 on the shore of Lake Superior and it’s been rough hunting and everyone is starving. Meanwhile, she’s [...]