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BOOKS FOR CHILDREN AND TEENS What’s So Special About Today? by Kelsey N. Clark. Terra Alta, West Virginia: Headline Kids/Headline Books, 2020. 32 pages illustrated in color by Ashley Belote. 8.5” X 11” hardback with pictorial cover, $16.95. The last page provides the author’s answer to the question posed in the title: “ Mommy, I think I finally know what’s so special about today. It’s God’s gift of love for us that never goes away.” “In her first book, Kelsey Clark has captured the simplicity of the American Dream. Through the eyes of her son and an everyday conversation between...

CHILDREN’S AND YOUTH BOOKS A Bird on Water Street by Elizabeth O. Dulemba. Napierville, Illinois: Little Pickle Books/Sourcebooks, a 2019 reprint of a 2014 release. 310 pages illustrated by the author with five additional essays, including Questions for Discussion at the end. Trade paperback, $8.99. Elizabeth Dulemba grew up in the Atlanta area, but lived in the early 2000s in rural Georgia, just south of Tennessee’s Copper Basin. This is where, from the 1840s until the 1980s, copper was mined. For decades sulfuric acid, a by-product of copper smelting, was released into the air killing all vegetation in a fifty...

CHILDREN’S AND YOUTH BOOKS Ring Around the Moon: Mommy Goose Rhymes by Mike Norris. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019. 50 pages with pictures of 170 carvings by Minnie Adkins created to illustrate this book. 8” X 10.25” hardback with pictorial cover, $19.95. This book celebrates Appalachian words – through nursery rhymes told in the mountain idiom – art – through the wood carvings of Minnie Adkins – and music – ending with the words and musical notations for an original song by Mike Norris. "What a wonderful celebration of language! Wit and wordplay abound, and the distinctive mountain phrasing...

CHILDREN’S AND YOUTH BOOKS The Wonderfully Wild Ones by Adeline Schneid. Terra Alta, West Virginia: Headline Kids/ Headline Books, 2019. 32 pages illustrated throughout by Ashley Belote. 8.5” X 11” hardback with pictorial cover, $16.95. The wonderfully wild ones of this book are siblings, Teresa, Kolbe, and Siena. They are young lions who escape from a zoo and explore West Virginia. “I adored the story of The Wonderfully Wild Ones by Adeline Schneid. The plot is fun, interesting and full of adventure as the lions cause chaos at the zoo. The characters are smart, funny and easy for anyone to...

NON-FICTION Religion of Fear: The True Story of the Church of God of the Union Assembly by David Cady. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2019. 282 pages with an Index, Bibliography, Notes, a Foreword by Ralph W Hood, Jr., and photos. Hardback with pictorial cover, $34.95. I first heard about the Church of God of the Union Assembly and it’s founder C. T. Pratt in conversations with Don West (1906-1992) the charismatic preacher, union organizer, historian of protest, mountain music promoter, and co-founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1932 and the Appalachian South Folklife Center in...