#BookReview: No welcome at the (spooky) B & B

 The Faraway Inn, by Sarah Beth Durst (Delacorte Press)

The Faraway Inn is a wonderful example of a story that is aimed at Young Adult readers but has much wider appeal. Yes, the viewpoint character, Calisa, is sixteen, but her situation and emotional growth are have universal appeal. Following an angst-ridden breakup with her boyfriend, she embarks upon a summer at her great-aunt’s B&B in rural Vermont. Instead of the idyllic summer-of-forgetting she expected, she finds a dilapidated, almost empty husk. one door after another is slammed in her face, sometimes literally and always without explanation. Auntie Zee is not only colossally grumpy and anti-welcoming but seems determined to send Calisa packing. Calisa, however, is anything but a helpless victim. She rolls up her sleeves, partners with Jack, the son of the (mysteriously absent) groundskeeper, and embarks upon a campaign of cleaning, tidying, and serving afternoon tea, complete with cake. Soon, she’s also investigating doors that lead to other worlds, when they don’t open capriciously to closets. Just as she gets a clue what is going on, the magical gates begin to fail…stranding Jack’s father in limbo.

Although this is a stand-alone unrelated to Durst’s “Spellshot” series, it shares many of the same elements: a young protagonist with agency, a complex system of magical worlds shaded with romance, danger, and longing.

[Reprint] Devastating Consequences of Dropping School Vaccine Requirements

 

Florida Department of Health considers dropping 4 school vaccine requirements – here’s what that could mean for kids

Florida’s Department of Health is considering ending the school requirement for vaccines against chickenpox. ArtistGNDphotography/E+ via Getty Images

Katrine L. Wallace, University of Illinois Chicago

The Florida Department of Health held a hearing in October 2026 on a proposal to remove four vaccine requirements for entry into school and childcare: Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, chickenpox, pneumococcal and hepatitis B.

These vaccines entered use in the U.S. at different times from the early 1980s through 2000. Prior to that, there were millions of chickenpox cases and thousands of serious bacterial infections and preventable deaths among American children each year. Vaccination has dramatically reduced the toll of these diseases.

Many parents today grew up during the transition to widespread vaccination for these diseases and may never have witnessed the severe complications these vaccines help prevent. I’m an epidemiologist who studies vaccine-preventable illnesses and health communication, and I worry that perhaps the luxury of forgetting about these diseases could end up giving rise to a generation of children who aren’t vaccinated against them.

What Florida would be choosing

School vaccination requirements help communities establish herd immunity, which is when enough people are vaccinated to prevent a disease from easily spreading. When vaccination rates fall, infections can spread among susceptible children throughout the community, placing those who are too young to be fully vaccinated, as well as those who cannot develop adequate protection due to medical conditions, at greater risk.

Florida’s proposal would not eliminate these four vaccines, nor would ending a mandate mean that every family would stop using them. However, it would weaken one of the policies designed to maintain high vaccination coverage. If fewer children are vaccinated as a result, the risks will extend beyond the families making that choice.

The consequences could be devastating.

Hib: The bacterium that can cause meningitis

Before Hib vaccines became widely used in the late 1980s, pediatricians sometimes faced a terrifying emergency: an infant with fever, lethargy and a stiff neck. Testing of cerebrospinal fluid would reveal bacterial meningitis caused by Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, an infection that could kill a child or leave lasting neurological damage.

Today, many doctors have never even seen a single case. The bacterium has not disappeared, but widespread vaccination has made serious Hib disease in young children far less common.

Before the vaccine, Hib was the leading cause of bacterial meningitis. In the early 1980s, there were 20,000 invasive Hib infections among American children under 5 years old, 12,000 of which were meningitis. Between 3% and 6% of those children died, and between 15% and 30% of the survivors were left deaf or with brain damage.

Hib infection did not manifest in dramatic outbreaks. Healthy young children carried it silently, and some, unpredictably, became seriously ill.

After the introduction of conjugate vaccines for Hib in the late 1980s, cases among young children declined by 99%. In 2023, the United States reported only 13 cases in children under 5. In 2026, that number is up to 28.

Chickenpox: The ‘harmless’ rite of passage

By the early 1990s, there were more than 4 million cases of chickenpox annually in the United States. Of those infected, 10,500 to 13,500 were hospitalized, and 100 to 150 died. More than 90% of cases and about 70% of hospitalizations occurred in children, as did roughly half of the deaths.

But even those who had manageable cases of childhood chickenpox are at risk for shingles later in life, which can lead to painful and sometimes permanent health complications.

Children are contagious before the rash appears, and each case has an incubation period of up to three weeks. A single infection could spread through a school or daycare in waves for a month or more. Since vaccination began in 1995, deaths from chickenpox in people under 20 years old have been virtually eliminated.

#BookReview: Beautiful prose isn't enough

 The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, by Shubnum Khan (Viking)

I wanted to like this book. I really did, and for the first 20% or so, I enjoyed it. The setting – a mouldering old house in Durban, South Africa – the widow and his teenaged daughter, Sana, whose way of experiencing the world is as richly lyrical as it is unusual, the other inhabitants of the house. Add to that the mystery of what happened in the house and why it’s haunted by a festering, evil djinn, and all these elements carried the opening.

Alas, it’s a high wire act to use setting and character as the forward momentum of a novel, no matter how vivid they may be in their own right. This is not to say that a novel cannot be focused on character or setting, only that the energy driving the story must arise from them, catapulting events into dramatic tension. Otherwise, the story drifts from one interesting or amusing incident to the next, dissipating engagement and curiosity about what’s going on and why.

This was my experience, although of course, other readers may have a different take on this book. It was always about to get going and then sinking back into stasis. Things that might have been charming crotchets, like the humorous friction between the house’s inhabitants, turned into irritations when it seemed that was all there was to the story. I never could figure out why Sana had such an unusual way of experiencing the world because her semi-hallucinatory state never varied. Without question, the prose is beautiful, filled with offbeat connections and unusual ways of interpreting reality.

For me, as a reader, however, “lyrically stunning” can go only so far in overcoming “lack of story tension.” The book went from always-getting-started to drifting to slog, in which I found myself looking for something else to do besides reading it.

As usual, your mileage may vary.

[Reprint] Are public executions true to American values?

 

In newly independent US, Americans debated whether public executions taught a lesson or just showed off the state’s power to destroy

A 1747 print of a public execution at the so-called Tyburn Tree, a gallows in London that served for hundreds of years as a site of hangings. William Hogarth

Maurizio Valsania, Università di Torino

The proposed livestream of Nidal Hasan’s execution by a U.S. military firing squad gives an old question a new audience. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist convicted by a military court of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3, 2026.

Explaining the plan to make his death public, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “people need to understand … there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

Whether the broadcast will proceed remains uncertain. But as a historian of the early American republic, I recognize a familiar expectation behind it: that watching someone die will teach a useful lesson. Americans at the republic’s founding debated that premise — and doubted what the lesson might be.

The power of government

On Aug. 17, 1797, New Yorkers gathered to watch John Young hang.

An English musician and music publisher struggling with debt, Young had shot and killed Robert Barwick, a deputy sheriff taking him into custody. Barwick left a widow and nine children.

Young’s conviction by a jury brought him to a scaffold surrounded by soldiers, before an immense crowd.

Governor John Jay, a leading Federalist who placed greater faith in firm government than in popular judgment, had authorized the military presence after the sheriff reported fears of a rescue. But Jay also wanted the execution to impress its witnesses with the power of the government carrying it out.

Writing to James Kent, New York City’s chief municipal legal officer, two days before the hanging, Jay stressed that the authority of law should prevail visibly. The occasion should be “particularly solemn and impressive,” he said. The “authority of the law should be seen to bear down (on) all opposition.”

Solemnity, however, proved difficult to arrange. The military escort played lively music as the procession made its way to the scaffold. One newspaper critic thought an uninformed passerby might mistake the spectacle for “the celebration of some Festival.”

Soldiers formed a square around the gallows. The crowd remained orderly. Young addressed a few words to the minister, sang a psalm “and with great composure pulled his cap over his face,” reported one newspaper. Then, before the assembled witnesses, he was hanged.

Loss of government’s dignity

Whatever the crowd’s reaction that day, the public execution had already become an argument about the nature of government.

#BookReviews: Another Gem from Charlaine Harris

 All the Dead Shall Weep, by Charlaine Harris (Saga)

I’m a long-time fan of Charlaine Harris, and she gets better all the time. All the Dead Shall Weep, the fifth installment in her “Gunnie Rose” series, is a showcase of her strengths: vivid characters, a gritty and believable post-apocalytic world with diverse cultures, and superb handling of dramatic tension and pacing. All conveyed in deceptively simple, evocative prose that captures the nuanced emotional literacy of the viewpoint characters (Lizbeth Rose and her sister, the fugitive grigori Felicia). Her portrayal of the resilience and resourcefulness of poor residents of Texoma is both stark and compassionate.

Newly weds Lizbeth and Eli, along with Felicia and Eli’s brother, Peter, take refuge in Lizbeth’s home town after fleeing the Holy Russian Empire in San Diego. Soon, they’re besieged by strange magic-wielders seeking to court Felicia because of her powerful death magic, and those with even more nefarious aims. Matters explode when armed paramilitary ride into town. Part mystery, part love story, all wrapped up in breathless, page-turner action.

The entire series is highly recommended.