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Friends, I'm very excited today to share four books I could not put down.

Especially when news is continually awful, I am so grateful for amazing books to help me orient

my brain in a different direction and keep me

from doom scrolling. I've had an amazing run of great books this year and I thought it would

be fun to share about four recent reads I couldn't put down. It's an eclectic collection

all united by powerful storytelling. My first book to recommend is Keeper of Lost Children by Siddica Johnson.

So as someone for whom traditional history lessons have just never landed, I'm so grateful

for historical fiction.

Clearly, storytelling is a key way to convey topics and ideas for me, and I know I have connected with

a masterful piece of historical fiction when I finish the book and want to read the author

note, then look up further information online. Keeper of Lost Children was one of these books.

This novel follows three storylines across a couple of decades from the late 1940s to mid-1960s.

First, there is Ethel Gathers, the wife of an American officer who is living in occupied Germany

and walks an interesting line of being part of a select circle as an officer's wife,

while still being othered given that she is only one of two

black officers' wives in the mix. Amidst her own personal heartbreak, Ethel discovers an

orphanage run by nuns, which includes dozens of mixed-race children resulting from white

...