The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster is a book in which generations of readers have journeyed with Milo to the Lands Beyond in this beloved classic. Enriched by Jules Feiffer's splendid illustrations, the wit, wisdom, and wordplay of Norton Juster's offbeat fantasy are as beguiling as ever. For Milo, everything's a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only because he's got nothing better to do. But on the other side, things seem different.

Rebecca N. Thompson, MD, MSc, is a family medicine and public health physician from Portland, Oregon, who specializes in women's and children's health. Throughout her career, she has sought opportunities to use written and spoken words to help build community and to make complex medical topics more accessible and more engaging for a wide range of audiences. Her critically acclaimed book, Held Together: A Shared Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and Imperfect Love (HarperCollins 2025), is the result of her decade-long collaboration with a remarkable group of women to share their most intimate true stories about personal relationships, professional identities, and health and healing across generations. Dr. Thompson trained at Harvard, Stanford, and Oregon Health & Science University and is always learning from her most influential teachers—her patients, colleagues, family, and friends. In her free time, she enjoys wandering through green spaces, reading in cozy nooks, playing unreasonably complicated board games, repurposing found objects, and accompanying her husband and children on all-weather adventures near and far.

Our drink this week is a Capri Sun, always a good time and a great pairing for a classic children’s book.

On Wednesday October 14th I will be MCing the Urban Librarians Unite Gala in Brooklyn NY, if you are in that area and would like to spend the night celebrating an organization that supports libraries, grab a ticket and join us! More info here: https://urbanlibrariansunite.org/romantasy-gala-2026/

What if every relationship you've ever had left behind a version of yourself? In A Life in Men by Gina Frangello, Mary's life is forever shaped by her complicated friendship with Nix, her charismatic, free-spirit best friend, and the rift that ultimately divided them forever. Both intimate and emotionally honest, this book is a powerful novel about love, identity, grief, and the people who change us forever.

As the Founder and CEO of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations, Kathleen is a well-respected voice in book publishing with in-depth experience in all aspects of the industry, including as a publicist, literary agent, acquisitions editor, and ghostwriter.

Her career encompasses 30 years of creating and directing impactful and strategic global media, marketing, and branding campaigns for politicians, A-List celebrities, athletes, and high-profile personalities.

Her fast-growing Substack newsletter, Publishing Confidential, shares her wealth of inside knowledge that she hopes will help demystify the book industry. She recently announced a book deal, expanding on her knowledge and experience in the publishing industry, it will be coming out in 2027. Married with two children, she resides in New Jersey.

In The Ogress and the Orphans, Kelly Barnhill tells the story of the struggling town of Stone-in-the-Glen, where fear and misinformation lead the townspeople to blame a kindhearted ogress for their misfortunes instead of the corrupt mayor who caused them. When a group of resourceful orphans discovers the truth, they join forces with the ogress to expose deception, restore compassion, and rebuild their fractured community. Blending fantasy with timely themes of kindness, courage, and the power of stories, the novel is a moving celebration of empathy and collective action.

Meg Medina served as the 2023-2024 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Her most recent middle-grade novel and first fantasy, Graciela in the Abyss, was a 2026 ALSC Notable Children’s Book and a CCBC Choices 2026 selection. Illustrated by Anna and Elena Balbusso, the novel was also awarded the prestigious 2026 Hamilton King Award by the Society of Illustrators. She is also the author of the Newbery Medal–winning book Merci Suárez Changes Gears, a 2018 Kirkus Prize finalist, and is followed by two more acclaimed books about the Suárez family: Merci Suárez Can’t Dance and Merci Suárez Plays It Cool. Her young adult novels include Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, which won the 2014 Pura Belpré Author Award, and was published in 2023 as a graphic novel illustrated by Mel Valentine Vargas; Burn Baby Burn, which was long-listed for the National Book Award; and The Girl Who Could Silence the Wind. She is also the author of picture books No More Señora Mimí / No más Señora Mimí, Evelyn Del Rey Is Moving Away / Evelyn del Rey se muda, illustrated by Sonia Sánchez, Jumpstart’s 2020 Read for the Record selection; Mango, Abuela, and Me, illustrated by Angela Dominguez, which was a Pura Belpré Author Award Honor Book; and Tía Isa Wants a Car, illustrated by Claudio Muñoz, which won the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award; and biographies for young readers She Persisted: Sonia Sotomayor and She Persisted: Pura Belpré, the latter with Marilisa Jiménez García. Meg Medina’s work examines how cultures intersect through the eyes of young people. She brings audiences stories that speak to both what is unique in Latino culture and qualities that are universal. The daughter of Cuban immigrants, she grew up in Queens, New York, and now lives in Richmond, Virginia.

To celebrate Meg’s Cuban roots, our drink pairing for this was a Cuba Libre:

Cuba Libre

Ingredients

• 2 oz white rum
• 4 to 6 oz cola
• 1/2 oz fresh lime juice (about half a lime)
• Ice
• Lime wedge, for garnish

Directions

1. Fill a tall glass with ice.
2. Pour in the rum and fresh lime juice.
3. Top with cola and stir gently.

• 4. Garnish with a lime wedge and serve.

Missing You, Metropolis by Gary Jackson is a poetry collection that blends superheroes, comic book mythology, pop culture, and personal memory to explore identity, race, love, grief, and belonging. Through inventive, emotionally resonant poems, Jackson reimagines iconic characters and fictional worlds as lenses for examining real-life experiences and the complexities of growing up Black in America.

Martheaus Perkins is a teacher, editor, and hot sauce enthusiast based in Washington, D.C. He is the recipient of the Robert Creeley Memorial Award, the Voices President's Award, the GMU Rinehart Fiction Award, and the Robert Raymond Scholarship. His debut poetry collection, The Grace of Black Mothers, was published by Trio House Press in 2025.

We sipped iced tea (Gold Peak), which was a drink Martheaus often enjoyed with his grandmother. This episode was recorded at Richmond Poetry Fest 2026. Special thanks to Rosa Castellano for bringing us together and helping us coordinate recording at the event!

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a satirical allegorical novel about a group of farm animals who overthrow their human owner in hopes of creating a society based on equality and freedom. As the pigs gradually take control, the animals discover that their revolution has replaced one form of oppression with another. Through its dark humor and memorable characters, the novel explores power, corruption, propaganda, and the dangers of political tyranny.

My guest this week is the amazing Katy Hearne-Church from Queens Podcast!

What do you get when you take two childhood friends with a passion for unexplored history and a whole lotta booze? Queens Podcast! Katy and Nathan share exciting stories of women in history. Katy and Nathan believe that the female perspective and roles are just as deserving of their time in the spotlight! Because history is more than the stories of dudes on a battlefield. Each queen is paired with a drink recipe that will totally get you in the mood to hear the fun, dramatic, juicy, and underrepresented stories of some seriously interesting ladies. Find them and listen wherever you find your podcasts!

Moscow Mule

Ingredients

• 2 oz vodka
• 1/2 oz fresh lime juice
• 4 oz ginger beer
• Lime wedge, for garnish
• Ice

Directions

1. Fill a copper mug or glass with ice.
2. Add vodka and lime juice.
3. Top with ginger beer.

• 4. Stir gently and garnish with a lime wedge.

Theo of Golden by Allen Levi is about an 86-year-old Portuguese widower who arrives in a small Southern town in Georgia. He spends his year there buying local pencil portraits from a coffee shop wall and gifting them back to the people they depict. Through these quiet meetings, his deep kindness and close attention change the lives of the townspeople.

MaryCatherine Price is the Digital Streaming Executive Producer at Channel 8News in Richmond, where she also hosts a behind-the-scenes podcast called The Rundown. She’s happily married to her comic-book-loving, jambalaya-making husband Alfred. She loves reading books that wreck her, drinking iced coffees and playing fetch with her sweet pup Percy.

An opening scene in the book depicts Theo raving about a local coffee-shop’s Espresso, so that’s what we sipped on. I am not a Barista but they turned out pretty well!

I wanted to mention a group for those of you in the Richmond Area might be interested, it’s called RVA Book Professionals and Students on Facebook, for networking with others who make the RVA bookish community happen.

The Burning Girls by CJ Tudor is a folk horror and mystery novel about Reverend Jack Brooks and her teenage daughter, Flo, who move to a remote English village seeking a fresh start. The village of Chapel Croft carries a dark history of past martyrdoms, missing teenagers, and the recent suicide of the previous vicar. As Jack investigates these intertwined tragedies, Flo begins seeing frightening apparitions of burning girls linked to the town's buried secrets.

Erin Palmer hosts a podcast called Did You Read The Book? Along with her friends, Erin dissects movie adaptations—from cinematic masterpieces to films that apparently treated the source material like a La Croix tastes; fruit flavors screaming in another room. She celebrates the rare times Hollywood gets it right, lovingly roasts the times it absolutely doesn't, and argues over whether cutting your favorite character was "necessary" or just a personal attack. Expect hot takes, behind-the-scenes trivia, and unapologetic opinions dripping with sarcasm. So grab your popcorn, dust off that novel you've been meaning to reread, and join Erin and her guests as they compare the book, the movie, and the creative decisions that keep therapists employed.

Smoked Rosemary Bourbon Sour Cocktail

Ingredients

• 2 ounces Bourbon
• 3 ounces lemonade
• Dash bitters
• Rosemary sprig

Directions

1. Carefully light rosemary on fire, letting burn until some of the leaves are ash. Place into a glass.
2. Combine bourbon, lemonade, and bitters in a shaker half-filled with ice and shake well.
3. Strain into glass over the smoked rosemary.

First ever Patreon-only episode is now live! Find me on Patreon.com/Drinksinthelibrary to listen to Bill’s fifth episode of the pod and hear us discuss how much we did not enjoy the drink pairing - a Dirty Shirley

Thank you for being a part of Libration Nation!

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historical narrative that chronicles the Great Migration, the decades-long exodus of nearly six million Black Americans fleeing the oppressive Jim Crow South for Northern and Western cities. Wilkerson captures the immense scale of this demographic shift through intimate, intertwined biographies of three individuals—Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster—who relocated during different eras and to different destinations. Their personal journeys of hardship, perseverance, and triumph serve as a microcosm for the millions who reshaped American culture, politics, and urban life.

My guest this week is Adriana from Bring Me Books! Adriana is the creator behind Bring Me Books, a literary platform dedicated to amplifying Black literature, nonfiction, and stories that challenge the way we think. She has built a community of more than 45,000 readers who believe that books are more than entertainment, they’re tools for liberation, critical thinking, and meaningful conversation.

As the founder of Truth Club, her signature nonfiction book recommendation series, Adriana curates thought-provoking recommendations that encourage readers to think more critically about history, culture, politics, identity, and the world around them. She has interviewed acclaimed authors and entertainers, been featured in Fox 2 News, Sirius XM Radio and partnered with major publishers and literary organizations that center Black voices, history, and culture.

Known for her signature blend of humor, honesty, and intellectual curiosity, Adriana has become a trusted voice in the book community, helping readers discover works that educate, challenge, and inspire.

Sun Tea

Ingredients

• 4–6 tea bags (black tea, green tea, or your favorite herbal tea)
• 1 gallon cold water
• Lemon slices, fresh mint, or fruit (optional, for serving)
• Ice
• Sweetener, such as sugar or honey (optional)

Directions

1. Place the tea bags in a clean 1-gallon glass jar or pitcher and fill with cold water.
2. Cover the container and set it in a sunny spot outdoors for 2–4 hours, depending on how strong you like your tea. Avoid steeping longer than 4 hours.
3. Remove the tea bags. Refrigerate the tea until thoroughly chilled.
4. Serve over ice with lemon, mint, or fresh fruit if desired. Sweeten to taste, stirring well until dissolved.

Note: Be very careful when brewing Sun Tea. For food safety, use clean equipment and refrigerate the tea promptly after brewing. Discard any tea that becomes cloudy, slimy, or develops an off smell.

First ever Patreon-only episode is now live! Find me on Patreon.com/Drinksinthelibrary to listen to Bill’s fifth episode of the pod and hear us discuss how much we did not enjoy this week’s drink - a Dirty Shirley!

Thank you for being a part of Libration Nation!