Rochester Community Players Showcase has accepted my one-act play, “When the Piper Visits and the Piper Plays.” Yeah! The Showcase runs from Wednesday Oct. 9 through Oct. 13 at the Multi-Use Community Cultural Center (MuCCC), 142 Atlantic Avenue. The performance of Piper and other short works will be Saturday Oct. 12 starting at 2 p.m.

In Elf Dog & Owl Head by M. T. Anderson, a Newbery Honor book, a boy, Clay, confined during a world-wide illness, found a mysterious dog that took him to hidden worlds and dangers. It was a classic adventure quest, in strange places behind familiar settings, where rocks could be slumbering giants and the other side of a lake could be a land of promise. Illustrations by Junyi Wu, helped defined the obstacles and odd characters.

My latest book, Rochester’s South Wedge Revisited, looks fabulous as an eBook. It’s in color and is very readable on a larger device.

Continuing with the Crystal Kite Awards, one of the New England Honor books was Whatever Comes Tomorrow by Rebecca Gardyn Levington, illustrated by Mariona Cabassa. This colorful and uplifting book had a splendid blend of words and images to handle anxiety. So helpful.

The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators gives the annual Crystal Kite Award to recognize great books from the 70 SCBWI regions around the world. It is the only peer-given award in publishing for young readers.

Now that I have finished reading all 100 Newbery Award winners, I’m on to reading several of the latest Crystal Kite award winners. In an imperfect launch of my latest book, I got a proof of the black and white paperback, Rochester’s South Wedge Revisited. At first it was disappointing because some of the images were fuzzy, but, the big BUT, what I could see of the color eBook sample was fabulous. We downloaded the eBook but have not succeeded in  opening it. Those techno glitches. Oy!

Evanna DiSalvo, branch manager at the Frederick Douglass Community Library in my neighborhood, just told me she has placed an order for my latest book, Rochester’s South Wedge Revisited. I’ve been waiting to get a print copy in the mail before announcing it. Early yay!

I made it through last week’s heat wave and storms reading my way toward the end of the Newbery Award winners. The 2017 winner, The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill, wove a fascinating web of lies, deceptions, betrayals and truths.

I started to blog as a sanity saver on Jan. 3, 2022 and decided to read all 100 Newbery Award winners about a year and a half ago. As I near the countdown to 100, I’m at 2016, I can’t believe what a wide variety of books I’ve read, and I’m starting to read books from the year they were awarded.

When You Reach Me, the 2010 Newbery Award winner by Rebecca Stead was a good book for hot-weather reading. It got off slowly with a  puzzling letter to sixth grader Miranda in New York City in a pre-techno-time. Miranda and her best friend Sal’s friendship fell apart and before long a strange web unfolded around classmates, parents, odd neighbors and shopkeepers. This story had good characters, setting and an intriguing plot.

It was a glorious sunny day at the opening ceremony for the Steve Preston Peer Connection Center at the Veterans Outreach Center in Rochester on May 30. Watching the presentation of colors by six members of the Vietnam Veterans Chapter 20 Honor Guard was like watching a living legacy.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Mark Christian Ngoma, a wonderful man who came to Rochester to visit sites related to Frederick Douglass. I am happy to share his pending and past book publications.

In the name of the downsizing books, I’m adding a few to the let-go pile. Celtic folk and fairy talks edited by Eric and Nancy Protter (1966) was a mixed bag. Some of the stories were inventive and original, others, clever, but overall I wasn’t fond of them. There is something to be said of the repetitive pattern of such and such happened once, twice and three times and then the surprise, but the lowly peasant boy getting the king’s daughter’s hand as a prize wore thin.

Despite the difficulty of reading small print in the Spring 24 edition of RH Rochester History, a joint venture of Rochester Public Library and RIT College of Liberal Arts Department of History, the content was excellent. Michael J. Brown’s article, “Revisiting the Mid-Sized American City” spoke well to the dilemma of places like Rochester. Reading “Bringing the Past into Conversation with the Present” by Rebecca Edwards, and “The State of the City: Past, Present, Future” facilitated by Erica Bryant was right on target about current issues.

 Because I know her and of some of the hurdles she has faced as a wheelchair user, it was a mixed pleasure to read Luticha Andre Doucette’s book review of This Brain Had a Mouth by James M. Odato. Luticha addressed how racially segregated the disability-rights movement has been and told of Lucy Gwin who suffered a brain injury after a car accident and coined the term “dislabeled.” Well done.

 At first I wondered why the 2006 Newbery award winner Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins, had won. Its take on smalltown life unfolded slowly as a group of siblings, neighbors and classmates figured out what to do with themselves. One of their activities was for three of them to sit in the front seat of a pickup truck parked in a driveway and listen to a radio show. Eventually one teen taught another how to drive it, and that skill played a key part in a crisis. The story came together well in the end.

I was captivated by the big-screen wonder of the movie Cabrini, got a biography of Francesca Xavier Cabrini (1850 – 1917), and read through it in a week. Pietro Di Donato’s biography, Immigrant Saint: The Life of Mother Cabrini (1960), was surprisingly different from the movie which went out of its way not to clobber people over the head with Mother Cabrini’s strong Catholic faith.

Many thanks to Jessica Damiano of the Associated Press for the surprising article in Saturday’s Real Estate section on women trailblazers in horticulture. I don’t think I’d ever heard of Jane Colden, the first female American botanist in the 1750s. Nor had I heard of Beatrix Farrand, the first lady of American landscape architecture in the early 1900s. I’d heard of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, but not as founder of the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi in the late 1960s.