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CHILDRENS AND YOUTH BOOKS   The Grandest Night Show by Gail McCoy-Hager Funsten. Mount Vernon, Ohio: Jewel Bug Publishing, 2019. 40 unnumbered pages with a Glossary and illustrated throughout by the author. Trade paperback, $12.95. Hardback, $17.95. The characters of this beautiful and alluring children’s book are the narrator, a little girl, and her mama and papa. She lives deep in a holler in the mountains. Her father tells her that every day in the summer there is a night show, and she enjoys sitting still long enough to enjoy all the night sounds and sights in her holler. She...

CHILDREN’S BOOKS The Princess and the Pickup Truck by Bill Lepp. Charleston, West Virginia: Quarier Press, 2018. 32 unnumbered pages, illustrated by Lottie Looney. 8.5” X 11” hardback in dust jacket, $15.35. The inspiration for this children’s book came while Bill Lepp was driving, with his teen-aged daughter, down a West Virginia highway when they caught up with a pickup truck carrying several mattresses. Lepp asked, “Do you think you could sleep on that?” to which his daughter replied, “Of course I could, Daddy, I’m a princess.” The result is a zany and endearing tale of a mountain man seeking...

NON-FICTION Mountains Piled Upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene edited by Jessica Cory. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019. 347 pages. Trade paperback, $27.99. The anthropocene is the current geological age, the period since humans have had the dominant influence on our climate and environment. It seems to me that this editor, Jessica Cory, an English professor at Western Carolina University, actually is looking at nature writing in a much more recent time, perhaps a more appropriate sub-title would have used “in the 21st Century.”  But even that would be inaccurate. Missing are not just writers of previous...

CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT BOOKS Birthday by Meredith Russo. New York: Flatiron Books/Macmillan, 2019.  278 pages. Hardback in dust jacket, $18.99. Powerful for adults as well as mature high school or even junior high kids, Birthday is the sequel to If I Was Your Girl, Meredith Russo’s first novel, published last year, that won the Stonewall Book Award, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and won awards from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and fifteen other literary organizations. It is a loosely autobiographical novel by a life-long Chattanooga resident who transitioned from male to female in 2013 when she...

CHILDREN’S PICTURE BOOK Ernestine’s Milky Way by Kerry Madden-Lunsford. New York: Schwartz & Wade/Penguin Random House, 2019. 32 un-numbered pages, illustrated by Emily Sutton. 9.25” X 11.25” hardback in dust jacket, $17.99. This beautifully illustrated book is set in the 1940s when five-year-old Ernestine’s father is off fighting in World War II, and Ernestine and her mother are tending their Maggie Valley farm. It tells the story of Ernestine’s journey to deliver milk to a neighbor. "This delicious period story with its warmly inviting illustrations has some surprises that get us right into the heart of the story. And what...