First, an overview because I loved it when I read it:

A lyrical, genre-bending coming-of-age tale featuring a queer, Black, Guyanese American woman who, while seeking to define her own place in the world, negotiates an estranged relationship with her father.

I committed to post in January, and I failed. Even through many reminders, I procrastinated. Huge apologies all around. Life, moving, unpacking, Dominic going to public school for the first time - it all got in the way.

No more excuses. Too much time wasted in not editing, revising and posting my very eager review of Arisa White's Who's Your Daddy. It's another win for my reading awareness, as the second book I've agreed to read from the Poetic Book Tours does not disappoint.

Who's Your Daddy takes on the explosion of thought and self-awareness of a woman's life told through poetry, each page a single poem, probing her life and the circumstances of the generational trauma of the family she was born into. There is a masculine absence and presence, the dedication of a single mother, a family history steeped in lives from the East Coast to the West, and through Guyanese proverbs and anecdotes.

I read Arisa White's words repeatedly, passages over and again. Poetry is always music when it is at its best, and her writing is even more so: it escalates, crescendos, quiets, and moves with waves of delicate grace and pacing; then shatters you with this knowing, this awareness of the things that happened in her life, how she felt about life knowledge and experience she learned at so early an age, a cultural depth to the interplay within family struggles and quick, brief flashes of men, life, friends. Those who loved her and let her down, betrayed her.

Every word Arisa White wrote, I read each aloud. I liked the way the words felt. Meaty and thoughtful, filled with desperate love, painful awakenings, and more, Arisa White's Who's Your Daddy provoked images and feelings that made me feel strong, small, aware, different, and similar.

I HIGHLY recommend her work of art.

About the Author:

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow and an assistant professor of creative writing at Colby College. She is the author of four books, including the poetry collection You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened, and coauthor of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, winner of the Maine Literary Book Award for Young People’s Literature and the Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Middle-Grade Nonfiction. She serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press. Find her at arisawhite.com.

Photo Credit: Nye’ Lyn Tho

Thank you to Serena at the Poetic Book Tours, once again.

Brain on Fire, now a Netflix film starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Thomas Mann, and Tyler Perry, is easily one of the most unnerving medical books I've read in a while. What's most frightening is Cahalan's complete inability to understand or control, what was happening to her. At 24 years old, just as she was truly making a name for herself in journalism in New York City, she awoke to find herself strapped in a hospital bed, completely unaware of what had happened to her. Memories erased, speaking was impossible, moving was not allowed, nor was she able to even if she tried: she was strapped to the hospital bed. Pieces of each day began to fragment into moments that increased doubt in her own confidence and undeniable fear at the unknown of what happened to her, the question of what was happening in her body that plagued her, possessed her, but the most terrifying is that it appeared out of nowhere. All within one month. A month that turned into more time erased, a life re-drawn into something maniacal. Her life as she knew it, how she was leading it and loving it, was gone. Doctors diagnosed her as bipolar, manic depressive, with her conditions of erratic behavior leading to fainting and seizures were frantically increasing at an alarming rate.

How it happened still is a mystery encased in medical riddles continuing to be untangled today about an auto-immune disease; we know it happens to primarily young women, but other than that, there is no true and consistent understanding. Historically over the past 100 years, there is an unexpected number of documented cases of young women who suddenly were filled with "hysteria." A notion befitting a 1900s novel on high society, women with fainting spells, however in today's advanced medical community, doctors and nurses and researchers might have a tiny inkling of reasonable and sound evidence to prove something significant. Something within the auto-immune disease category, but more specifically the unique and rare anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.

But even though medical communities might slowly be familiar with this, science is still unfolding pieces every day for more awareness, how to manage it, and one day, hopefully a cure. The "madness" that descended upon the author, one that tested a relationship with her new boyfriend, and also assuredly bonded her once estranged parents, became a goal to combine efforts to figure it out together, in collaboration with doctors who believed. With her family dedicated to her, they shared a common journal in her hospital room to record moments they recorded when they visited with her, seizures, and events that went beyond understanding for a healthy human body, comparing these journaled events with shocking camera footage to decode a pattern, anything to explain why Cahalan was besieged with this medically "new," disease.

What I respected was her acknowledgement that she was lucky, on so many levels. She had a solid family support structure, and a boyfriend who was there for her every step of the way, even though they had just started dating. She had extensive medical health insurance as well, but even with all of that, while it still gave her the luxury to be potentially cared for more than others, she still encountered doubt and disbelief and many diagnosed her initially with mental disorders, paranoia, and more. What about patients who don't have the "right" healthcare coverage, who don't fit into the "approved" and "believable" medical population? What might patients such as those experience?

Moving and heart-wrenching, and downright scary, this memoir of a young woman's spiral into a series of medical appointments, memory loss, physical debilitation, seizures, and more is at times thoughtful and straight-forward, but mostly filled with downright horror. It is completely terrifying to imagine what it might be like for a young mind to go awry, astray, and fall apart, all without any medical research or support for those suffering from an auto-immune disease that many still don't believe exists.

Read this. Recommend it to your friends with young daughters. Watch all and care for them. This is important.

Disclosure: I downloaded this book for free from my library's Libby app.

About the Author (from her website)

Susannah Cahalan is an American journalist and author, known for writing the memoir Brain on Fire, about her hospitalization with a rare auto-immune disease, anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.

She has worked for the New York Post. A feature film based on her memoir was released in June 2016 on Netflix.

Visit her:

• On her website
• On Facebook
• On Instagram

Over the summer, in the chaos and hectic days of moving from Florida to Puerto Rico, I spent four months renting a house in my Dad's neighborhood so my son and I could have family right across the street while my husband located the perfect home for us. During that time, I was remotely helping my in-laws' Boston boating business during the extremely busy summer season, so I decided to enroll my son in a monthly summer camp. Thank God for that summer camp for him, and for me, Audible.com saved my sanity as well during my short breaks throughout the day. This excellent memoir of Cheryl Strayed kicking butt and walking miles after unforgiving miles following some of the most difficult and emotionally tangled and destructive points in her life, were astounding.

There were so many times over the years I had planned to read this. Stumbling across the memorable cover in a bookstore, or kicking myself when the movie came out and I thought to myself, "I have to read this before I watch the movie!" Which then meant I always kept putting it off. And I did miss out. I didn't realize then what I know now, which is that I needed this book. I needed to hear what this woman chose to do after all of the events in her life up to that point. I could have used this memoir to inspire me after my own separation and divorce almost two decades ago. I was so impressed by Strayed's decision to do a thing so wildly different than what the average individual struggling with a sudden and unexpected, devastating loss of a parent, followed by the downward spiral into drug addiction, along with her infidelity to her young husband (who, I felt, she treated fairly and respectfully throughout the memoir, owning her failures and mistreatment to him). I was wrapped up in this woman and her feisty and unsure decision to just walk, with a (to be expected) sometimes naive assumption of hopeful results, an overwhelmingly heavy pack on her back, but with a vigor and a faithfulness in this dream. As I listened to the remarkably narrated audiobook, I thought to myself, "why didn't I do something like this years ago? When my mother passed and my former husband and I had just divorced? Why didn't I do something different, something wild, to follow my instinct and guts, to throw it all out the window and just be?" I regret the years I didn't read this. I am confident this would have propelled me into something different at the time, something new. 

I wept for Strayed when she encountered one obstacle after another as she walked the trail, I cheered her on to continue when she screamed out in disgust or anger or frustration, and I was madly obsessed with her overall willingness to just keep going. Because that's exactly how life is, isn't it? Somehow, we just keep plugging along, one foot in front of the other, trying to make the best out of all of the messes we create. In a vague and long life, we just make it happen, we just do it. In Strayed's time of just over 3 months to walk the Pacific Coast Trail, her life was singularly isolated and compacted into that stretch of trail, and she could view all of the missteps and mistakes, and identify some of the choices she now needed to make.

Books were a necessary weight for her, and I would feel the torture of painfully ripping pages out after she was done with it to make fires and relieve the burden on her back. She could never carry more than what she needed, and this human filled with flaws, regrets and hope, legitimately walked it all. She wasn't one of the many who would frequently stop and spend nights in a hotel. She had nothing except a self-esteem filled with confusion and sadness, and you certainly can't pay for a hotel room with that. So on she walked, 1,100 miles and 94 days, alone, hungry at times, with some pretty bad wicked blisters to contend with. But she never, ever gave up. Not once.

Side note: Following this book, I listened to Bill Bryson's A Walk through the Woods of the Appalachian Trail, and all I could think was, "Cheryl Strayed could beat Bill Bryson any day." Either by walking trails and writing. Sorry, Mr. Bryson, but I'm team Cheryl all the way, forever and ever. She didn't walk during the day and spend nights in hotels. She was an all out bad ass.

(Click here to follow me on Goodreads or click here on Audible.com to listen to a sample.)

Wild on Audible.com:

Wild is a powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an 1100-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe - and built her back up again. At 22, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State - and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone. Strayed faced down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

Movie thoughts: I watched Reese Witherspoon in Wild, and I think she knocked it out of the park. It was intense, beautiful, heart-wrenching, and filled with guilt so intensely felt that I owned this author's pain, once again. It was a beautiful adaptation. A movie just as good as the book. 

About the Author (from Wikipedia)

Cheryl Strayed is an American memoirist, novelist, essayist and podcast host. The author of four books, her award-winning writing has been published widely in anthologies and major magazines. She's amazing, and her actual bio (click here) is chockfull of all of her incredible nuances, life lessons, and general insights into her incredible personality.

Follow the author:

• On her website
• On Twitter
• On Instagram
• On Facebook

Oh, my gawd, in my life right now, this is PERFECT. I'll explain at the end, but my favorite part is the realization that "I am blessed to be born with a body that gets fat."

With my new love for running, I've found that music doesn't help me run any better, longer, or stronger. Music distracts me, making me ambivalent. I end up running to the beat more than anything else, which is annoying if I need to slow down or speed up. But listening to an audiobook? Fantastic. And listening to one about running by Haruki Murakami? PERFECT.

Only Haruki Murakami could write his memoir, and make it seem like it's just going to be about one thing only, something simple, but then he sneaks in so much more to make you really think. Is it only about his love affair with running? It is, but I would say it's a straightforward reflection about one man's evolution in his life and how running has made him better. Although Murakami falls in love with it, he just can't fight growing older, and this is tough to accept.

Before his career as a novelist, Murakami smoked sixty cigarettes a day. SIXTY. He decided to get healthier, so he quit smoking and ran. Short distances at first and then eventually his runs lengthened. Soon, he was running an average of more than 36 miles a week. Marathons are now a way of life for him and Murakami puts his heart and soul into it all. He experiences highs and lows that confuse him and make him question what his body can do, but he still pushes himself, trying to become better every day.

Whether you love the chaos of your job, are stressed out by it, or a little bit of both, you have to commit to it in order to make a living and survive. However...you still need that moment to yourself, right? This is where I'm at in my life now. I want to find time each day, but I also want to be better in everything. While I am no athlete (or perfectly coordinated human being, for that matter), I now suddenly find myself in a life more chaotic than ever before. So I want to run and it makes me feel so much better. Listening to this audio helped me understand why. There is one part about feeling the pain, but moving past it and not really feeling it anymore that resonated with me. I ran a little bit longer that night.

Running or not? Will you like the book either way?
I think you'll still enjoy it even if you're not a runner. It's hard for me to feel like I'm giving great guidance about that because I recently fell in love with running, so I instantly connected to it. Murakami is a fascinating person and the different races he participates in are incredible. He is motivational simply because he doesn't want to be anything other than what makes him happy. He talks a little bit about his writing, and the success of his books, and how he is extremely pleased with those who love his work, particularly the young college kids he never expected. But at the end of the day, the book is about a runner, one man who finds complete and total joy in the beauty of pushing yourself, but truly enjoying the art of being who you are.

And you know what my favorite part really was?
As I mentioned earlier, Haruki Murakami revealed a wildly cool idea about something I never thought I would feel: "I am blessed to be born with a body that gains weight." Huh? What? I thought this was crazy-talk. But as I listened, I totally got it. Like he says, by having a body that gains weight, we have something that is our trigger to motivate us to get healthier and to exercise. If we had a perfect {read: relative} body, then we wouldn't really ever get healthy. We'd smoke and drink and eat junk and maybe we'd clog up our arteries and get sick and a host of other issues but we would think we were fine because hey, our bodies look gooood. This was eye-opening for me. I resolved to feel happy with the fact that I need to work out and eat better,  that I have to invest in myself in order to look and feel the way I want to. I loved this revelation of the book and it's a lesson I'll take with me forever.

Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Release Date: 07/29/08
Audio Time: 4 hours, 25 minutes
Narrator: Ray Porter

Others said:
Book Chatter
Bookfoolery and Babble

FTC Disclosure: I purchased this book on the audiobook website, Audible.com

About the Author

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author of such popular works as Norwegian Wood and 1Q84. He is also a translator of English classics to the Japanese language. Although he shuns the public eye, he is a passionate runner and has been featured in running magazines for participating in several marathons each year. He lives with his wife, Yoko in Kyoto, Japan.

Audio Notes: Ray Porter's voice was outstanding and the inflection in his voice carried the emotions of the words right to my ears and it was blissful to listen to him while running. I loved it even more so because of Ray Porter's narration and am girlishly delighted to find another narrator to add to my favorites list. Click here to listen to the sample. And to Audible.com, please create a way to "favorite" your favorite audiobook narrator so that I can receive an alert when they have a new audio released!

She is an adult, married, with a young son. She is a writer, living in New York, with deadlines and assignments. Her place in life is already carved out and understood.

Right?

For Dani Shapiro, her memoir embraces the fact that she actually doesn't know, but that she is trying - trying so very, very hard - to find out. Most especially, faith becomes the crucial piece that perhaps will help make sense of it all, to calm her anxiety and the fear that something bad could happen at any moment. Faith, though, has almost disappeared in her adult life, which is the most troubling. The uneasy feeling of being an outsider in the very religion you were raised in is undeniably unsettling. She wonders how it is possible that she doesn't remember Jewish hymns and prayers that she grew up hearing and reciting herself - how can this be so? The doubt and fear become the wall, separating her from some semblance of personal foundation.

This beautifully written memoir is a quiet undertaking, an introspective study into understanding meaning and religion, if only to feel a connection to her deeply religious father or to repair the relationship with her mother - maybe, actually, even to God. And I could not put it down.

Weaving elements of different faiths, yoga, Kripalu, her search is a lyrical unfolding of personal stories, snippets of contemplation, short pages of confusion, heartbreak, and understanding. Dani Shapiro's path evoked a sense of my own questions of faith - where was I to fit myself in the great landscape of life? Reading it in a few hours was a simple journey for a similar door to open a bit more, and understand personal faith.

I know that this will fit perfectly on my bookshelf, a comforting reference point. One person's life can't possibly provide all of the answers another hopes for, but it can certainly offer a bit of comfort to know that you're not the only one moving about and trying to make sense of it all. This is my first time reading Dani Shapiro's work and I kick myself for not having read her other books sooner.

Although I'm sure this will be recommended mostly for women, I would recommend this to anyone who has pursued their own questions of life and faith, and their place in all of it. Book clubs - this is definitely one to pick! I enthusiastically encourage you to select this for your next meeting - there is no question that it will evoke thoughtful discussions and personal stories. Dani Shapiro will also be available to Skype with your book club! Click here to find out more.

About the Author

Dani Shapior's most recent books include the novels Black & White and Family History and the bestselling memoir Slow Motion. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Elle, Vogue, Ploughshares, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among other publications. She livers with her husband and son in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

Follow Dani:

• On her website
• On her blog, Moments of Being
• On Facebook
• On Twitter: @DanijShapiro 

________________________________________________

Many thanks to Trish with TLC Book Tours for giving me the opportunity to read this book!

Please take a look through the upcoming tour schedule to read more reviews!

Wednesday, February 9th: Kelly’s Lucky You!

Thursday, February 10th: Book Club Classics!

Monday, February 14th: {Mis}Adventures of an Army Wife

Tuesday, February 15th: Books Lists Life

Wednesday, February 16th: nomadreader

Tuesday, February 22nd: Coffee and a Book Chick

Wednesday, February 23rd: Colloquium

Thursday, February 24th: The 3 R’s: Reading, ‘Riting, and Randomness

Friday, February 25th: Books in the City

Monday, February 28th: English Major’s Junk Food

Tuesday, March 1st: she reads and reads

Tuesday, March 1st: The House of the Seven Tails

Wednesday, March 2nd: Boarding in My Forties

Thursday, March 3rd: Man of La Book

Tuesday, March 8th: Chefdruck Musings

Happy Reading,
Coffee and a Book Chick

Book Review
Sixteen seconds is a very long time.  Time it yourself.

On July 5, 1970, an Air Canada flight crashed with 109 passengers on board.  For sixteen seconds of that flight, the passengers knew that they were going to crash.  There were no survivors.  Ms. Fishman's mother, Rita, and two younger sisters, Carla and Wendy, were on that flight.  In that moment, it became just her and her father, when once they were a family of five.

The author contacted me last month and inquired if I'd be interested in reading her book. After reviewing the website for her self-published memoir Repairing Rainbows, I was worried about the responsibility of reading such an important topic and reviewing it.

But, I shouldn't have worried.  Although it is an incredibly tough topic, the book is written easily and as though it's being told in conversation.  It establishes quickly the close-knit family that they once were. Even the dedication page pulled me in. Dedicated to her mother and two younger sisters, it lists each of their dates of birth and dates of passing of July 5, 1970. But for her father, there is something unique that intrigued me - his date of birth is listed, but there are two dates to signify his passing. One for the date of the horrific crash taking more than half his family in one moment, and the second for the date of when he actually passed 29 years later.

The author had essentially lost her entire family on the day of that crash.  As she phrased it, "officially" losing her mother and two sisters, and "unofficially" losing her father.  The story is one that captures her growth from the young girl on "that day," into who she is now, and the steps she needed to take in order to live.  She didn't want to simply exist, and nor would her mother and little sisters wanted that.  I also think that even though she felt the presence of her loved ones in simple and small things that surrounded her in her day-to-day life, her littlest sister, Wendy, probably would have been the most adamant and made her presence known even more had the author not taken the steps move forward in her life -- what a personality in Wendy!  But her father became broken, struggling and only existing.  His decisions were not ones that he would have made before, and the author is open and honest in her frustrations.

I went through the entire range of emotions throughout this book -- shock and numbness when the news was relayed, the complete horror and despair at the sounds of sadness and misery emitting from her broken father, to anger at Air Canada for their complete lack of sensitivity for the families of the victims.

And then I found something else I kept asking.  How can a book about such a tragic event in history that affected so many people's lives be such an incredibly hopeful story about life with a powerful message?  I anticipated feeling the sadness and frustration on what happened, but this book is about so much more than tragedy -- there is family, love, hope, and most especially, choice.  That decision to simply exist or to actually live life.  While her father couldn't move past that terrible day, she did so that she could establish her own place, to continue the legacy of her mother and two younger sisters with her own family and with her husband who has his own amazing story to share.  This is a powerful reminder to enjoy all of our own distinct places in life -- and how we can either choose to live it, or we can simply choose to have life pass us by.  I am incredibly grateful that I had a chance to read this, and feel privileged to be able to share with you an interview with the author.

Author Interview

Lynda Fishman is a trained clinical social worker who has spent the last 20 years as a camp director and runs her own day camp, Adventure Valley.  She has published articles and training manuals on leadership, teamwork, bullying, trust, childhood heath and wellness, communication and customer service.  This is her first full length book.

Q- What made you truly decide to write this in November 2008? You had already been contacted by another author, but you wanted to tell your story yourself. What was it that finally made you decide that the time to tell this story was now?

A- Our family business (summer day camp) was finally on solid ground, and for the first time in my adult life, I really didn’t have anything pressing to do. For me, too much time to “think” can be emotionally risky. I also know that I thrive on being busy. In fact, I believe that the greatest gift we can give to ourselves is a project or activity that keeps us busy and is pleasurable at the same time. As soon as I realized that I had plenty of free time, I decided to start writing the book that I had written over and over again in my head for so many years.

Q- Next to family, clearly, you have devoted your life through your day camp to help others, and this is your life’s passion. As a clinical social worker with twenty years of experience, are you interested in, or have you already done counseling work for the families of airplane crash victims or any other catastrophes?

A- Running a large summer camp has given me the chance to meet and get to know an enormous number of individuals and families. I have never worked with any families of plane crash victims, but in my role as a camp director, I’ve had the opportunity to provide support and counselling to many people struggling with a wide range of issues, loss, trauma or crisis.

Q- You’re very open to the signs that people talk about receiving and feeling from their loved ones who have passed on, and you have also experienced this yourself. The skeptics are always out there -- being a clinical social worker, how do you distinguish between actually seeing signs from loved ones, to simply wanting to see something?

A- Having combined my clinical training with my life experience and spirituality, I believe that we can and should choose HOW to look at any situation, no matter what it is. We can choose thoughts that are inspiring and empowering – thoughts that make us feel good. We can think about ways to persevere and overcome, or we can become victims. We can think about our life as a gift, or we can view it as a punishment. We can go through life with determination and zest, or drag ourselves through every day as if we are tied to a ball and chain.

I choose to look at life through rose-colored glasses. For me, that means I choose to take a favourable view, even if I have to grasp at straws to find a glimmer of positivity. I will find a way to focus on the positives, look at the bright side, expect the best, and somehow remain optimistic.

I choose hope instead of despair.

I choose acceptance as opposed to judgment or rejection.

Forgiveness feels much better than holding a grudge.

Recognizing opportunities to learn and grow outweighs the burden of guilt and regret.

Truth and honesty are way easier than lies.

I choose gratitude and appreciation rather than greed and jealousy.

I choose happiness for others, instead of envy.

I much prefer being upbeat and joyful, compared to down and miserable.

I choose to smile.

I choose to laugh.

I choose to live.

Looking back and reflecting on that time as a thirteen year old, when my whole life came to a disastrous halt, I now understand and fully believe in the power of choosing our thoughts. After losing my mother and two little sisters in a plane crash, I was able to move forward, taking baby steps, because I chose hope. I refused to give up. I replaced fear and panic with hope and dreams. I never let go of my trust and faith in the future. I found positive things to focus on. I avoided miserable people. I admired the colours of flowers, trees, birds and rainbows.

I really listened to songs, finding words and messages that were happy and meaningful. I watched movies with happy endings, and read feel-good books.

I spent time around animals noticing their joy and appreciation for everything – a walk in the park, the chance to play, a bowl of kibble.

I don’t live in a dream world. I am not naïve. I’ve enjoyed tremendous personal and professional success. The life lessons I share come from well earned experience. And I do live by the words in Carole King’s song, Beautiful:

You've got to get up every morning

With a smile on your face
And show the world, all the love in your heart
Then people gonna treat you better
You're gonna find, yes you will
That you're beautiful as you feel

Q- Do you feel that airlines today have changed from their approach to sensitivity in dealing with the families of victims then they were forty years ago?

A- I believe that nowadays, media and technology have empowered individuals, so that big companies have to be very careful about how they deal with people, particularly in crisis situations. There is finally a zero tolerance for bullying. The airline industry now uses PR firms to guide them in doing whatever they have to do to appear compassionate and caring in their responses.  

Q- Have you had any responses of your book by Air Canada?

A- One of the senior executives of Air Canada ordered the book from the Repairing Rainbows website in early July and had it shipped to his home. However, I have never heard from him or from any executive at Air Canada. I have received numerous “confidential” emails from Air Canada flight attendants, ground employees and even a few pilots, with consistently compassionate and supportive messages.

Visit the author's site at Repairing Rainbows. 

Happy reading,
Coffee and a Book Chick