Lorilee Craker

Come for the recipes and stay for the writing in this luminous collection written by Christian moms who are part of the Coffee + Crumbs online journal community. God, friendships, hospitality, and keeping each other going—whether through spice tea and conversation or an UberEats order on a horrible day—underpin this darling of a book. Or maybe it’s the other way around: Come for the writing and stay for the recipes.

A few years ago, I visited the real Little House on the Prairie outside of Independence, Kans. It was my second visit (I’m a serious fan, and also my son lives in Kansas), and I was surprised and delighted to see that this time, the gift shop was carrying books such as the Birchbark series by Indigenous author Louise Erdrich, hailed as a First Nations take on frontier life for middle-grade readers.

Theo who? Readers of this No. 1 New York Times-bestselling novel don’t find out his last name until the very end of the book, and for good reason. We just know this 86-year-old character as Theo of Golden, a fictional town in the South where he moves to quite mysteriously from his New York City home. As an avid reader and observer of what books people are talking about, I kept hearing about Theo over and over again in my bookish social media feeds.