books

Usborne Books, a divison of EDC (Educational Development Corporation) is proud to offer the Literacy for a Lifetime Grant Matching Program. EDC is the leading publisher of children's non-fiction titles, over 1,400 to choose from! Literacy for a Lifetime is a wonderful opportunity for your school or organization to get quality educational materials. How does this great program work??? If your school or organization receives a grant, Usborne will match it 50% in product. For example your daycare raises or receives $300.00, that means $450.00 in Usborne books!!! The receiving organization has full control over the selection of Usborne titles and they will be shipped for free! Smaller grants may be combined and there is no cap to the amount of free books you can receive.

I have some book news to share with you, and this time it is all local to St. Johns County.

First, I'm working on a story for next week's paper about an award-winning author of novels for young adults who has just moved into Julington Creek Plantation. She has two books heating up the presses at MTV books (the second hits shelves later this summer), and just contracted to write a third for a different publisher, and now she's your neighbor. I think you'll enjoy learning about her, her writing, and what brought her to St. Johns County (it's probably the same thing that brought most of you).

Many of you may already know that in addition to my day job here at My St. Johns Sun, I'm a book reviewer and books reporter for the Sunday Times-Union. I'm also a novelist. My first book, Transit Gloria, is making the rounds of literary agents in New York, and I'm working on a book I've tentatively titled The Embed, about a reporter who volunteers to go to Iraq and finds himself in over his head. Both are high-tension character-driven stories and if you're a fan of Pat Conroy's or Anne Rivers Siddons', I think you'll like my books.

I want to use my blog here to talk about books. Reading them, writing them, understanding them. I'm reading Khaled Hosseini's latest novel. Anyone who participated in the St. Johns County Library's St. Johns Reads program last year will be familiar with Hosseini's amazing first novel, The Kite Runner. The new book is titled A Thousand Splendid Suns. Like The Kite Runner, it is set in Hosseini's homeland of Afghanistan. I'll be interviewing Hosseini on June 15, and he'll be in Jacksonville the following week. I'll let you know when my review will be running on the book page.