Happy Fourth of July to our members in the US! Hopefully, you’ll be able to squeeze some reading in around the festivities. What are you reading? I’m reading our group read, On the Rooftop by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. It’s 1950s historical fiction about a trio of Black singing sisters.

As book coverage in newspapers wanes, I'm missing good, critical writing about books. I love the Washington Independent Review of Books (for which I sometimes write and edit), and sometimes LitHub is interesting, but I would love to find other places. What are your favorite sites? (Oh, and for community type reviews I like Story Graph, which is like Goodreads but so much better.) https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/carrie_c

In the history of my home in Pennsylvania there is a true account in the history of Armstrong County of a woman's harrowing story of her kidnapping in which two of her sons were murdered by a band of American Indians. She was taken with two of the children, one of whom was an infant, after one son being murdered at the initial abduction. Her other son was shortly thereafter murdered. For six days she was forced to walk barefoot through the wilderness in captivity carying her infant child and finally escaped with her infant still in tow. She walked back to her home where she was received and cared for. She wrote of her ordeal in a book that was published during her life. Would you read a book that went into detail of what she had to endure?

I'm reading Mirrors & Smoke by our member @Adrienne Stevenson for fiction. It's about a herbalist and midwife in Niagara, Upper Canada, before and during the War of 1812. For non-fiction, I'm re-reading The Pinks by Chris Enss. It's about the first women detectives in the Pinkerton Detective Agency in the 19th century. Do you read outside when the weather's nice? I always like the *idea* of it, but rarely do it these days, even though I used to love reading in parks when I was a student.

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