One Two Three
Laurie Frankel

The best book I’ve consumed this year has been One Two Three.

I listened to it on libro.fm which is an excellent way to experience it.

Jen and author Laurie Frankel at a recent book event

Over the past couple years, I’ve taken to reading/following/paying attention to British writer (now Texas resident) Edward Carey. During the pandemic lockdown, Carey did one drawing per day and posted it on Twitter. For a taste of these, see this website. You’ll see he includes illustrations of both a personal nature (ie: the cat that came to live with the family) and national news (George Floyd.)

Little 
Edward Carey

In addition to being an illustrator, Carey is a terrific storyteller, which I learned reading his book Little,  an historical novel based on the life of Madame Tussaud (with illustrations!)

Swallowed Man
Edward Carey

Recently I read Carey’s The Swallowed Man. In this tale, Geppetto, the father/creator of Pinnochio has an argument with Pinnochio and Pinnochio runs away. Hearing a rumor that Pinnochio has taken to the sea, Geppetto desperately follows, but instead of chasing his son on a boat is swallowed by a giant fish. Following that, Geppetto is trapped in the belly of the fish with his thoughts and regrets. The story is quirky and heartfelt. This is not the Disney-version of Pinnochio nor the Bible’s tale of spitting Jonah up after he’s been sufficiently punished. I experienced this book by alternating between the print book (the illustrations!) and the audio book which is narrated by Carey (that voice!)

The Silence That Binds Us
Joanna Ho.

Another fantastic audio book I recently listened to was The Silence That Binds Us.

This young adult novel explores themes of racism, suicide, and family. Maybelline Chen has a close friendship with her older brother Danny. In addition, this brother-sister team has formed best-friendships with another brother-sister. When Danny dies by suicide (the seventh student suicide over the course of just a few years), some parents blame it on the Asian parents in the community, including Maybelline’s parents. Parts of this book are heart-wrenching to experience and yet all too believable. The Sister Wolf Book Group has selected this one as one of their summer reads and I’m looking forward to the discussion! I’m also hoping my 20-year-old daughter Megan will read it as well so we can talk about it!

Anxious People
Fredrik Bachman

Before last month, I may have been the last person in the world not to have read a book by Fredrik Bachman. After being charmed by him in a zoom session sponsored by Simon and Schuster, I corrected that deficiency by listening to Anxious People on Libro.fm.

The story centers around an attempted bank robbery by an inept robber (the bank was cashless) who ran out of the bank and inadvertently took hostage the people at an open house in an apartment building across the street from the bank. Initially I was confused because the book was so funny—how could it be with such a serious topic? Perhaps it was just the sardonic tone of the reader? I stopped listening to the book to read a few reviews and learned that it is indeed a humorous book. It is also poignant, telling the back stories of each of the characters—would-be bank robber, hostages, police officers, with great humanity and generosity of spirit.

Now I understand why readers rave about Bachman and his books! Which would you recommend that I read next?

Calling for a Blanket Dance
Oscar Hokeah

I lived in Oklahoma for 15 years, and I think I was in every community mentioned in Calling for a Blanket Dance, Oscar Hokeah’s powerful debut novel. And yet, the world of the book was completely different from the world in which I, a non-native person, lived. Reading the book led me into communities and ways of being which were completely new to me.

The book is made up of linked stories which together tell the story of Ever Geimausaddle. On his mother’s side he is Cherokee and Kiowa, and on his father’s side Mexican. Ever and the many people who make up both his family and his community experience discrimination, disappointment, poverty, and alcoholism. They also experience the strength of being part of an extended family and a community, the power of music and dance, and a rich cultural heritage.

Ever and other characters in the book experience tragedies, unrealized opportunities, and homelessness. Yet there is also hope, healing, and the strength of family in their lives. The quilts made by Ever’s grandmother, Lena, appear in several places in the book. In many ways, the book is like a quilt, with separate stories, like quilt blocks, creating a thing of great beauty which is greater than the sum of its parts.

Calling for a Blanket Dance will take you into the world of its characters, and you will return having been profoundly moved, and perhaps bring a piece of that world with you.

This book is shelved on our Indies Intro display, a collection of debut works judged by independent booksellers to be particularly excellent.

Fox Creek
William Kent Krueger

How does the author of a long-running series keep each new book fresh without merely telling the same story over and over? Obviously, some authors don’t, but William Kent Krueger manages it beautifully. His devoted fans wait eagerly for each new installment in the Cork O’Connor series.

And how does he do it? The setting is almost always the same, Tamarack County in northern Minnesota. While the core group of characters is the same in many of the books, they grow, develop, and change across the series. There’s a deep humanity in Krueger’s treatment of these characters, which makes them come alive to readers.

Cork O’Connor, part Irish, part Ojibwe, was, like his father before him, the sheriff of Aurora. Now he runs a diner and investigates crimes on the side, often working closely with his successor as sheriff. O’Connor is, at heart, a decent man with all too human flaws.

Fox Creek is the 19th book in the Cork O’Connor Series. This installment focuses on Henry Meloux, the aged Ojibwe healer. Both he and Cork’s son have had a vision of his death, and Meloux is not certain if this is imminent or in the future. However, he is a person at home with himself and his future, whatever it might be. His wish is to prepare peacefully for whatever comes.

However, the incidents which unfold are not peaceful. A stranger, a woman named Dolores Morriseau, comes to Meloux’s remote home, seeking advice. His great niece Rainy, who is married to Cork O’Connor, is also present. Very quickly, danger appears in the form of men hunting Dolores, for reasons which are only gradually revealed.

Henry leads both women into the Boundary Waters. With his deep knowledge of the area and of human nature, his hope is to keep them safe.

Meanwhile, Cork frantically works to discover who is pursing them and why. He begins to track both groups in the Boundary Waters, hampered by a late season snowstorm.

The book is masterfully plotted, and suspenseful to the end. The only problem with it? Waiting a whole year for number 20 in the series.

Note: the book will be released August 23. We are currently taking pre-orders.

When Women were Dragons
Kelly Barnhill

I was reading this book when Roe V Wade was overturned and found it to be a powerful commentary on that decision.

The narrator of the book is Alex. She tells the story near the end of her long life, concentrating on events when she was growing up in the 1950s and 60s. I also grew up in that era, and think that Barnhill did an excellent job portraying a time when the ideal woman was a wife and mother content to be a homemaker, children were expected to accept their parents’ decrees without understanding them, and talking about homosexuality was taboo. In 1955, a mass dragooning occurred. Thousands of women, including Alex’s Aunt Marla, turned into dragons on the same day. Many of them torched the homes and the husbands they left behind. The government attempted to keep this a secret and silenced the work of scientists who attempted to study dragoning in a manner similar to the McCarthyism of the same period.

Alex’s mother raises Beatrice, the child Marla left behind when she dragooned. When the mother dies of cancer, care of Beatrice falls on Alex. Her father quickly remarries and sets the girls up in an apartment. Against his wishes, Alex focuses on her studies and prepares for college and a career in mathematics. Her mother was a brilliant mathematician whose dreams of a career in that field were stifled by her husband.

The story is complex and has much to say to our present moment. The metaphor of dragons is a powerful one. Read this book and discuss it with other women!

The Wolf Den
Elodie Harper

If you loved Circe, you should be taken with The Wolf Den. The protagonist Amara was born free and comfortable, but her doctor father died and her then impoverished mother was forced to sell Amara into slavery. She has ended up in a brothel in Pompeii, where she suffers and endures, and constantly plots to find a route to freedom. Her cruel master and her fellow whores and the other slaves in and near the brothel are not reduced to stereotypes. Each has a personality and a story, and a different relationship with Amara.

Elodie Harper is a journalist as well as an award-winning writer of short stories. She studied Latin at Oxford, and her research included “trapsing round Pompeii.” Each chapter starts with a quotation from Roman poetry or plays… or graffiti from the walls of Pompeii.

The Wolf Den

Big Sky by
Kate Atkinson

I want to rush out and get Atkinson’s previous Jackson Brodie novels! Well, it was fun not knowing that he’s the protagonist in the beginning. Each chapter early in the book is from the viewpoint of a different character, and Brodie was so busy worrying about the sulkiness of his teenage son that it barely registered that he was following a canoodling couple. There are so many, varied characters introduced that it’s very hard to imagine how they will be pulled together into one plot. And some of the loose threads in the end are amusingly resolved.

This is a very enjoyable book that I highly recommend, but one of the blurbs on the cover has me stumped. Washington Post says, “It’s Raymond Chandler meets Jane Austen.” This modern novel is about trafficking sex workers (not a spoiler as you see it in the first chapter) and gruesome murders. I can’t for the life of me see any relationship to Jane Austen. Maybe you will! Consider this a challenge.

The Go-Between
L.P. Hartley

This book reminds me very much of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (which was made into a monumental miniseries.) In both books a wealthy aristocrat befriends a schoolmate and brings him home, into his family’s complex life. And in both books the befriended man looks back at his experiences with the family and sees how they have changed his life, with tragic outcomes. The tone of the two books is remarkably similar.

In The Go-Between the schoolmate, Leo, is only 12 years old and sees himself as a “little boy.” He is bright and imaginative but quite naïve about what is happening with the grown-ups in the house. He gets involved in a matter that he is ill-equipped to handle. It’s all very British and it brings 1900 to life: the promise of a shiny new century that crumbled only a few years later.

Cathedral
Ben Hopkins  

I'm obsessed with history, and its natural offshoot, historical fiction. Excellent examples of historical fiction are books by Ken Follett and Robert Graves. Ben Hopkins’ Cathedral is also a perfect fit with this genre of writing. Hopkins is a screenwriter and a filmmaker, and his writing has the cinematic quality of tightly focusing on the intimate and personal, and then zooming out, to the broad perspectives of economic, social and political influences. He tells the stories of people living in the mid-sized German trading town of Hagenburg, on the Rhine River from 1229–1351 AD. Christians and Jews, rich and poor, and we experience with them the events that changed their lives over the course of a little more than a century, in an area of Europe, less well explored in writing, than the larger cities in less fractious regions. I'm thinking of Paris, London, and Vienna. Remember, it was in one of these mid-sized smaller towns, Wittenburg on the Elbe River, that in 1517 the Reformation began.

The Hummingbird
Sandro Veronesi

This was my first encounter with the Italian writer Sandro Veronesi, two-time winner of the Primio Strego writing award. I feel it's important that we, as readers, pay special attention to contemporary writers working in languages other than English... that is when we're lucky enough to encounter them in translation. Some psychologists assert that language provides a template or framework for the way we think. Different languages may then grant us differing perspectives. I've noticed an openness to magic and spiritual mysticism in Spanish speaking writers; not always but often. Does this seem so to you too? So, it's interesting to read someone working in Italian. Family, relationships, and personal loss, while not uniquely Italian themes certainly, seem to be handled with a mature polish of self-reflective candor. Oh, they're bumpy and messy. They always are, but is this an Italian cultural trait, or is it Varonesi's particular skill as a writer? Or perhaps something of both? I'll have to read more. Your thoughts?