Currently Reading on this Snow Day

Currently...

We have a snow day today—an old fashioned, no technology required, no responsibilities snow day. We haven't had a day like this in my school community in a very long time. Not because it never snows here, but because our use of technology never slows.

This isn't a "technology is bad" sort of post. I fully understand it's importance in our lives and the wonderful ways it can improve them. This isn't a call out on the need for distance learning and technology's role in that during the pandemic. It's just to say—

*long, slow exhalation*

So what's on the agenda? 

Seems like the perfect day for catching up on reading and spending time with my kiddo at home.

I realize we're just coming off of winter break from school, but that was no break. That was a whirlwind of cleaning and preparing and celebrating and visiting and people.

Today, as the snow falls and mutes the wider world, I can be quiet and calm and slow-moving and mindful of all the small things I love so much.

I'm ever grateful for this snow day, my warm home, and the safety of my family.

What is your favorite way to celebrate a true snow day?

 

Currently Reading...

The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas

The lifeblood of any free society is persuasion: changing other people's minds to enable real change. But America is suffering a crisis of faith in persuasion that is putting its democracy and the planet itself at risk. Americans increasingly write each other off instead of seeking to win each other over. Debates are framed in moralistic terms, with enemies battling the righteous. Movements for justice build barriers to entry, instead of on-ramps. Political parties focus on mobilizing the faithful rather than wooing the skeptical. And leaders who seek to forge coalition are labeled sellouts.

In Persuasion Anand Giridharadas takes us inside these movements and battles, seeking out the dissenters who continue to champion persuasion in an age of polarization. We meet a co-founder of Black Lives Matter; a leader of the feminist resistance to Trumpism; white parents at a seminar on raising adopted children of color; Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; a team of door knockers with an uncanny formula for changing minds on immigration; an ex-cult member turned QAnon deprogrammer; and, hovering menacingly offstage, Russian operatives clandestinely stoking Americans' fatalism about each other. As the book's subjects grapple with how to "call out" threats and injustices while "calling in" those who don't agree with them but just might one day, they point a way to healing, and changing, a broken country.

 

Mirror Girls by Kelly McWilliams

As infants, twin sisters Charlie Yates and Magnolia Heathwood were secretly separated after the brutal lynching of their parents, who died for loving across the color line. Now, at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, Charlie is a young Black organizer in Harlem, while white-passing Magnolia is the heiress to a cotton plantation in rural Georgia.

Magnolia knows nothing of her racial heritage, but secrets are hard to keep in a town haunted by the ghosts of its slave-holding past. When Magnolia finally learns the truth, her reflection mysteriously disappears from mirrors—the sign of a terrible curse. Meanwhile, in Harlem, Charlie's beloved grandmother falls ill. Her final wish is to be buried back home in Georgia—and, unbeknownst to Charlie, to see her long-lost granddaughter, Magnolia Heathwood, one last time. So Charlie travels into the Deep South, confronting the land of her worst nightmares—and Jim Crow segregation.

The sisters reunite as teenagers in the deeply haunted town of Eureka, Georgia, where ghosts linger centuries after their time and dangers lurk behind every mirror. They couldn’t be more different, but they will need each other to put the hauntings of the past to rest, to break the mirrors’ deadly curse—and to discover the meaning of sisterhood in a racially divided land.

 

Currently on sale...

 Need a book to curl up with today? Love and Other Unknown Variables is on sale this week for only $.99. Grab your favorite device for reading and get your copy today. Need more books to keep you warm this winter? Check out Entangled Publishing's Big YA Sale now!

Book summaries and images from Goodreads.