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Brenna's Backlist Picks

Thoughtful and personal exploration of the life of the woman who wrote Goodnight Moon, with many passages from the personal journals she kept her entire life. Margaret Wise Brown completely reshaped publishing's approach to children's literature, introducing things we take for granted today, like sensory touch-and-feel books, read-along audio recordings, and books about abstract concepts like feelings or difficult subjects like death. You will never look at the Kid Lit section the same again after this book.
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Johnson is an author, attorney, and disability rights activist. Due to a congenital neuromuscular disease, she’s always needed assistance with her daily care and uses a motorized wheelchair. Her life defies assumptions about disability. Her memoir details her pursuit of a law career and her activism and also includes profound meditations on death and pleasure.
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This is a retelling of Arabian Nights, set in a world almost-ours but not-quite-ours, and it is a love letter to women's relationships with each other. Sisters, mothers, elders, friends, lovers, WOMEN. It manages to somehow be a novel, a short story collection, and a nonfiction social commentary all at once. It is funny, and sharp, and deep, and magical, and lovely, and intensely relevant in a way that is kind of hard to describe. --Brenna
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