Who am I?

I’ve run a small-town library in rural Southern Maine for almost ten years, and I’ve worked in libraries for almost twenty. Before that, I was a children’s bookseller for… I forget how long? I’ve been thinking about and recommending books for decades, and I’ve been a reader for my entire life.

I started writing Bookshelves of Doom around the same time that I started my library career; I wrote a column about middle grade and young adult books for Kirkus Reviews for a decade, served on the Rise Feminist Book Project from 2017-2020, and have written for various other outlets.

I love narrative in all formats—prose, poetry, song, comics, film, television, podcasts, fiction, nonfiction, and and mash-ups of any or all of them. I’m on Twitter at @bkshelvesofdoom and on Letterboxd under the same name.

I live with my husband, our two cats, the ghost of our beloved Jack Russell, and there’s a squirrel who swings by our living room window every morning for a walnut—she takes them right out of my hand.

What’s this newsletter?

Currently, this newsletter goes out about once a week, usually on a weekday. It highlights a book that I’ve just read, and usually includes something that I’ve recently watched or listened to or been up to—sometimes related, sometimes not.

At the moment, I’m very into middle grade horror and mysteries for all ages, but my interests are wide and varied and ever-changing. I occasionally do close reads of classic novels—most recently Carmilla—in which I recap the book over the course of a few weeks. But I don’t reserve that sort of thing for Classic Literature… I’ve been known to recap Christopher Pike as well.

Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Hope to talk to you soon.