The Land of Lost Things
John Connolly

This book might as well be named Reader Lost to World because once a reader starts in on this tale, nothing else (hunger, thirst, sleep, work) will be able to drag the reader out of the tale. Ceres, a 32-year-old single mother is devastated by an accident that has left her 8-year-old daughter Phoebe in a coma. Ceres spends nearly all of her time with Phoebe, reading fairy tales to her. The resources of a 32-year-old single mother whose occupation is that of copywriter/editor are limited and so Ceres is forced to leave their London home, retreat to her childhood cottage and place Phoebe in the nearby Lantern House facility (akin to a Shriners Hospital). Once settled, Ceres ventures into, by mistake, Elsewhere—the Land of Lost Things. It doesn't take her long to realize where she is since she has just recently read The Land of Lost Things. Despite her desperation to get back to Phoebe, Ceres is forced to journey through Elsewhere, with the twist that her entrance to Elsewhere has transformed her body back to its 16-year-old self. This is a fairy tale, and within it are many fairy tales. While the story contains all the magical elements a reader could hope for in a fairy tale land, the author's wit and humor are, at times, laugh out loud funny—I was hardly able to read aloud, to my husband, the chapter of witches at an AA type meeting seeking to abandon wickedness, because I was laughing so hard. This book is the sequel to John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things, however this book stands alone. DO. NOT. MISS. THIS. GEM!!

Note: This book will be released September 19.

Meredith, Alone
Claire Alexander

One of our publishing sales reps has been gushing over this book so I thought I'd give it a go and I'm glad I did! I opted to listen to this book on libro.fm and the reader is quite good. Meredith has not left her house in over 1200 days. She is single and does not have children, but she does have her cat Fred, so she's not completely alone. She also receives regular visits from her friend Sadie and Sadie's two young children. Meredith is able to work from home and since deciding not to leave the house, has discovered she can have everything she wants or needs delivered to her. The pacing of the narrative feels like the slow burn of a Paula Hawkins mystery, but there are no dead bodies (so far) in Meredith, Alone. I have a feeling this book would be rich for a book group to discuss with issues of family, loneliness vs. aloneness, friendship, and grief.

This Time Tomorrow
Emma Straub

Alice is about to turn 40, and she’s more or less content with her life. Her job is okay, although when she graduated from college with an art degree, she hadn’t expected to work at her old prep school as an admissions counselor. Her boyfriend is okay, too, although he’s not the ONE. She still is close to her best friend from high school. The only thing that’s not going well is that her father, who raised her after her mother abandoned them, is dying. The night of her fortieth birthday, Alice has too much to drink. When she awakens the next morning, it’s unaccountably 1996 and she’s sixteen again. Time travel isn’t as strange to Alice as it might be to someone else (say the reader of the book) because her father is the author of an enormously popular cult novel dealing with time travel. Nonetheless, she has many questions and tries frantically to learn how to return to her life. Time travel isn’t really the theme of the book. It’s a tool to explore mortality, the inexorable march of time, and how small choices can change the direction of one’s life. Too heavy? Oh, no, the book is entertaining, funny, with a surprisingly sweet charm. It enriched my reading that Straub was dealing with the illness and death of her father, Peter Straub, while writing the book.

I’ve been having trouble with my glasses lately, and was grateful to be able to listen to the book on Libro.fm

Read Ann’s review in Youth Yak.

Never Trust a Sneaky Pony and Other Things They Didn’t Teach Me in Vet School 
Madison Seamans

Solid advice if I ever heard it. Anyone who has spent much time around equines and other livestock will appreciate and possibly identify with the stories in this book. Dr. Seamans has a great capacity for relating fairly complicated health problems and treatment situations with humor and recognition of the inexplicable force that is often part of the cure and as he states in the preface, he finds it easier to learn when there is a story attached. The reader will likely recognize many of the characters, both equine and human, that populate his book.

Not surprisingly, adventures and mishaps while trailering horses are a common topic. For example, the “horse haulers” Oscar and Bill, who answered an ad for “Truck Driver Needed, no experience necessary” and their troubles failing to understand that a horse laying down in a trailer was not “napping.” Another story in the trailering genre is the unexpected success of trailering as a treatment for colic.

One of Seamans’ diagnostic skills centers on observation, “It’s not what you don’t know, it’s what you don’t look for.” Knowledge exemplified in one case, when he and his trailered patient, met at a “wide spot in the road” way back in the hills. After inspection of an extremely sore hoof, by flashlight and headlights, followed by vigorous use of a vice-grips, what appeared to be a nail point sticking out, turned out to be a piece of manzanita- a very hard, unyielding wood. So, the concerns about pulling a nail head out through the top of the hoof turned out to be unfounded. “This illustrates the lesson that it is seldom okay to diagnose stuff over the phone.”

I really enjoyed this book and recommend it to horse lovers in general, and those who take care of them in particular.

The Last Cuentista
Donna Barba Higuera

We meet main character Petra as she is in the midst of escaping a catastrophic event about to occur on Earth. She and her family are some of the very few lucky ones chosen for their knowledge and specialties to board a spacecraft bound for a promising new planet that is several hundred years away. Petra is enthralled with storytelling, and she wants nothing more than to become as adept at weaving stories as her abuelita, although her scientist parents want a different future for her. Petra is promised that while she is in a preserved state on the ship, she will learn about subjects from ecology to literature so that she is prepared to help start a civilization on this new planet. Upon awakening, Petra is horrified to discover that she is the only one who remembers life on Earth. Members of the ship created an organization called the Collective which is bent on destroying everything from their previous life on Earth in an attempt to create a perfect and uniform society that is free from discord, but also lacking in any diversity or distinction between people and their thoughts. Petra must hide her knowledge of the past while using stories to undermine the Collective and convince the other children to help her take them down. This is a beautiful book about the power of oral history and family that both younger readers and adults would enjoy.

Galatea
Madeline Miller

A short story by the author of some of my absolute favorite Greek mythology retellings? Sign me up! This story tells the heartbreaking story of Galatea, who is effectively imprisoned in a facility by the domineering husband who created her out of marble. Blessed with life and great beauty, Galatea should be living a charmed existence but is instead bound and helpless to the man who helped bring her to life. That is, until the threat to her daughter's safety spurs her to action. This story may be short, but it is no less impactful than Miller’s longer novels and it is written with just as much artistry and care.

Note: Audio versions of this book will be available September 5.

The Barrens
Kurt and Ellie Johnson

Couple Holly and Lee set out on a week’s long trip to canoe the Thelon River in subarctic Canada, thinking it will be the ultimate test of their relationship, either driving them apart or becoming a bonding experience. Underprepared and miles from civilization, disaster strikes when Holly takes too big a risk and falls, leaving her seriously injured. Holly had traveled this route previously as a teenager, but Lee is a complete novice who is now forced to make most of the trip while transporting Holly’s comatose body on her own. We follow Lee as she deals with the emotional and physical toll of this trip while reliving her difficult childhood through the stories she tells Holly in an attempt to rouse her. This debut recently won a Minnesota Book Award which is well deserved for this novel's riveting plot and emotional depth.

Note: The copies of this book in the store are autographed.

The Book Eaters
Sunyi Dean

These aren’t just people who are such big readers that they “devour” books. These are humanoids with special teeth they flip down so that they can bite through books, bindings and all. Books are their food source, and when they have eaten a book they retain the contents. They’ve been among us for many years, but are secretive. There are five families of them in Britain, I don’t know how many are in America.

There’s a bit of Handmaid’s Tale here. Only a few females are born in each generation, so they are temporarily “married” to different mates as required to avoid inbreeding, and don’t get to stay with their children. To keep them docile, they are fed only fairy tale books about helpless princesses. But our heroine has somehow broken away. The novel opens with her and her son, fugitives in a city, hiding from… well, you need to read the book to find out why they’re on the run. Unless, of course, you’re a book eater and can just learn by eating a copy.

Cloud Cuckoo Land
Anthony Doerr

Doerr says that this book is “intended as a paean to books” and it certainly is. The novel ricochets among historical fictions depicting both sides in the siege of Constantinople, a contemporary and timely story including the lives of the characters that brought them to a dramatic stand-off. And then it pivots to science fiction and Greek mythology. An endangered book is the thread gradually bringing the threads together. It’s the tale of Aethon, who dares to seek utopia, the “cloud cuckoo land.” All of the stories deal with people struggling to find better places, overcoming terrible obstacles that often involve risking their humanity. It’s about perseverance, vulnerability, and figuring out what utopia actually is. 

Our Missing Hearts
Celeste Ng

There was a financial crisis across America that led to great hardship. China was scapegoated. Most white Americans clumped all Asians together and anti-Asian violence grew. A law was passed that, among other constraints on freedom, led to thousands of children being torn from their families.

My favorite parts of this beautifully written dystopian novel are from the point of view of a 12-year-old boy whose mother had left him. His father is desperately trying to keep him safe in their reduced circumstances: he had been a linguistic professor and now he shelves books in the library. Every decision made is an effort to keep the boy from attracting attention.

Libraries play a major role in the struggle. The shelves are stripped of any book with Asian or other “dangerous” content, but librarians are natural researchers. Guerilla art is also important. As is the boy’s poet mother.

Note: This book came out in paperback at the end of last month and is available in the store.

The Serpent Coiled in Naples
Marius Kociejowski

New York Times Best Book 2022

I've hesitated a good deal about how to present this book to readers of this month's newsletter. It's an unusual book, and I've never encountered such a writer as Marius Kociejowski. He's a poet, essayist, and travel writer, and writes in all of these genres simultaneously as he turns his attention to the city of Naples, Italy. Taking "views of the city.” not as if for postcards... static and seemingly changeless, but as a vagabond meandering through time (history) and place, with the sensual aesthetic achieved only by the sympathetic savvy, of a long-time resident. His "views" are of: street artists and performers, food culture, religion, politics and geography, all presented through the spectrum of history, and colored by his skill as a writer. Be warned! This book is NOT Naples, presented as one of a "5 Italian cities, in 5 days" tour. However, if your fancy is for a Virgilian-like guide to the meaning of sun-kissed Naples (Remember: near mythical Vesuvius, looms large over the city's skyline) this book is a treat.

Note: the hardcover of this book is available now; the paperback will be available in November.

Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel

Winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2009

Told from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, one of the most artful and influential politicians in English History. "Blah—blah—blah,” you're saying as you read this. And yes, there are maybe dozens of books recounting the bald historical events and listing the participants in them. But it's a rare writer who has you share viscerally the fateful despair Wolsey felt when he fell from power, or the prideful helplessness of Anne Boleyn, who came so far, achieved so much, and yet was unable to bear a son for Henry. These are just two of the characters Mantel changes from paper doll figures into sympathetic personalities that haunt us after we've turned out the bedside lamp. Who most haunts my thoughts? Katherine of Aragon, loyal, dignified, dutiful, no schemer..... yet betrayed at nearly every turn.

Amy Thielen has a new cookbook, Company! As you might guess from the title, this is a cookbook aimed at hosting dinner parties. In the introduction, Amy says "I think of this as my (so-called) entertaining book." While I haven't had a chance to cook any of the recipes yet, I'm looking forward to tasting the samples that will be prepared by caterers at our launch party on September 2. Make sure you check out the section in the back called "A Well-Battered Batterie de Cuisine: Tools and Equipment" which explains some of the better culinary tools (especially the section about commercial plastic wrap with which I agree 100%!), which a lot of cookbooks don't. For those who haven't done an Argentinian style asado before (included on pages 284-301), it's a fun and entertaining way to cook!