From The Mixed Up Files

This summer, my family vacationed in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. We hiked, kayaked, and reveled in Mother Nature’s beauty – including the Apostle Island sea caves! Yet, one of my greatest discoveries on that trip was not in nature – it was in a bookstore. I spotted Back Forty Books as we were driving through Two Harbors, MN, after a long day of hiking, and I convinced my husband to pump the breaks, turn around, and allow me “please just a few minutes, and I’ll keep my purchases to a reasonable level of books I...

As recently covered in the fascinating Vox article “The promising race to get kids reading again” by Constance Grady, kids read and read and read up until about age 9, when they drop off a reading cliff. There are plenty of theories for this, as outlined by Grady, including: Middle-grade books getting too long, due in part to the success of the billion-page-long Harry Potter series. Kids having less free time to sit and read because they are more scheduled than earlier generations. Covid-19 threw off reading habits, along with access to libraries and books in school. Potential readers putting...

The recent rise of books being taken out of libraries has made an impact on young readers. Now, more than ever, young people have less access to titles representing diversity. “The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked that of the 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, 39 % represent the...

  Welcome to STEM Tuesday: Author Interview, a repeating feature for the last Tuesday of every month. Go Science-Tech-Engineering-Math! Today we’re interviewing Laura Mucha, author of Kaleidoscope: Step into a world of color. Kaleidoscope paints a vivid and often creepy picture of humankind’s quest to create coloful art materials. The history and science...

THE GRIMLORE GAME combines the twisty fun of Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, the locked-room thrills of The Mystery of Locked Rooms, and the eccentric family dynamics of Knives Out, sprinkled with some Wednesday Addams energy on top to make it the perfect read for the Fall and Halloween. Kit Devlin knows...

As a young child picking strawberries alongside his family, Pedro Martin learned that hard work is survival. Even then, he loved to draw cartoons when he wasn’t in the fields and especially loved Saturdays when he could watch cartoons and draw. While in the fields, he imagined the characters of...

THE GRIMLORE GAME combines the twisty fun of Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, the locked-room thrills of The Mystery of Locked Rooms, and the eccentric family dynamics of Knives Out, sprinkled with some Wednesday Addams energy on top to make it the perfect read for the Fall and Halloween. Kit Devlin knows...

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.” This famous quote by Stephen King encapsulates an important truth for writers: We should always be reading, and the parenthetical in that quote tells us why. Reading gives us tools, and the only...