Hey Readers! I am taking some time for myself for a week or two. The first half of this year has been so incredibly busy so I’ve decided to take just a little break from a few things to make sure I’m keeping life in balance. I hung an “out of office” sign on my Instagram and I’m taking on a shorter reading list again this week.

So other things I’m doing for myself including spending more time in (finally clean and organized) art studio. I’ve been creating new items for MapleStreetStudioHRS, of course. But I’ve also been creating for myself. I’m also wrapping up the end of my house project list, which also feels really good.

So my list this week is also focused on cleaning up my Currently Reading

A sweeping saga of a Jewish family and community fighting for survival against the ravages of history.

Set between events depicted in Fiddler on the Roof and Schindler’s List, Lisa Brahin’s Tears over Russia brings to life a piece of Jewish history that has never before been told.

Between 1917 and 1921, twenty years before the Holocaust began, an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 Jews were murdered in anti-Jewish pogroms across Ukraine. Lisa grew up transfixed by her grandmother Channa’s stories about her family being forced to flee their hometown of Stavishche, as armies and bandit groups raided village after village, killing Jewish residents. Channa described a perilous three-year journey through Russia and Romania, led at first by a gallant American who had snuck into Ukraine to save his immediate family and ended up leading an exodus of nearly eighty to safety.

A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. 

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history’s most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.

Submit Your Book

book for review, please visit Contact Me and complete the form. I’ll review your request and respond within 48 hours. I’m also happy to work with authors on interviews. To set up an interview, please use the same form.

Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto is the moving account of the horror of the Warsaw Ghetto—written by the recognized archivist and historian of the area while he lived through it. Through anecdotes, stories, and notations—some as brief as was slapped today in Zlota Street,—there emerges the agonizing, eyewitness accounts of human beings caught in the furor of senseless, unrelenting brutality. In the Journal, there is the whole of life in the Ghetto, from the erection of the Wall, in November 1940, for hygienic reasons, through the brief period of deceptive calm to the eventual mass murders. It is a portrait of man tested by crisis, stained at times by the meanness of avarice and self-preservation, illumined more often by moments of nobility.