Feature Stories

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Mercy is selling raffle tickets for a chance to win an American Girl doll.

The scooters are parked in their places, not cast willy-nilly for us to fall over, and the mad search for one pink tennis shoe (and under-our-breath cuss words over car seats) has ceased.

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Here’s a bit of trivia — did you know Missouri is sometimes referred to as “the cave state”?

Hear, Bee! Hear, Bee! Even you, Chris, if you could get your nose out of that epic doorstopper of a new novel, “The Son,” by Philipp Meyer.

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World War I had been over for nearly 20 years when local veterans came together to organize a VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) post in Washington. Established on April 8, 1938, there were 28 men who signed the charter.

Kent Wascom’s debut novel “The Blood of Heaven” reads like the slow burn of a Bourbon swallow. The novel crawls the banks of the muddy Mississippi during the early 19th century with a young boy, Angel Woolsack. Wascom tells his tale in a Huckleberry-like fashion, with a slow-drawn language that may not sit well with all readers. Those who have acquired the taste of works like Twain will savor the calescent syntax. The language is that of a young man’s sermon, of a naïve revolutionary, and of the South’s odyssey into statehood under the presidency of founding father Thomas Jefferson. Yet, our aged Angel, reflecting as narrator, assures us in the prologue, “we will never be the shining city on the hill.”