What are you reading?

I'm actually reading a couple of different books because I have two daughters, so I keep up with what's at their age level. I'm reading a collection of Mayan folktales by Rigoberta Menchu called "The Honey Jar." She's a Guatemalan activist. I'm reviewing a young adult novel called "The Braid." It's a novel in prose poem by Helen Frost about two sisters separated in Scotland during the Highland Clearances in the 1800s. It's so elegant and spare, and the details are so touching.

How do you discover them?

I do some book reviewing for the DOE on an informal basis, so I see what's coming out. The ones that look appropriate or interesting I bring them home and share them with my kids. But for myself I'm reading Alice Hoffman's "The Ice Queen." I think she's wonderful the way she blends magic and realism. This one is based on the fairy tale "The Snow Queen." She uses it as inspiration and takes off from there. There's some overlapping in all these.

What's the connection?

Alice Hoffman gets her inspiration from fairy tales, which overlaps with the Mayan tales of creation. All three books are strongly women-centered, and all are about how do you maintain a connection, how do you try to overcome tragedy and continue to love and keep yourself open.

You must be drawn to these because your books do something strikingly similar — delve into our past tragedies and how to find the beauty in life despite those.

Definitely. That's exactly it. How do we move forward, how do we continue to love and heal, both as individuals and as a family. What are the things we choose to carry into the future, what from the past has meaning that we want to take with us. ... I wouldn't just say this is similar to what I do, and I picked all of these with different intentions in mind, but it is funny when I look and think, both of my books have the inspiration of a folktale and then see how they build on that too. So definitely as I'm reading I see similarities and common themes. But it's also just the pleasure of reading the language.