As a child, telling an adult you’ve just witnessed a fairy fall from the sky would usually earn a chuckle, or a reminder that you have a vivid imagination. In Chantal Munro’s children’s book, TickleTouch: An Environmental Fairy Tale, however, it signals something far more unsettling for the adults: the medicated lollipops aren’t working. The reality is that what seems like a children’s daydream is not imagined at all; it is just invisible to everyone else except that child.
As a British citizen, I’ve always been intrigued by America’s gun laws and the split between Democratic and Republican viewpoints. Bullet Holes explored this area with finesse, focusing on the devastating psychological impact of gun tragedy on a family who’ve lost their son, Danny, in a school shooting.
Memoirs are some of the best ways we have of glimpsing a bit of history that does not get a nod in traditional textbooks. Compiled and edited by Carol Quigless, The Dr. Milton D. Quigless, Sr. Story: A Memoir of Race, Medicine, and Purpose in the Segregated South, does just that. In a little over 400 pages, which include a lovely collection of photographs at the end, we see America through the lens of a determined and talented Black man whose family refuses to accept the limits imposed by race and class in what was then a nation mired in Jim Crow laws.
