Here in New Zealand, Thanksgiving doesn't exist. There are no turkeys on supermarket shelves in November, no Black Friday frenzy (well, mostly), and absolutely no cultural pressure to go around a table listing the things you're grateful for. The Fourth of July is just a Wednesday, or whatever day it lands on, and Memorial Day passes without so much as a barbecue in sight. I've always watched American holidays from the outside, the way you watch a parade through a rainy window  aware of the noise and colour, but not quite part of it. That changed when I went down the Ancestry.com rabbit hole. It started innocently enough, the way all great reading adventures do. One link led to another, one census record to a ship manifest, one name to a date that made my jaw drop. Because there, nestled in my family tree like a well-worn bookmark, was a name I recognised from every American history textbook I'd ever read as a book nerd obsessed with the colonial era: Edward Doty. Th...

Here's a thought that keeps me up at night and trust me, it takes a lot to keep a book devourer like me from her beloved reading time. Somewhere out there, a group of people decided that you shouldn't be allowed to read certain books. That someone, somewhere, sat down and said: "No. That story is too dangerous. That idea is too powerful. That truth is too uncomfortable." And honestly? That's exactly why you need to read them. Banned books aren't banned because they're bad. They're banned because they're brilliant. They ask hard questions. They hold up mirrors we'd rather not look into. They give voices to people who have been told, repeatedly, to stay quiet. And the moment someone tries to take a book off a shelf, it becomes the most important book in the room. The American Library Association reported that in 2025 alone, over 5,600 books were banned from libraries across the United States,  the highest number ever recorded since tracking be...

Review: Books and Bad Dates - Book #1 The Weaversbrook Series - Carmen Whitmore - March 2025 If you’re anything like me, sometimes you just need a cutesy, feel-good romance to scratch that reading itch and that’s exactly how I stumbled across Books and Bad Dates by Carmen Whitmore. Sitting on my shelf as a lovely birthday gift from Bookstagram , it practically called my name with that hot pink cover and honestly, I’m so glad I listened. Books and Bad Dates introduces us to Daisy, a small-town librarian who is as lovable as she is relatable. Like many of us, Daisy has endured her fair share of awkward, cringe-worthy, and downright terrible dates. But instead of letting those experiences fade into embarrassment, she’s done something rather magical with them ,she’s rewritten them. Under the secret pen name Rose Winters , Daisy transforms her dating disasters into swoon-worthy romance stories, giving herself the happy endings she never quite got in real life. Isn’t that just the dream?...