If you haven’t read The Good Lord Bird by Mixed Remixed Festival favorite James McBride, get it now in paperback. The National Book Award winning book is the kind of story we like to celebrate at the Mixed Remixed Festival. This is how the National Book Award folks describe it: “James McBride’s novel takes a pivotal, troubled sequence in American history—John Brown’s abolitionist campaign—and retells it in a voice as comic and original as any we have heard since Mark Twain. The narrator is one Henry Shackleford, aka Onion, an escaped teenaged slave who accompanies Brown while disguised as a girl. Fondly portraying Brown as a well-meaning but unhinged zealot, The Good Lord Bird is daringly irreverent, but also wise, funny, and affecting.”  I just call it darn good.-Heidi Durrow