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NON-FICTION Mary Bohlen's Heritage Cooking Inspired by Rebecca Boone by Mary Bohlen. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2020. 153 pages with a bibliography and lots of full-color photos. 7" X 9" trade paperback, $23.00. For year's Mary Bohlen has traveled to living history homes and parks to demonstrate open hearth cooking. Although the book begins with Daniel Boone's wife, Rebecca, it moves south from there with beautiful pictures of mostly North Carolina living history sites and recipes appropriate to each. She begins with meaningful tips on cooking in fireplaces and ends with recipes that can easily be made even on...

NON-FICTION Appalachia in Regional Context: Place Matters edited by Dwight Billings and Ann E. Kingsolver. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, a 2020 paperback reprint of a 2018 hardback release. 255 pages with an Index, photos, and notes at the end of each essay. Trade paperback, $30.00. This is a collection of scholarly essays most of which are separated by a poem by bell hooks from her Appalachian Elegy. This innovation is one of the strongest features of this book, but sadly the Table of Contents ignores the poems until the very end. The authors of the essays include some of...

CHILDREN’S BOOKS Nelsonville from A to Z edited by Celeste Parsons. Buchtel, Ohio: Monday Creek Publishing, 2019. 26 un-numbered pages (one for each letter!), illustrated in full-color by Hannah Sickles. 11.25” X 8.75” hardback with a pictorial cover. $19.99. Nelsonville, Ohio, is located in the Hocking Hills in the southeastern portion of the state. Some of my favorite letters include “Q is for Quandry” the last stanza of Ms. Parsons’ poem is “Oh, there are words like “Quaint”/But unique to Nelsonville it ain’t./And how would you illustrate it?/I Quit.” I also like “G is for Good Vibrations.”  The author credits...

COMICS Juanita & the Frog Prince: Fairy Tale Comix by Ed McClanahan. Lexington, Kentucky: South Limestone Books/University Press of Kentucky, 2020. 48 unnumbered pages with an introduction by Bob Levin, illustrated by J. T. Dockery. 9” X 12” hardback with a pictorial cover, $24.95. This comic book adapts a tale already told by McClanahan in A Congress of Wonders into a format that is particularly appropriate for his prose. It is set in the 1940s – when Ed was growing up – in Kentucky – where Ed grew up. The protagonist is the two-nosed Luther Jukes who is jailed for...

CHILDREN’S AND YOUTH BOOKS A Broom for Ma by Rhonda Cable. Buchtel, Ohio: Monday Creek Publishing, 2019. 32 un-numbered pages illustrated in full color on every page by Jackie Duffy. 8.25” X 10.25” hardback with pictorial cover, $14.95. This is a nifty book that those who read it to children will enjoy as much as the kids. The main character is Amos who is 80 years old and has been married for 60 year to a woman he simply calls, “Ma.” The book follows him on a day when he decides to get up early and make Ma a broom....