Category: Sleeper Stories

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April 20, 2026

11:10 am

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Mental Health, Mi Familia Loca, NPM, Part and Poetry, Sleeper Stories

This week we have arrived at the portion of the NPM celebration wherein I acknowledge that I will be so glad when it’s May. Not because I can’t write a daily poem – I can, and probably should. Not because I can’t draw a daily doodle, either, though these images are only just now becoming the shorter, quick-sketch thing they were meant to be from the beginning, with fewer attempts at a photo-realistic literal and more impressionistic and observational within a metaphorical window… but because I always (always, always) set myself some project expectation that I absolutely struggle to complete. While the poems are moving from externally observant and becoming more internal, I’m finding that the form is inhibiting me – though this was a deliberate choice. Tricubes are meant for brevity, after all, and this is a process to teach myself to lean into that – but it’s just… hard. Normally I use poetry to process. Often there’s more I want to say, but it feels like dwelling – and I’m not going to change forms, though I feel the desire. Additionally, I DO have other things to do…

swinging bridge

between now
and back then,
a crevasse:

dear parents,
leave something:
some kindness –

memories
of soft hands
as a bridge.

Poetic addendum: Saw family this weekend. People of color who experienced physical ‘correction’ have a number of people telling them that culturally this is ‘necessary’ or ‘just how it is,’ or any number nonsensical things. I think there’s a part of us that goes cold and doesn’t recover, and when the punishing parent is approaching their four-score and whatever, and you still don’t feel safe to be familiar with them… what has the ‘culture’ done? What have we normalized? What is the profit…?

hourglass
avalanche
forces hands –

we can’t hold
time’s passage:
sand’s slipping.

leave something –
in loving
memory.

I guess a double tricube could be a new form?

{constant reader’s reads: great graphics}

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April 20, 2026

5:14 am

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General Coolness, Sleeper Stories, Under Radar Reading Recommendations, What We Do

Dear TBR:

Today’s effortless Three On A Theme: She’s Reading report is brought to you by Girls Doin’ Stuff, and Finding Your Place and… graphic novel greatness.

UPROOTED, by Ruth Chan: Don’t you just love this cover? And, can we normalize authors writing their name in whatever languages they speak? The use of Chinese characters here is just so cool.

This is a great book to check off a whole host of Read Harder challenges – an Asian protagonist, a book with a non U.S. setting, and a memoir. Ruth Chan both wrote and illustrated this outstanding book.

Thirteen-year-old Ruth is filled with fear when her parents announce that they’re moving back to Hong Hong from her hometown from Toronto. Though Ruth is a Canadian citizen, it IS going “back” to Hong Kong – for her parents. They’re moving to the island for her father’s job, but Hong Kong is where Ruth’s mother is FROM. She’s over the moon to be going back, and Dad is excited about the benefits and security of the new job, but… Ruth, an only child who has been welded at the hip to her two best friends for years, is feeling uprooted, bereft, and lonely.

It’s hard not being Chinese enough for your Chinese family. Her Cantonese, only reluctantly spoken sometimes to begin with, is definitely not good enough for her cousins. And yikes – she’s not in middle school in Hong Kong – nope, she’s in high school type classes, and she has chemistry already. Academic rigor and a language barrier aside, Ruth is missing her father, who is often away over night for work trips, and her mother, who, living so close to every cousin, sister, and best friend she grew up with is often away for afternoon coffees, morning gym trips, and weekend shopping. Ruth has to do SOMETHING to find her feet. She clings to the stories her father tells her when he’s home – and somehow, hearing about how the family clung together and made it through some of the roughest times in history give her fresh determination to make it through.

I’ve been meaning to read all of Shannon Hale’s REAL FRIENDS series, and I’ve just realized that it, too is considered memoir – so we’re two for two! Sixth grade Shannon is really spending a lot of time thinking about of what it means to be a friend, what it means for her to fit in with her friends, and …how she fits. Or, IF she fits. After standing up for herself against a classroom bully and spending a summer with her first job, Shannon is sure sixth grade is going to be a breeze. After all, she’s now friends with both the oldest and the most well-known sixth grade girl. She’s going to be a queen of the school, and she and her friends will finally be on top of things. Of course… it’s middle school, so doesn’t actually turn out that way. Not only does this book detail Shannon’s continuing drama with the close circle of friends she’s known throughout elementary school, the book also explores her confused expectations as to what girls are allowed to and expected to do – weighted heavily with her mother’s input as shaped by the Church of Latter-day Saints – and her concerns about her marriageability. I had a rueful chuckle about this. By the age of eleven-twelve, roughly Shannon’s age through sixth grade and the beginning of seventh, as this book covers, I was outspoken in my desire not to marry, and told anyone who would listen that I was just going to do my own thing, live in my own house, read as much as I wanted, and ignore people. (IRONIC how this is still a theme for my life.) However, the adults around me brushed off my desire for independence from the traditional role I saw fulfilled around me, and rather than asking me why, or responding to my insistent disagreement with curiosity, they constantly told me, “Yes, you will” or, “You’ll change your mind.” Shannon timidly wonders if she’s ever going to be compatible with a man if none of the boys in her school like her… and she doesn’t know how to take being left behind when the girls around her pair off. She doesn’t think that’s what she wants… but, maybe she doesn’t know the right thing to want… That difficulty with deciding on her own opinion plagues Shannon as she tries vainly to keep up with the latest group, the latest movie, the latest TV shows and characters, all in an effort to not be left behind, out of step, or forgotten. The book also explores intrusive thoughts and acute anxiety, normalizing an experience that Shannon struggles with throughout the book. While it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, I do find myself wondering how she will negotiate trying to keep up and fit in as she gets older. The book does end on a hopeful note, as Shannon refuses to let her tight circle of friends determine which elective she’s going to take or change the direction of her interests.

This book is both written and illustrated by Sarah Sax.

Viv Sullivan used to be plain old Olivia Vivian Sullivan – an unknown nerd intensely into her fandoms and her two best friends. She also used to hate picture day, because there were umpteen Olivias in her school, and nothing making her stand out from the rest. Forgettable in a way that makes her feel invisible, even changing her hair style for picture day is a battle she can’t win, as her mother insists on helping her with a “classic” french braid and making her a hand-knitted cardigan to war. When she sees a fellow student interviewing students about their cool outfit choices for her vlog, Viv is done with being overlooked. Her favorite vlogger talks about living their truth a lot, and so Viv decides that there has to be a truth better than the one everyone thinks they know about her. In the bathroom she cuts off her French braid, and her messy, choppy hair gets attention from everyone – including her mother, who is called to the school to pick her up. A stylist straightens the jagged edges a bit, but to Viv’s mother, the damage is done. For better or for worse, Viv’s out-there action has drawn attention. She’s now what she didn’t know she wanted to be – an influencer. Now all Viv wants to do is to KEEP that attention. She pushes for bigger and bigger actions from herself, and from her two best friends who… didn’t actually sign up for Viv’s style of truth living. When it all crashes – as it inevitably has to – Viv must decide a.) if she really wants to still be friends with her best friends, and b.) if there’s a line between living your truth and living a version of yourself that’s fictional and pretending it’s your truth.

This book surprised me a little; I felt like Viv’s brashness was tempered by how truly good at fulfilling the dreams of others, but as her attention-seeking escalates, I wondered if it was being driven by something more than her personality difference with her mother. I guess not every action stems from some deep place of hurt or whatnot, but it was difficult to feel like I really understood what brought Viv to where she was – but this is from the perspective of a person who has only ever met one person with her same name and whose greatest wish was to find her name on a gas station keychain. This book is the first in a series.

Fresh onto the TBR:

  • Somebody’s Daughter, Ashley Ford
  • The Friend Zone Experiment, Zen Cho
  • The Tribulations of Ross Young, Supernat PA, A.J. Sherwood

Reality is overrated – but books are more than escape. Sometimes, they’re a platform to stand on, high enough to help you see another point of view. Stay reading!

        

Until the next book, 📖

Still A Constant Reader

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April 16, 2026

1:08 pm

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NPM, Part and Poetry, Sleeper Stories


We’ve reached the halfway point of the month, and the location of a new window that really isn’t a window, exactly. I mean, it’s a screen. We were always going to have to get to the screens.

As a person who lived through the moral panic of video games as a child and then a teacher, and who is living with everyone else through the genuine cause-and-effect panic that is the morally bankrupt application of uncontrolled AI, this too-much-this-or-that in terms of digital interaction has solidified into the realization that forevermore, It’s Always Going to Be Something. People will always be upset about that which doesn’t fit within their parameters of societal or personal behavior or expectation. Even before screens, and reading on screens, my father sought to eradicate my predilection towards bookishness – without his control over the characters in the books nor over my thoughts about their actions or words or what I was learning from them, the contents of my mind must have felt chaotic, untrammeled, and wholly out of his reach… just like an individual’s thoughts ought to be.

May we guard the freedom to read forever.

avoid, escape, iterate

what mattered
was distance:
diminished

consciousness
receding
present, past –

the future
replete with
evasions.

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April 14, 2026

1:10 pm

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NPM, Part and Poetry, Sleeper Stories

Heard the factoid this morning that Queen Elizabeth I’s courtiers blackened their teeth with soot to mimic her own genuinely decaying teeth, as in 1533 their monarch’s unrestrained love of sugar had left its mark and dentistry was not yet really A Thing. The podcast compared this to the myriad women who have gone under the knife to change their appearance and appeal to the putative head of this government in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-six. …And, I was thinking how we’re all grasping so frantically, even since primary school, for somewhere to belong, in the most galling fashion at times (see: Junior High). …and, how standing out and solitariness is not how most of us are naturally inclined, and how much effort it must take to stay true to oneself in that environment, and not even change your makeup routine to resemble the herd… And, how in two years or six months or less, the herd is going to look wholly different and even more ridiculous than it does now, and for those whose surgeries can’t be undone, then what? For whom are we changing our very bodies and selling our souls, with no reciprocity?

Collectively, We The People need Dr. Rudine’s windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors… and for heaven’s sake to maybe have a sit and a quiet think… Because beyond all of the other *waves hands* …murderous, callous, unethical, illegal, ungodly -ists and -isms, none of that “go along to get along” stuff is ever sustainable. Weren’t we all supposed to learn that in junior high?

transcendent

confidence
shouldn’t lie
in “prettiest.”

upending
privilege,
the wisest

transcend it.
Indifferent
assurance.

Hummingbirds (which I cannot draw) are the ultimate in assured indifference. Beautiful, but may or may not come to the feeder. Exquisite, but may merely give you a quick side-eye as they pass. Stunning, and could not care less what you’re all about. #goals.

{constant reader’s reads: a girl who shines}

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April 14, 2026

1:09 pm

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General Coolness, Sleeper Stories, Under Radar Reading Recommendations, What We Do

DEAR TBR:

This is the year’s first novel-in-verse that I’ve read – and boy, does it shine.

The year is 1963 and fifth grader Cooper Dale is not looking forward to her school year. She has The Mean Teacher, and she’s dreading dealing with Ms. Keating, whom everyone says is just terrible. Cooper hates being the only Colored girl in her class, and hates how everyone looks at her when the history lesson is on slavery. Only the summer before, four girls only a little older than she is were killed in a church bombing by the Klan. The world seems full of scary, mean white people who hate her for being the color she is, and it’s dispiriting and exhasuting. What makes it all worse is a boy named Wade Carter, because Wade just can’t seem to leave Cooper alone. He is a bully, and his bullying is almost always racial in nature, taking the form of microaggressions that are not terribly micro, when taken together. Wade wears Cooper down. She loves her family, loves their gatherings, and otherwise loves her culture, but at school, she dearly wishes that she were white and could blend into the crowd.

Cooper is a worrier, and like many kids in early middle grade, though her worrying is part of her growing up and growing to see adults – and the larger world – as entities separate and with their own backstories, those worries sometimes consume her. She worries about her parents, and wishes they didn’t have to work so hard. She worries about disappointing them, and worries about seeming likeable. She worries that her siblings and cousins and extended family will be ashamed of the way she thinks and feels – and sometimes acts. Cooper feels like it’s harder to be herself – whoever that is – because her parents have told her repeatedly that she needs to “shine” in all that she does. To Cooper, that means that she should make straight A’s. She struggles with this. More, as Ward’s pestering gets under her skin, Cooper struggles with her behavior, earning herself a smack with a ruler from her scary teacher, her parents’ disappointment, and worse – her own. Why can’t this year be easy? Though Cooper’s dearest wish is to be just treated like everyone else, that’s never going to happen for the lone Black girl in a white-dominated school in 1960’s America. What Cooper finally determines is that her only option to counteract her frustrations are to shine, like her mother says she should. She’ll be so good that no one can ignore her. Cooper asks the input of her older siblings, and her cousins on how they succeed and deal with things, and vows to make her shine brighter. Ward Carter’s family hiring her mother as household help while Mrs. Carter is ill IMMEDIATELY makes that 1000% harder.

Still, as the school year goes on, through its ups and downs, Cooper begins to faintly understand that what she really should be looking to be is radiant – not just shiny on the outside, but radiating light and goodness and kindness from the inside that isn’t just external polish. And when real-world trouble touches their school community, Cooper finds out that radiance can’t be easily extinguished.

This book is accessible in terms of having short, spare poems, tons of historical references, from the Kennedys to Crayola’s “flesh” tone’s shift to peach, Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles, and a classmate whose interest in African culture and language really reflects the shift to the nascent 60’s attitudes of “Blackness” as divorced from the outdated terms “Negro” and “Colored.” Cooper is a young, but thoughtful fifth grader, and the novel takes the far-ranging themes of racism and prejudice and recolors them through the lens of forgiveness, family, and community. No one is perfect in this book – but no one and nothing is irredeemable, even bullies. Vaunda Micheaux Nelson subtly weaves a steady emotional pulse of a coming of age book with the everyday banalities of the fifth grade to create a quiet but memorable novel in verse that has a lot of heart.

Fresh onto the TBR:

  • Somebody’s Daughter, Ashley Ford
  • The Friend Zone Experiment, Zen Cho
  • The Tribulations of Ross Young, Supernat PA, A.J. Sherwood

In a world that seeks to dull us, may we ever be the radiance that it needs. Stay reading!

Still A Constant Reader

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April 13, 2026

10:10 am

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Happenings, Musings on Extemporanea, NPM, Part and Poetry, Sleeper Stories


Washday

Consider
housekeeping:
constantly

applying
principles
of order.

(though laundry
demonstrates
entropy…)

(Since even my washing machines have windows, they seemed fair game for observation.)

Monday, November 13, 1620, the Mayflower came ashore. After they probably kissed the ground in gratitude for someplace solid to stand, the Pilgrim-esses hauled out the wash… because it was Monday, after all, and that’s what one did on Monday.

Every time I manage to do laundry on a Monday I feel some sort of bizarre kinship with hundreds-of-years-ago Englishwomen, who started this, and all who came after… Just trying to impose order on chaos, tying the days of the week to some sort of recognizable pattern, trying to make meaning of drudgery. Good luck to all of us who keep trying…

{constant reader’s reads: a complex western}

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April 12, 2026

6:05 am

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Sleeper Stories, Under Radar Reading Recommendations, What We Do

Dear TBR,

The Indian Appropriations Act of 1889 reapportioned lands once belonging to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole peoples who had been forcibly removed. The Oklahoma Land Rush that same year was an historical event where what was considered some of the best ‘unassigned’ land in the U.S. was up for grabs by non-Native Americans. Historical record tells us that the race started at ‘high noon’ on April 22, 1889, and that an estimated 50,000 people were lined up at the start, seeking to gain a piece of the available two million acres. Jewell Parker Rhodes uses this foundation to tell an excellent story.

Will and his family are sharecroppers in Texas five years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Though their lives changed when Will’s grandfather and father walked away from the Louisiana plantation where they had been enslaved, the changes haven’t been big enough. Sharecropping meant turning over 70% of their crops to someone else – someone who charged them for the seed they used to grow it, leaving them almost no profit. Will’s father finds sharecropping just as unjust as slavery, so when he hears of the Land Rush, it’s a gamble that he absolutely must take.

Unlike Will, who is a bit undecided about life, Will’s father is a long-range thinker; silent, thoughtful, and determined. He hasn’t been soft, or particularly loving towards Will, so when it is decided that Will, rather than his grandfather, will accompany Will’s father on the cross-country trip, Will is both nervous and exhilarated. Could it be possible that they can soon share the type of closeness that Will’s father and grandfather do? Or will the family mule, Belle, remain Will’s best and only confidant?

Along the trail, Will encounters dust, boring scenery, hot days, flooding rains, and Americans – some for whom the possibility of free land brings out their worst, and others who behave honorably. As in any good Western, there are gunslingers, sheriffs, and saloons. Will’s eyes are opened by his travels, and he learns that there are choices which, once made, will change a person – forever. Considerations of the cost of war, what it means to be a man, and how one’s faith can be a prick to the conscience as well as a guide for life deepen this story from mere adventure to something more. Will changes from a boy who thought he knew the answers into a young man who knows that life holds questions that he hasn’t even thought to ask. A great novel for those who like history, Westerns, and complex tales of growing up, Will’s Race for Home should be on your TBR list this year.

Fresh onto the TBR:

  • Gamelit, MCA Hogarth
  • Food for Thought, Alton Brown
  • The Midwatch Institute for Wayward Girls, Judith Rossell

In the words of Hank Green, “The truth resists simplicity.” Never buy the lie that life, with its astoundingly complex array of beliefs and systems, history and sociology, is anything like simple. Neither the story of the theft of the American West nor the story of the settlement of African Americans within the West is a matter of a simple, monolithic truth – that’s why it’s important to read widely and think deeply. Friends, stay reading!

📚 Still A Constant Reader

{constant reader’s reads: another parent trap}

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April 8, 2026

1:04 pm

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General Coolness, Sleeper Stories, Under Radar Reading Recommendations, What We Do

Dear TBR:

I really dislike when I discover a traditionally published Big 5 middle grade book I’ve heard nothing about. Don’t get me wrong, a new book is always a joy, in a way – but in another way, it’s kind of disturbing. Brief research into the film director and novelist who combined to write this would suggest it should have had much more buzz, but the truth is that middle grade gets overcrowded and 2019, when this book was published was a very prolific year for buzzy middle grade publications. At any rate, it was nice to find a wholly new-to-me book that was both touching, funny, and was the reading comp I was looking for.

Bett is named after her maternal grandmother, Betty. Bett with two-t’s is… a firecracker like her namesake – out to grab the world and take it on. She swims, she camps, she surfs, she skis – she takes risks and seeks thrills and would live outside with animals if possible. She gets it from her father, who, after the death of his partner, Phillip, when Bett was just a baby, taught her that life is short, and to grab it with both hands. That’s why when Bett’s dad falls in love, he falls all the way in. The new beau has a daughter just like he does – same age and everything. So, why shouldn’t they be friends? Why shouldn’t they be sisters? Why shouldn’t their first introduction to each other be in the same cohort at summer camp? What could possibly go wrong?

Avery is circumspect, studious and smart – and very much an indoor cat like the father who raised her. Surrounded on all sides by her with adult support staff in the form of nannies and tutors, her father has tried to supply both father and mother, since Avery’s mother is a busy playwright she’s never even met – he’s made sure of that. Avery has asthma, rampant anxiety, especially about large bodies of water and dogs, insomnia, social insecurities galore, and a near-fascination with germs and hygiene. When she is contacted by a girl letting her know that her father is seeing someone, she is first dubious, then cautious – what if this girl is part of some elaborate financial scam!? – and then she’s a horrified that this wildly creative girl whose emails are rife with spelling errors – this is the girl that her father expects her to be best friends with? Nevertheless, she’s polite. Avery does her best to be polite, even when being joined at her favorite summer camp by a girl she definitely didn’t expect.

This book is both charming and hilarious, and the personalities of the girls shine through their letters and writing style – Bett making spelling errors and shrugging, Avery almost visibly wincing. Grandma Betty’s yearning for a life bigger than what she’s found as a retiree in Texas reads as legit, as do the unspoken ambitions and needs of the other adults in the book. Though those are solely shown rather than discussed, this is clearly a book about children and the ways in which their lives are intersected with an essentially controlled by their adults. Some of what’s here would not be obvious to a younger reader not as adept at reading between the lines, but it adds ballast to the girls’ personalities, as they know their adults and read them well, and try to explain them to each other. Romances – friendships – and relationships of all kinds wax and wane throughout the narrative, reflecting the natural ways people go in and out of each other’s lives.

There’s a lot to love about this novel, with its high concept yet heartfelt plot, though it does have its small criticisms. I did wish that Bett’s characterization wasn’t so much dialed to ‘does-what-she-wants sassy’ and leaving out the biracial part of her identity. While the Brazilian part of Bett’s family was her surrogate, her father is listed as African American, as is Grandma Betty. Bett mentions once that she’s alone as a girl of color at the chi-chi summer camp where the girls are sent… and that’s it. I can’t imagine her adults wouldn’t take some aspects of Black culture as a part of their lives together. The paperback cover shows her with a small cloud of curly hair, but though she’s on her own all summer, she never does her hair – it’s not mentioned as anything she has to take time and care with, though Avery mentions that it’s curly. It comes across as if Bett’s dad is a hunky, impulsive gay himbo who works in pool construction – blue collar work – and he’s taken up with a wealthy white architect, the type of person builders, Bett explains, usually fight with. It’s also notable how much the men cry, which veered closest to cliché than any other part of the book I read. The inevitable book-ending wedding aside, this is a love story on several levels – between consenting adults, of course, but also between two girls who choose friendship and its vicissitudes and themselves most of all over whatever their parents, teachers, camp staff, and other friends plan for them – which is a triumph of its own. Self-determination, self-awareness, and in the end, selflessness make all the difference. I’m glad I read this book.

Fresh onto the TBR:

  • To Ride a Rising Storm, Monoquill Blackgoose
  • Books & Bewitchment, Isla Jewell
  • The Merciful Crow, Margaret Evans
        

Until the next book, 📖

Still A Constant Reader