Ask a Bookseller

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Sometimes, you just want to escape into a book.

For those who enjoy a cozy romance, Marissa Mills of Luminary Books in Gardnerville, Nevada, says her recent favorite is the novel "If it Makes You Happy" by Julie Olivia.  

Think “Gilmore Girls” meets “When Harry Met Sally.” Set in a small town (of course!) in Vermont in 1997, this friends-to-lovers novel is a sweet story with a bit of spice.

Michelle is taking over her mother’s bed and breakfast. Cliff, the single dad next door, is a baker who starts teaching Michelle how to bake so she can handle the breakfast part of her new venture.

Mills says the book has grumpy/sunshine, black cat/golden retriever energy. She appreciates that Cliff’s daughters are key characters in the book, as is Michelle’s dog, Rocket. 

It’s not a coincidence that the cover, with its couple strolling near a town-square gazebo, evokes “Gilmore Girls." 

Julia Olivia has many romance titles to her name, but “If It Makes You Happy,” published by  Penguin Random House, is her first break into major bookstores. 

Bookseller Mills says that after their store book club read it, “they fell in love with the author and her writing, and they went back and started reading all of her other works.”

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

More than 10 weeks after the federal immigration enforcement surge began in Minnesota, Border Czar Tom Homan announced this week that federal agents would be drawing down and Operation Metro Surge was coming to an end, though he stressed that immigration enforcement would continue. 

In that environment, Minnesota’s indie bookstores remain a source of books for those seeking both to understand what’s happening in this country and to escape from it. 

For those who are leaning in, Makkah Abdur Salaam of Black Garnet Books in St. Paul recommends a collection of down-to-earth letters designed to meet you where you are. It’s called “Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis,” edited by Kelly Hayes. 

The letters come from contemporary activists and writers from all walks of life whose work focuses on a variety of issues. The letters are titled to help you find what you need in the moment.

There are titles like “Read this if someone you loved has killed themselves or wants to, and maybe you want to, but you also want to survive.” Or, "Read this if you've been assaulted. I believe you.” Or, “Read this if you are panicking about collapse.” 

Overall, Abdur Salaam says, the letters offer advice for those who are in it for the long haul. 

“It talks a lot about sustainable activism and how that requires mutual aid, collective work with your community, and mutual care. And it also talks about how hope is a practice: it's something that you have to contribute to each day and figure out how that looks for you. [The collection talks about] how conflict is inevitable in any movement, and how to basically navigate that, and how it takes very thoughtful and purposeful action to work through that. That’s how movements survive and stay sustainable.”

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

With the surge of ICE operations in Minnesota now in its third month, indie bookstore owners in the Twin Cities and beyond say that customers are coming in looking for three things: community, books to help them understand what's happening and books to help them escape.  

Rima Parikh, owner of the science-first bookstore The Thinking Spot in Wayzata, with some of her recommendations for leaning in. 

For a fiction read, Parikh says the classic novel “1984” by George Orwell has been popular. Set in a dystopian future where Big Brother is always watching, the novel describes a world where language is censored, history is changed, and the party in power tells people to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. 

For a historical perspective, Parikh recommends the nonfiction book “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America” by historian Heather Cox Richardson. 

“There are many books that try to explain the moment, but she goes way back. She goes back to the founding of America and goes through every twist and turn of our meandering history,” Parikh says. “[She] has a coherent narrative through the whole thing explaining how we got here. And essentially, her theme is that a small group of wealthy individuals have weaponized language and promoted false history, which has led us into the state of authoritarianism.”  

For a book to spark conversations among children and adults alike, Parikh recommends a pair of books, “An Illustrated Guide to Bad Arguments” and “An Illustrated Guide to Loaded Language” by Ali Almossawi. These short, illustrated books introduce logical fallacies and other ways language is used to mislead others.  

She offers this example in the book of a false equivalence: 

“It says, yesterday's violence left 12 rabbits with lost limbs and one badger with slight shoulder pain. And the response: ‘We urge both sides to show restraint.’  

“Taken as itself,” Parikh says, “urging both sides to show restraint, yes, [that’s] perfectly valid. However, in this particular context, both sides are not equivalent.”

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Minnesota is in the national spotlight as the massive federal ICE operation continues. It can be a challenge to know how to talk to children about this issue, and books can be conversation starters for families, as well as sources of comfort.

Timothy Otte of Wild Rumpus Books in Minneapolis says his bookstore, which focuses on books for children, is getting requests for books about community and social justice. And while there is no one perfect book to speak to this moment, he finds himself regularly thinking about a picture book by Oliver Jeffers entitled “Begin Again: How We Got Here and Where We Might Go — Our Human Story. So Far.”

Jeffers grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the politically turbulent 1970s and 80’s, and his picture books often focus, in gentle ways, on how we treat each other and live together on one planet.

"Begin Again” is a book that Otte says feels appropriate for children and adults alike.

Here’s how Otte describes the book:

“It is about what we can do and what we can build together.

“In the book, Jeffers has a little essay describing the inspiration for the book, and in it, he says that he no longer asks people what kind of world they want, because what people say is in the negative.

“They say, ‘This is the kind of world I don't want.’ So now he asks, ‘How do you want to feel?’ And I think that's such a brilliant question, because we can build a world in which we all feel safe, we feel in community, we feel held. We want to have a place to live and food to eat and a group to be in, whether that's a family or a larger community.

“This book is a great place to find inspiration for how to make that world a reality, and the kinds of questions that we need to ask both ourselves and the people around us if we want to build that world.”

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Need something kind and cozy to sink into this weekend?

Allie Cesmat of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Ariz., recommends hopping aboard “The Elsewhere Express.”

It’s the new cozy fantasy by Samantha Sotto Yambao, who drew national attention for her novel “Water Moon,” about a pawn shop where people go to sell regrets. Cesmat compares Yambao’s writing to the playful worlds of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli.

Cesmat says she's never read another book like it. She describes the premise:

“You are adrift in life. You're sitting there, kind of feeling like you have no purpose, nothing's going on, and all of a sudden a train pulls up and lets you on to this world that is set apart from ours. The train [contains] revolving rooms and magical dimensions. You are trying to find your purpose, and your purpose is the train compartment that you're walking towards.”

“We follow two characters on this train as they figure out their purpose is, what they're what they're missing. The train is a closed-door mystery: you don't really know what's happening next. You don't know what the tension is. It's a cozy fantasy, for sure, but it is lyrical. It is magnetic.

“And as you're reading it, you start wondering, well, what's my compartment? Where am I adrift in this world? And it brings hope and comfort that you wouldn't otherwise have.”