Dad Suggests Books Opens a New Location in East Fayetteville
On June 21st, 2025, Dad Suggests Books quietly opened the doors of our new flagship location in east Fayetteville. In just 6 short weeks, the response from the community has been wonderful and encouraging and so much more enthusiastic than we could have dreamed. Many kind and supportive locals laughed in the face of our attempt to do a very quiet and slow soft opening, and we could not be more thankful.
In case you didn’t know, we’ve had a very small store in the far back right corner of The Shops at BrickCity for about 3 years. (As an aside, it will be closing at the end of August this year, and there is currently a big moving sale going on!) It was the perfect scenario for testing the waters and seeing if people enjoyed the types of kids books and family games that we like. We learned a lot with the small store, built a lot of important relationships in the book business, and figured out the ins and outs of placing orders and all that jazz. All we really needed was a bigger place to connect with our customers and give them room to relax and read with their kids! And now it’s here!
The most exciting thing about the new store is our quiet reading room - which is inspired by Bilbo’s house in The Shire. When you go through the round green door you’ll discover many cozy nooks designed for reading with your kids. And the room is full of reading room books that aren’t for sale - they’re just there to read so you don’t have to worry about messing them up or anything like that. Our hope is that the comfortable and unique atmosphere will help build memories and a positive association with books.
One of the most common questions we have been asked when we are asked for blurbs for news stories about the new shop is what do you want people to know about the shop? And I think the answer is definitely the potential and the intention of the reading room. It’s a cozy and magical environment full of comfortable nooks and books that are there for reading together with your kids. Nothing has brought us more joy in the first 6 weeks than seeing parents or grandparents cozy up with their kids and read together for an hour.
We worked on our design of the store with Aubrey Pate of Smart Interiors, and we definitely couldn’t have done it without her. We’re really proud about the attention to detail - from the Narnia-inspired wallpaper in the bathroom to the magical forest critter lights (are they called sconces?) in all of the nooks and window seats. There’s simply no way I could have conveyed our vision for the store to our contractor C.R. Crawford the way Aubrey did. And Christian from C.R. Crawford went above and beyond to help us in many ways that I’m sure aren’t part of his job description.
And special shout outs to Joe from Chord Construction for his passion on the woodwork, including the round door, and the whole team at Botanic Plant Co for making the home look like it’s built into a hill using real dried grass. And it was Olivia Trimble from Sleet City that painted our sign and the bookstack mural on the building! It took an entire team to put together our store, and we are very thankful to everyone.
Inside Dad Suggests Books you’ll find that our picture book section is the largest section of books. I think the picture book will always be my favorite format, as you can tell from all of our book recommendations on this website, and I’m always very excited to highlight the incredible works of art in that section. Chapter books and graphic novels - both early readers and middle grade - make up the next largest section. And Teen/Young Adult is our smallest section - though admittedly that section also devotes quite a bit of space to every edition of The Lord of the Rings that I could find.
We also adopted two sweet cats to make Dad Suggests Books their home. Pokko is 11 years old and Ponyo is 6 years old. We experimented with bringing any of our 7 cats from our home during the day, but they were NOT fans of traveling like that. So we adopted these two precious ladies to be the queens of their own domain in the store. We have plans for building them more secret hiding places and high places they can climb to, because so far they are not huge fans of when the store is super busy.
Another piece of our store that has proven very popular is the giant Totoro that my wife, Jessica, crocheted. Crocheted looks like a very strange word, doesn’t it? It took her more than a year to complete, admittedly with a few months break somewhere in there, and kids very much like to hug him. It’s very cute to see kids come in and make a beeline either straight to the big, round, green door or to Totoro.
We still plan to do an actual Grand Opening sometime soon - likely in September - complete with things like giveaways and a ribbon cutting - so make sure to keep an eye out on Instagram where we are most active. For any of you that are local to Northwest Arkansas that are reading this, thanks a ton for your support with the store. It’s a real dream and we’re just so happy families seem to be enjoying it. If kids are associating reading with a positive experience in our shop, then we couldn’t ask for more.
And for those of you from all over the U.S. and all over the world who have followed along on my website sometime between 2018 and now - thank you for your support as well. Thanks for engaging with me about our favorite books and my random dad thoughts. We never would have opened a curated kids bookstore if some of you out there didn’t make me feel like my book suggestions were being helpful in some way.
And perhaps the very best part of having a larger bookstore is all the space we’ll have to celebrate and display the winners of the Dad Suggests Picture Book Awards this year. I’m telling you folks, we are making this a thing. We are this close to getting publishers to put that Dad Suggests Picture Book Awards sticker on the winners. This close!
