St. Louis’ Jewish Book Festival usually runs for about two weeks in early November.

But this year it has planned several events with authors outside its initial calendar. Unfortunately, the first one, featuring author Michael Oren, had to be canceled.

Baring illness or bad weather, on Thursday Jan. 21, another popular author, James McBride, is scheduled to discuss his new novel, “Song Yet Sung.”

Since his novel is about a runaway slave who also has visions of the future, it may be a  bit hard to see why McBride is featured in the Jewish Book Festival. 

Festival authors usually must be Jewish themselves or writing about a Jewish topic. Well, cBride is best known for his memoir “The Color of Water,” which was a best-seller in the 1990s. It was partly the tale of his mother, who was the daughter of an Orthodox Jew, raised in the South, and how she felt more comfortable around black people. She married a black man, and after his death she remarried. She told her kids that she was “light-skinned.”