Category Archives: Arts & Culture

Sacramento Book Festival Welcomes Big Names

The second annual Sacramento Book Festival will
feature more than 125 local authors reading, participating on panels and
introducing themselves to Sacramento readers. Photo courtesy of Sacramento Book
FestivalSACRAMENTO, CA (MPG) – From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. May 31,
the California Writers Club Sacramento Branch will launch the second annual
Sacramento Book Festival at the Shepard Garden & Arts Center, next to
McKinley Park, in East Sacramento.

As part of the free festival’s focus on literacy, organizers
will run a book drive for new and gently used children’s books for the Mustard
Seed School. This Sacramento Loaves & Fishes program is a free private
school for children ages 3 to 15 years old who are currently homeless.

The Sacramento Book Festival committee will also
welcome the Sacramento Literacy Foundation to the event, an organization whose
mission is to help all children in the community read at grade-level. Also, there
will be 916 Ink, an arts-based creative writing and literacy nonprofit organization
helping Sacramento youth discover a love of reading.

The festival will feature more than 125 local authors reading,
participating on panels and introducing themselves to Sacramento readers.

The roster includes New York Times bestselling
thriller author James Rollins, award-winning mystery author Catriona McPherson,
crime fiction writers Claire Booth and James L’Etoile, among many others who
Sacramento-area readers will recognize.

In addition, there will be children’s activities, a
food truck and a scavenger hunt with prizes.

Event sponsors include 916 Ink, Amatoria Fine Art
Books, Avid Reader on Broadway, Black Women Write, Capital Books on K, Capitol
Crimes, Elk Grove Writers Guild, Friends of the Sacramento Library – Book Den,
the Mustard Seed School, Northern California Publishers and Authors, Northern
California Romance Writers, Paper Lantern Writers, Sacramento Literacy
Foundation, Sacramento Public Library, A Seat at the Table Books and
Underground Books. The second annual Sacramento Book Festival roster includes New York
Times bestselling thriller author James Rollins, award-winning mystery author
Catriona McPherson, crime fiction writers Claire Booth and James L’Etoile, among
many others who Sacramento-area readers will recognize. Photo courtesy of Sacramento
Book Festival

The authors, by neighborhood, are as follows:

River Park authors Scott Coatsworth authors Ann
Naimark and Ann Da Vigo.

Fair Oaks authors Tim Schooley and Sandra Navarro.

Curtis Park/Downtown Sacramento authors Michael Gorman,
Grete Brewer-Bakken, Brian Buhl, Melissa Buhl, Chance Knight, Linda Townsdin
and Jeff Galvin.

Carmichael author Ann Chehak and Antelope author Candice
Burney.

West Sacramento author Jeyzel Rossi and American River
author Bonnie Blue.

Gold River author Luanne Oleas and Rancho Cordova
author Jill Davis.

Elk Grove authors George Hahn, Rosemary Covington, Betsy
Schwarzentraub, Nafisa Kahn and Bryan Hill.

East Sacramento authors Anara Guard and Brian
Reisinger.

Land Park authors Ron Javor, Jennifer Morita and Michele
Drier. Pocket authors Eileen Hook and Dorothy Rice.

Arden Arcade/Arden authors Lynda Smith Hoggan, Amy
Rogers, Brenda Davis and Gloria Galloway.

South Sacramento authors Pat Henshaw and Maryalice
Tomoeda.

Orangevale authors Phyllis Laatsch and Britney Nida.

Davis authors Judith Starkston, Lally Pia, Sharon
McDonell and Justine Villanueva.

Woodland authors Belinda Sikes and Lisa Montanaro.

Roseville authors Betsy Miller, Madeline Olson and Sharon
Fujimoto. Rocklin authors Lois Butcher and Kate Moore.

Placerville author Terol McCullar and Granite Bay
authors Ryan Hoyt, Donna Wierzbowski, Cindy Sample and Bill George.

El Dorado Hills authors Jenifer Rowe, James L’Etoile
and Bitsy Kemper.

Folsom author Joanne Kwan and Winters author Catriona
McPherson.

Local author channels grief through her book, ‘Blackbird’

BATON ROUGE – An author who grew up in the capital city decided to channel her grief by writing a book. 
Betsy Stephenson lost her son, her mother-in-law and her dog within a six-week period. To cope with her grief, she wrote a book exploring her feelings and hoping to help others experiencing a difficult time. 
Stephenson’s book Blackbird is available anywhere books are sold or online. 

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Accordion books workshop at Gallery at the VAULT

An accordion book made by Deborah Stuart. Photo provided
SPRINGFIELD, Vt. – Gallery at the VAULT is delighted to offer a fun workshop, “Easy Accordion Books with a Twist,” with Deborah Stuart, on Saturday, April 26, from 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
A favorite of handmade book artists, accordion books can be used in so many ways, and are fun to create. Their pages can close like a book with an actual cover, and open like a sculpture. In this workshop, you will learn two ways to make this structure. There will be a great assortment of papers and art tools for decorating the pages of the books you make.
No previous experience is necessary, but this would also work for those who have done some bookmaking and would like further skills. There is an accordion book created by Diane Kemble on the mantle in the Open Wall room that you can see. Yours will be your own unique style, but Kemble’s will give you the idea.
Register by Wednesday, April 19. The cost is discounted for gallery members.
Gallery at the VAULT is located at 68 Main Street in Springfield, and is open Wednesday-Saturday, from 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. For more information, call 802-885-7111, email galleryvault@vermontel.net, or visit the gallery’s Facebook, Instagram, or web page, www.galleryvault.org. Gallery at the VAULT is accessible.

Special Report: Lawmakers and librarians discuss Senate Bill 13, seeking to guard against inappropriate books in public schools

WACO, Texas (KWTX) – This legislative session education has been one of the main focuses of both the Senate and the House, with legislators once again looking to pass a law that will keep quote inappropriate books out of public school libraries.During the 88th Texas Legislative Session the House and Senate passed House Bill 900 to help define what’s considered “sexually explicit” and prevent them getting onto the shelves. However, with that bill still facing legal challenges, they’re now looking to pass a new bill that was first introduced during the 88th session. Senate Bill 13, which is authored by Senator Angela Paxton, is now one of Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s top 40 priority bills this session. “The purpose of this bill, clear and simple, is to protect our children from sexually explicit material,” Sen. Paxton explained. The main way this bill hopes to accomplish that is by changing how public schools select their library books. Cheryl Cooper and Diane McDaniel are both retired public school librarians with years of experience, explaining how that process normally works. “We also had a library policy that was set for the district, so we followed what the policy said and it always required that we look at a certain number of reviews and that we have books that go along with the curriculum and books that would meet the interest and the needs of the students,” McDaniel recalled. And while this can vary from district to district and campus to campus, McDaniel says every public school librarian follows some sort of policy. But according to Texas House Representative Hillary Hickland, who actually testified for SB 13 as a parent last session, what they’re doing now isn’t enough. “Unfortunately we’re still having the problem, and some of that is around you know who gets to say what’s explicit,” Rep. Hickland shared. Under SB 13 each school district would be required to have a “Local School Library Advisory Council” to give recommendations, and the school board would have the final say over new books. According to McDaniel one of the concerns librarians have with this is that it will diminish their role, arguing this puts more work onto board members when they’ve been trained specifically for this purpose. “We have gone to library school, we’ve trained in how to choose books well and to make sure that we have a balanced collection, that we have books for everybody, we know the curriculum at our school, we know our students… that’s a lot for a school board to learn,” McDaniel shared. When introducing the bill Sen. Paxton explained that librarians will still get to choose the books, but they must be approved before going on the shelf. “Recommendations for library material acquisition will continue to be initiated by librarians, but will additionally be reviewed by an advisory council consisting of parents and community members appointed by the school board members,” Sen Paxton said. And then it will be voted on by the school board. That same council will also give recommendations on what books should be removed from the shelves. “The bill also includes a reconsideration process, and it gives parents transparency and control over content available to their own children,” Sen. Paxton further explainedAccording to Cooper, many public school libraries already follow a similar process. For example, at her former school if a parent brought her a book they were concerned about, she says they would be asked to read the book and list out which parts concerned them. “We had a committee and that committee looked at the book, it included me, a parent, an administrator and a teacher, and we voted on it,” Copper said, “so if we voted to keep it then the parent had the choice of saying okay I trust you or I can go to the school board and then the school board would vote whether to take it on or off the shelf”. Another big concern with this proposed LSLAC council is whether the people on it might choose to target certain books based on what they consider to be inappropriate. “If they’re passionate about reading that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I feel like there might be people on these advisory boards that are strictly there to keep out a certain book,” Cooper shared. And if this were to happen McDaniel says it would take away the purpose of a library.“When you have a book for every child you’re also going to have a book that’s going to be wrong for another child,” McDaniel said, “that’s the beauty of a library, you get to choose what you want to read and nobody’s making you read anything that you’re uncomfortable reading”. On the other hand, Rep. Hickland says anything in a library that makes someone uncomfortable shouldn’t be there.“A school library should be a place that parents don’t have to worry about their children being exposed to sexually explicit material without their knowledge,” Rep. Hickland said.On March 19th SB 13 passed the Senate in a 23 to 8 vote, meaning it will now go to a committee within the house where some are hopeful it will pass, while others hope it won’t. Timeline of SB 13 as it makes it way to the Texas House(Isabella Quintanilla)“There’s so much support around really elevating education, making sure we have quality materials, and that there is that transparency and partnership with parents,” Rep. Hickland shared. But McDaniel says that “at a time when we need to be encouraging our kids to read, I think this is going to make it harder to get the books in the library, it’s going to make it harder for the kids to find the books they need and that they want… it worries me a lot”. If this is signed into law then according to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, this legislation will go into effect at the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year.Copyright 2025 KWTX. All rights reserved.

Amazon using AI to recap books on Kindle

It’s another weekday, so we’re getting AI added to another tech product, and today, it’s the Amazon Kindle, but at least this feature seems subtle and helpful.
If you’re like me and you’re endlessly waiting for the final book in a series, and it’s been over a decade since the last one, this new Amazon Kindle feature will use AI to recap the events of the first few books in the series to bring you up to date on all the major plot points.
To use this feature, you need to update your Kindle to the latest version of its software, and you may need to change your language to U.S. English since this feature is launching in the U.S. first.
It’s still unclear how well the feature works, and people online seem to be wary of plot hallucinations or other AI-related errors. Amazon claims that won’t happen, but we’ll have to wait and see what really happens when it fully releases.
This update also adds the ability to turn the page by double-tapping on the side or rear of select e-readers.
Source: Engadget
Image Credit: Amazon

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New report shows it’s largely officials and organizations demanding books be banned – not parents

A new report reveals the vast majority of those demanding book bans are organizations or officials — not individual parents.Seventy-two percent of demands to censor books in schools have come from organizations that include elected officials, board members and administrators, according to the American Library Association. Parents only accounted for 16 percent of book ban demands, while individual library users made up five percent.“The movement to ban books is not a movement of parents, but a movement of partisans who seek to limit our freedom to read and make different choices about things that matter,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the organization’s office of intellectual freedom, said in a statement. The American Library Association can “trace many of the challenges to lists of books that have been distributed by Moms for Liberty and other groups,” Caldwell-Stone told ABC News.’Gender Queer’ by Maia Kobabe (pictured) and ‘The Bluest Eye’ by Toni Morrison were among the most-challenged books of 2024

A bad job: Facebook’s ‘Careless People’ meet their match in a new tell-all book

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost IdealismSarah Wynn-Williams(Flatiron Books/Macmillan)It is not of memoir-worthy earth-shatteringness to have had a crummy job. Even those of us who’ve been lucky professionally had duds along the way. A boss from my early 20s berated the office for misdeeds entirely in her head, all part of the place her underlings held in some psychodrama. The more creative will use these experiences as inspiration for fiction. The less-so will content themselves with ranting to their friends. That is, unless the bad job happened to be somewhere that is itself newsworthy and glamourous. A company that everyone’s existence is somehow a product of. That’s where memoirs enter into it.Careless People is a tell-all about a place where a dream job turned out to be a nightmare: Facebook. More on that soon enough, but there is a publishing subfield in which this book exists, and that needs explaining.Despite having no public profile before her book emerged in March without advance notice, Sarah Wynn-Williams manages to be of a piece with other 2020s memoirs—think Prince Harry’s Spare or My Body by Emily Ratajkowski—that depict hyper-glamorous scenes, but implicitly admonish the reader for thinking anything enviable is happening.On some level, the authors have to know their books exist because they depict rarefied worlds everyone wants to glimpse behind the scenes. But these glimpses are not presented in the spirit of mindless escapism. There’s much name-dropping in Careless People (within the span of a few pages we get a list that includes Beyoncé, Leonardo DiCaprio, Big Bird, Malala, and the Pope), but all in the service of pointing out how rotten it is at the top. (Some Canadians, too—early on, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is snubbed by then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper.) You might wonder what it’s like at Davos, but Wynn-Williams would have you know it kinda sucks.The book is also, in some ways, a real-life counterpart to Leigh Stein’s hilarious 2020 novel Self Care. It’s about start-up-culture hypocrisy, the way companies that talk a good game about how they’re saving the world are quite possibly doing something else.***This memoir begins in earnest with the time Wynn-Williams survived a shark attack as a child. It’s the sort of story where, if you have it in your repertoire, you’d be a fool not to tell it. It’s horrifying and gruesome and it involves a shark. Her parents didn’t take her seriously when her health failed during the recovery—and she almost died.As I was reading this part, I found myself wondering how interesting anything involving tech bros and bro-ettes would be, with that act to follow. Careless People has been touted as the new release Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want you to read. More than touted: Meta, now the parent company of Facebook, has taken legal action to prevent the author from promoting it. Yet much of the book consists of the author seeming stunned to learn things that would not have startled outside observers at the time. The Social Network came out in 2010, the year before Wynn-Williams started at Facebook. Zuck comes across as a dweeb, Sheryl Sandberg (former Meta COO and Lean In author, now vocal Israeli hostage-freeing campaigner) as a ruthless girlboss. The reveals include the fact that the reason Facebook has so many workplace amenities is that they want you to have no life outside of work, which is one of those things you would have surmised even if you yourself have had zilch to do with that sector. I’m reading, finding everything about as I’d pictured it, and wondering when the other shoe will drop.Then a whole DSW’s worth of shoes start dropping.***On a private jet, Sandberg insists a heavily pregnant Wynn-Williams join her in bed. It will shock you to know that I was not on this jet and am going by what’s in the book. It’s a strange scene because it’s portrayed as sexual harassment, but could also be interpreted as a boss, lacking boundaries, suggesting a pregnant underling get some rest. The story is interspersed with what does sound like an inappropriate, exploitative relationship Sandberg formed with a different much-younger woman employee.There will be more sexual harassment alleged, this of a man (Meta’s Joel Kaplan) culminating in the instances the author speaks out about, leading, in her more-than-plausible account, to her 2017 dismissal from the company. There will be work assignments given during her maternity leave. There will be screwing over the entire country of Myanmar. (In fairness, who amongst us has not done this, truly.)By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over. That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers. We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & removing penalties. In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start…— Joel Kaplan (@joel_kaplan) April 4, 2025The main value of Careless People is the presence of quoted text—emails, and spoken—from behind-closed-doors conversations. The reader is being let into private spaces not otherwise available. The writing itself is secondary, and sounds like this:“I moved to a job at the New Zealand embassy in Washington, D.C., hoping I could get closer to where important decisions about the world were actually made. D.C. seemed like the center of the world. The place where important decisions get made.”There’s much use of “important decisions” and similar phrasing, but little clarity on what, beyond innate ambition, brought Sarah Wynn-Williams to Facebook. She describes wanting to change the world, to make an impact, to be at the centre of things—motivations that seem blandly positive but non-specific. The language of marketing, or of a college admissions essay, where one says nothing but grandly. She was drawn to Facebook’s revolutionary potential, but what did she want revolutionized? She rightly praises Facebook as a tool for finding loved ones during a natural disaster, but what else about it did she like? Was she dreaming of a better world, or did she want to be a big shot? The between-the-lines answer is, a bit of both.(More details may be revealed when she testifies later this week at a U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee meeting focused on Facebook’s cooperation with China.)Wynn-Williams makes the occasional nod to a sense of culpability, but the book’s overall gist is that she was a morally pure soul amidst a sea of baddies. She has many excuses, understandable ones, for why she stayed at the company as long as she did (2011-2017). She needed the health insurance, she was her family’s main breadwinner, and (the maybe less sympathetic) she stood to earn a ton if she stayed at the company and wasn’t fired.She is ever-ready with background details attesting to how caring she is, how careless everyone is around her. She is attentive to the plight of endangered tuna (Zuckerberg is not bothered), and tries to steer the young founder towards admiring the gentler of the long-past U.S. presidents. There’s some scene where an Israeli security guard appears, and she finds herself trying not to think about where he acquired his skills.Given the popularity of vice-signalling these days, virtue-signalling has a quaint appeal, but also poses some reliability-of-narrator questions.She presents herself as somehow outside events that she is participating in. She’s too scrupulous for Facebook, the lone scruple-haver in a sea of (as the cover unsubtly alludes to) sharks. It is only later in the book that she reveals a divide within the company, wherein many outside the inner circle of leadership find the whole endeavour a bit sus.At face value, one is hearing the tale of a kind, idealistic (the subtitle mentions “lost idealism”) person who was young and innocent and shattered by the knowledge that your colleagues are not your family. She regularly seems not just surprised but appalled each time she relearns that the purpose of Facebook is expanding Facebook, rather than something altruistic. By her persuasive accounts, she pushed back against a lot of corporate malfeasance. The leadership sure sounds blasé at best about Facebook’s role in getting Donald Trump elected in 2016 and in offering user data to China and in monetizing teen girls’ insecurities in creepy ways, and so much more. But the expectations she had of the company, idealism-wise, exceeded what would be reasonable to have if you went to work for an actual charity.It is now occurring to me that the bad job I had in my 20s is one I had found through a website called Idealist.org. I wasn’t particularly idealistic, but the assumption that this was how recent college grads saw themselves was so ingrained among millennials that this was our job board.***Careless People devotes a good amount of space to her status as a cultural and socioeconomic outsider at Facebook. She didn’t know what Louboutin shoes were, and gets a deeply snooty response from a colleague wearing them. Is this bumpkin cred, though, or evidence of a certain disposition? Plenty of women who do not own and could not afford Louboutins know that those are the ones with the red soles, knowledge acquired during an idle flick through a glossy or Sex and the City binge-watch. They may not be the same women who create jobs for themselves at Facebook.The narrative approach, in which Wynn-Williams is a naif among metaphorical sharks, didn’t have me entirely on board. That a smart, socially adept white woman went law school in New Zealand to a diplomatic job, and then to an American company doing corporate international diplomacy is very possibly less whodathunkit from the outside than if you’re living it. There’s a can you believe they let ME into the room? aspect of the book where it’s like, yes, I can well believe it.Outsiderness, though, is subjective. As is the whole concept of being self-made. Well into her time at Facebook, the author still presents herself as “a random person from New Zealand.” I had trouble squaring this self-presentation with New Zealand’s prime minister asking after her newscaster sister by first name. Even in a small country, this would not be typical. But I certainly buy that it wasn’t foretold that Sarah Wynn-Williams would work at Facebook, but nor was it that Zuck—the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist—would found such a company.Marne Levine, the chief business officer at Facebook parent Meta Platforms, is to depart the company this summer ⁦@sal19⁩ $meta https://t.co/0nGmx5Z6TH— Sarah E. Needleman (@saraheneedleman) February 14, 2023 That our narrator is a non-Jew in what she not-inaccurately refers to as Facebook’s “‘largely Jewish leadership team’” comes up, here and there. This is first alluded to when her superior, Marne Levine, does a not-un-Basil-Fawlty-like faux pas of mentioning the Holocaust, and that she herself is Jewish, to a German delegation at Facebook. Wynn-Williams mentions this in the spirit of how awkward and embarrassing this was for her (that is, exclusively for herself), how necessary her own diplomatic skills were, and refers to it later in the book, as the source of negative feelings towards Facebook from Germany. But that’s not the book’s key Jewish moment.This is it: A fellow Facebook employee tells Wynn-Williams that everyone she works for (he lists them individually) is “‘a Jew who went to Harvard.’” He spells out to her, “‘You’re not like these people. And you’ll never be like them. And the sooner you grasp this, the better.’”Wynn-Williams describes herself as having been “worried” this man was “drifting into some antisemitic conversation I don’t want to be a part of.” And yet she, not this unnamed man, follows up with the sentence, “Facebook is an elite product, born in an elite college, fronted by elite Harvard grads who show up for other elite Harvard grads who are decision makers in all sorts of places.” She is not insinuating anything about any elders of Zion. The book is most definitely about a sinister cabal intent on world domination, one that simply happens to consist of a lot of Jews.I don’t love it. But I’m not paranoid enough that I think when someone speaks ill of Mark Zuckerberg, it maligns the entire Jewish People. And it would be a stretch to call this an antisemitic book, given that it is strictly about Facebook-now-Meta and how that company is run. There’s no implication that the vast majority of the world’s Jews, who aren’t tech oligarchs or Harvard alums, have anything to do with it. And Jews are among those who have already published about Facebook’s skeezier aspects.It’s more that a lot of the book’s ‘colour’—the things that strike Wynn-Williams as noteworthy—consists of her culture shock at spending time with a bunch of Jewish Americans. Someone will phrase things a little bluntly or whatever, in a way that strikes me as pretty normal, but that offends her sensibilities. (I’d be more specific, but fear that in doing so, I would offend Canadian sensibilities, Jewish or otherwise.)  这本书中有一章详细介绍了“奥尔德林”，这是Facebook寻求在中国解禁的项目的代号。据韦恩-威廉姆斯称，该公司提出了各种错综复杂的安排，包括寻找中国合作伙伴、数据收集和审查工具，希望能让执政的中国共产党满意。https://t.co/07PV3ed42G— 纽约时报中文网 (@nytchinese) March 18, 2025 There is an at least one more Jewish member of Zuckerberg’s inner circle, pictured next to Sheryl Sandberg in the photo accompanying the New York Times review of the book, who goes unmentioned: Meta’s head of product Naomi Gleit, who started at Facebook in 2005. Trivia I know because we were friendly-enough classmates at public magnet high school in New York. Another individual whose trajectory could not have been predicted. The non-zero part of me that picked up this book out of where-is-she-now curiosity about a one-time acquaintance who made it big was either disappointed or, I suppose, relieved.So who is Sarah Wynn-Williams—a whistleblower, or an unreliable narrator, or some mix? At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter for the book. The point of Careless People became clear when I realized it’s not about her at all. It’s about shedding light on the ethos of the tech sector currently management-consulting the U.S. into ‘efficiency’. And one of the best things about Elon Musk is that, despite being part-Canadian, he is otherwise not one of ours.Coming soon! The Jewish Angle, a weekly topical conversation podcast hosted by Phoebe Maltz Bovy for The Canadian Jewish News. Click here to learn more and listen to the trailer.The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is the opinion editor at The Canadian Jewish News, where she is also co-host of the podcast Bonjour Chai. Phoebe is a contributor columnist at The Globe and Mail and a co-host of the podcast Feminine Chaos. She is the author of The Perils of “Privilege” and is currently writing a book, with Penguin Random House Canada, about female heterosexuality. She has a doctorate in French and French Studies from New York University, and now lives in Toronto.

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A Book That Feels Like a Hug: Lessons From Sonoko Machida’s The Convenience Store by the Sea

Sonoko Machida is an award-winning Japanese author, born in 1980 in Fukuoka Prefecture. In 2016, she won the By Women for Women R-18 Literature Prize for Blue Fish of Cameroon. Her novel The 52-Hertz Whales won the Japanese Booksellers’ Award and became an bestseller with over half a million copies sold in Japan. Her following two novels, Scooping Up the Stars and Sora’s Recipes, were both nominated for the award in consecutive years. The Convenience Store by the Sea has sold over half a million copies between Japan and South Korea. The Convenience Store by the Sea is about the quaint seaside town in Kitakyushu, Mojiko, which is full of hidden delights. And one unexpected treasure is the 24/7 operational convenience store called Tenderness. Its motto is “Caring for People, Caring for You.” It’s odd that the store’s manager has his own fan club and is a bit of a small-town celebrity. The customers are all somewhat eccentric. But there is a warmth about Tenderness that draws you into the store. The employees all know you by name, the lights are always on. And the shelves are shocked with treats from ramen to crispy fried chicken to sweet parfaits. Customers get the feeling that whatever they need will be available at the store. Title: The Convenience Store by the Sea Author: Sonoko Machida  Translated by: Bruno Navasky Machida writes the book by intertwining short stories about customers at the store and their personal lives and dreams. There is Mitsuri who works part-time at the store, loves drawing manga, and calls Shiba, the store manager by the name of Phero-manager, the author writes, “‘Phero-manager’ was Mitsuri’s private nickname for Shiba. He had a sort of mysterious magnetism that made him intensely attractive, so much so that she imagined invisible pheromones – love hormones – pouring out of him like water out of a fountain.” All the old ladies of the area love him and everyone who seems to come into contact with Shiba seems to fall for his charm. The store had a special program of food for old people especially the residents of the building in which the store is housed. We are also introduced to Shiba’s brother, Tsugi, the “Whatever Guy” who does anything and everything that you tell him to: he finds lost people, cleans out houses for the old, etc. He is a real handyman for the town and is needed and in high demand by everyone. We are also introduced to the art to manga as both Mitsuri and another character, Yoshiro are fond of the comics. Mitsuri even has a blog on the Phero-manager and has made a fictional account of his life online that has many followers. Machida writes the book by intertwining short stories about customers at the store and their personal lives and dreams But that’s not all the book is about, it’s about lessons in learning, a story about Yoshiro’s search for his purpose and how he likes the coffee at the store and it keeps him going, a story about two young teenage girls who bond over strawberry parfaits and both are facing personal challenges and how they overcome them, a story about an aging man who finds hope in pretending to be grandparent to a young boy on his field day, and finally a story about a young boy who doesn’t believe in love but then falls in love himself. The book is essentially a book of love, friendship and hope and the convenience store is the central point that seems to bring all these elements together. It is littered with wise quotes. For example, at one place in the book, Tsugi says: “The more we suffer, the more we should eat. If you don’t get enough nutrition, it distorts your thinking.” At another place the author comments on marriage by writing that: “Just as I raised you to be that way, there are parts of me somewhere that were created by you. Husbands and wives raise each other.” In this way, Machida comments on marriage and how husbands and wives grow together and due to each other – and their characteristics grow due to how each is treated by the other. The book is one that highlights the importance of community in a world that is increasingly becoming individualistic, for example when Shiba’s sister becomes ill, people from all over the city send food and flowers and that is a heart-warming thing to read. Often, in today’s world, where we are focused on the me, myself, and I, this book’s stories gives you a look into what it’s like to live in a small-town and be surrounded by people who care about your well-being when you’re down. Without giving any endings away, each short story has a lesson, and the book was an easy and absorbing read as I enjoyed my time learning about Tenderness and the goods that were sold there, and its clients lives. This book is one I would recommend to everyone for it will add value to your life and grow your personality, as only some books can do. It is exceptionally well-written and I’m not surprised that it is selling like hot cakes all over the world. For me, it was a pleasure to read and review.