What I Read: March 2025

Spring in real life and in my reading life.

It felt like winter would never end this year. The days are somehow so full and are marching so fast, and yet winter and it’s ennui kept its grip for too long.

It’s still not really spring here in Wisconsin. The ground is largely brown, and I have yet to see a flower. It hit 75 degrees last Friday. We pulled out the sandals and found out who needed the next size up (both kids, of course). And then we woke up to a dusting of snow on Monday. I lit a fire, we baked some oatmeal cookies, and cozied up for a brief quiet moment before the hustle of spring fully pulls us in.

I broke out of a month-long ready slump on March 23rd by finishing three books in two days thanks to a 24-hour getaway and an unputdownable rom-com. That felt like the best kind of coming-back-to-life.

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Here’s What I Read in March:

Rez Dogs {middle grade fiction / audiobook}

by Joseph Bruchac

The kids and I listened to this short (2 hour) book in the car, and then I saw it on the shelf at the library the very next week. Written in verse, the book is a poetic story about a 13yo girl named Malian who is visiting her grandparents on a Wabanaki reservation when the COVID-19 pandemic forces her shelter-in-place away from her parents in the city. Author Joseph Bruchac narrates it himself, and I loved listening on audio so that we heard the correct pronunciation of the place and people names. The story interweaves Malian’s present life with oral histories of her Penacook people, and it does not shy away from hard things. Malian’s mother and grandparents all were taken from their homes as children and put in schools to teach them English and erase their Indigenous cultures, and the book comments on how hard that was. The gentle narration doesn’t dwell in the past, but connects the dots to today and how the people living on the Wabanaki reservation still care for one another in the midst of a new kind of plague. Both my 7yo and 5yo enjoyed the book — as did I. We’ll definitely be checking out more of Bruchac’s work in the future.

**This is not at all related to the FX television series Reservation Dogs, so be careful when you place your library hold.

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Dragons in a Bag {middle grade fantasy / audiobook}

by Zetta Elliott

The complete opposite of the quiet story in Rez Dogs, Dragons in a Bag was exciting from page one. Jax’s mother drops him off with an old friend of hers that he’s never met when she needs to spend the day at the courthouse. Within a few pages, Jax realizes that the woman — called Ma — isn’t exactly what she seems. What follows is a thrilling story of magic and mayhem, told from the perspective of a 9yo boy living in Brooklyn, NY. The first in an urban fantasy series for late elementary/early middle grades, author Zetta Elliott writes in the afterword that she wanted to write fantasy novels where Black kids can see themselves at the center of a magical story, not confined to the margins. We’ll definitely be reading the next book in the series, and probably on audio because the narration was excellent.

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The Serviceberry: Abundance & Reciprocity in the Natural World {nonfiction}

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

After loving Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (along with just about everybody else on the planet), I bought Scott a copy of this for Christmas, and without knowing it a friend bought a copy for me, too. This book brought me out of a reading slump in March, when I work up much earlier than the rest of my family (so rare!) one day and read this in one sitting. Kimmerer writes about what we can learn from the way in which the species of the natural world coexist and further each other’s lives: the bird eats the irresistible berries, and in doing so spreads the seeds. The bird is fed, the plant is spread, and everyone has gotten what they needed. I can’t say I learned anything new or groundbreaking from this book, but it does pull together so much of what I’ve been mulling on around community care and loneliness and a lack of sustaining relationships in life. It’s a good read, and a timely one. And if you are local and want to get together to talk about, please reach out!

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The First Four Years {historical fiction / audiobook}

by Laura Ingalls Wilder

We’ve come to the end of the (original) Little House book series! Listening to these as an adult has been a different experience, and this final book was actually painful to listen through. These Happy Golden Years ended with Laura and Almanzo newly married and sitting on the front step of their home, surveying their surroundings with great hopes for the future. I think that was a more fitting ending for a children’s book series, and I can see why Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t publish this final book during her lifetime: it lacks much of the carefree retelling of stories from the earlier books, and has a thread of despair that runs throughout. I ended the book feeling heartbroken on her behalf, and feel like I may feel similarly once I read Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which is on my radar for later this year.

**Content Warning: the book discusses two difficult labors and deliveries, as well as the death of a young infant.**

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Meena Meets Her Match {middle grade fiction}

by Karla Manternach

My friend Alli and her son Boden (age 10) read this, and Boden said “We should tell Abbie about this one.” I’m getting book recs from cool kids?!? LIFE ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED. It’s like I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment.

Meena is nine and loves all things colorful. She rescues trash a.k.a. treasure from the sidewalks, crafts up a storm in her workshop, and lives life out loud. She is also having some friendship troubles. And might be a bit impulsive. And for some reason keeps doing this thing where she zones out and then doesn’t remember what’s happened in the last few minutes… until a Saturday-morning seizure lands her in the hospital to find out what’s wrong. Readers get to follow along as Meena navigates a world that feels a little too gray for her liking, and how she uncovers the color that she craves once more.

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The Power of Ritual {nonfiction}

by Casper Ter Kuile

I finally finished this one! It wasn’t bad, or hard, I just fell out of love with nonfiction for awhile — I’m going to blame it on winter. I enjoyed Beth Silver’s interview with Ter Kuile on Pantsuit Politics awhile back and was looking forward to reading this. It’s a high-level overview of how the loneliness epidemic is affecting Americans, and what people are doing to add meaning and ritual to their own lives when they can’t always rely on the places they’ve always found those in the past (churches, workplaces, small towns, etc.). The author and the book are non-religious, explicitly taking the rituals of religious spaces and helping people who might not feel at home in a church to apply some of the same practices into a secular life. Some of the book was stuff I’ve already read or heard, but I liked seeing it all laid out in one place to digest. The biggest thing I’m taking away from this one is where Ter Kuile recommends crafting a Rule of Life for yourself on how you will practice the rituals you want to stick with (his example is Sabbath). I think I might do this alongside my family, where we mull over our family values and craft some language around how we might live those out.

A related read: The Life We’re Looking For by Andy Crouch.

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The Rom-Commers {romantic comedy}

by Katherine Center

I read this in one day and was delighted from start to finish. Katherine Center remains my favorite rom-com writer these days. She has a way of crafting fun-but-flawed characters who aren’t afraid to be a bit extra on the page. The plot is always predictable enough to be exactly what you need, but unpredictable enough to keep you reading. There’s some spice, but it’s never an awkward amount. The Rom-Commers is no different. Amateur writer and rom-com enthusiast Emma gets a call from an ex who says he has a job for her: writing a screenplay with Charlie Yates. Yates is known for his sci-fi/horror/western films… but he’s written a rom-com and it needs a little, er… a lot, of work. If Emma can spend a few weeks in L.A. and help turn the script around, she gets to a) make a lot of money, which she needs, and b) write with her actual idol, Charlie Yates. But can Emma convince rom-coms are worth Yates’s time? And can Yates fall under the spell of a good rom-com without falling for Emma? Of course not, thank you very much Katherine Center.

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I finally crossed over into the Spring section of The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl, and we’ve been working through Tsh Oxenreider’s Bitter & Sweet: A Journey into Easter as a family for Lent. I started Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey a couple of days ago, and haven’t gotten very far yet, but I’m adding lots of post-it flags so I’m guessing I’ll have something to share in April’s roundup.

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What I’m Reading with the Kids:

We began reading Mary Poppins (this version is gorgeous) and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (everything at Living Book Press is 20% through April 6th, no code necessary) for school. I’m surprised by how disjointed the narrative is in Mary Poppins, and I’m delighted by how funny the story of Robin Hood is.

We also loved these two picture books, above: One Grain of Rice by Demi (a mathematical folk tale that both our history and math textbooks recommended recently), and The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco (have a tissue ready). The Master Swordsman & the Magic Door (link to ThriftBooks) contains two folktales from ancient China, and we loved the unexpected endings to both as well as the fantastic art.

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What I’m Reading Next:

I’ve got two books about the weather on my nightstand right now to prepare for a science unit, The Secret World of Weather and The Weather Detective, as well as a bunch of picture books that we’re slowly working our way through. And I just nabbed an audiobook copy of Everything is Tuberculosis, John Green’s latest book. But after that, who knows!

What are you reading right now? Hit “reply” and tell me!