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Weekly Words about BooksJUNE 16, 2013
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New Arrivals from Two Favorites
| Jeannette Walls' 2005 memoir, The Glass Castle, has sold more than 2.5 million copies and has been a favorite of book clubs for more than seven years. Her honest, funny, and ultimately life-affirming account of surviving a willfully impoverished, eccentric, and severely misguided family captured readers' hearts and will soon be made into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence. Her second book, Half-Broke Horses, a novelization of her grandmother's life, didn't garner the same excitement but was well-received nevertheless.
Now Wells has written The Silver Star, a full-scale novel - albeit with  familiar themes drawn from her life - about two girls abandoned by their mother who find trouble when they make their way to a small Virginia town.
The story begins in 1970 in a small town in California where 12-year-old "Bean" Holladay lives with her sister Liz, who is fifteen. When their mother takes off to find herself, the girls decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that's been in their mother's family for generations. Because money is tight, Liz and Bean start babysitting and doing office work for Jerry Maddox, foreman of the mill in town - a big man who bullies his workers, his tenants, his children, and his wife.
Bean adores her whip-smart older sister - inventor of word games, reader of Edgar Allan Poe, and nonconformist. But when school starts in the fall, it's Bean who easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz who becomes increasingly withdrawn. And then something happens to Liz...
Aspects of the girls' lives may be recognizable to readers of The Glass Castle, as Walls inserts some of her personal experience into The Silver Star, which will reward you with a spunky, endearing heroine in a life affirming coming-of-age tale.
Although Carl Hiaasen has been a bestselling author for many years, he continues to write a weekly column for the Miami Herald - the newspaper he's worked at for 43 years. He certainly doesn't need the money, but the inspiration might be another matter. Hiaasen is known for creating hysterically offbeat characters and situations, and readers often wonder how he comes up with such outlandish ideas. According to the author, he often doesn't - real-life newsmakers from the pages of the Herald fuel much of his creativity.
For Hiaasen fans like me, we're delighted that South Florida continues to breed whack jobs because it means more books from a writer of some of the most wickedly funny crime novels you'll ever read. Case in point - the recently published Bad Monkey.
Andrew  Yancy - late of the Miami Police and soon-to-be-late of the Monroe County sheriff's office - has a human arm in his freezer. There's a logical explanation for that (at least in Hiaasen's off-kilter world), but not for how and why it parted from its shadowy owner. Yancy thinks the boating-accident/shark-luncheon explanation is full of holes, and if he can prove murder, the sheriff might rescue him from his grisly Health Inspector gig (it's not called the roach patrol for nothing).
But first - this being Hiaasen country - Yancy must negotiate an obstacle course of wildly unpredictable events with a crew of even more wildly unpredictable characters, including his just-ex lover, a hot-blooded fugitive from Kansas; the twitchy widow of the frozen arm; two avariciously optimistic real-estate speculators; the Bahamian voodoo witch known as the Dragon Queen; Yancy's new true love, a kinky coroner; and the eponymous bad monkey, who earns his place as one of the author's most hilarious characters.
Hiaasen is also known as an environmental advocate for Florida, and he delights in skewering greedy developers, corrupt politicians, and the like in his books. With Bad Monkey, he continues the comeuppance in his own diabolically entertaining fashion, which adds to the overall enjoyment of another wild, wicked, and wonderful Hiaasen yarn.
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What Indie Booksellers Are Recommending
| | Here are a couple of titles from the June Indie Next, the monthly compendium of new book recommendations from independent booksellers. The first is this month's #1 pick, and I chose the second because, aside from it hitting several regional bestseller lists, I just liked the title.
The Son by Philipp Meyer
"Epic yet intimate, Meyer's The Son is the best kind of historical fiction. Vivid characters and great storytelling bring to life a distant time and place, while the themes and issues explored are co mpletely relevant to our time. The interwoven perspectives of the three generations of the McCullough family create a counterpoint as each comments on the others, their mores, and their expectations and how these change over time. This is what great literature should be: a page-turner with a serious moral purpose."
- Scott Kinberger, Books Inc., San Francisco, CA
The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by
Anton DiSclafani
"In 1930, at the height of the Great Depression, Theadora Atwell is forced to leave the only home she has ever known and the family she cherishes to attend the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls in the Blue Ridge Mountains of  North Carolina. Not only has she been banished to a world she knows nothing about, but also her life until this point has been lived mostly in seclusion with her nuclear family on a thousand-acre orange ranch in Florida, an environment that could not be more different than the one in which she finds herself. The reason for her banishment is a secret slowly revealed. This is a coming-of-age story you won't soon forget."
-Terry Gilman, Mysterious Galaxy, San Diego, CA
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WHERE TO FIND A BOOKSTORE
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Many of you already have a favorite local bookstore, but for those of you without such a relationship, this link will take you to a list of Northern California indie bookstores by region.
If you live or work elsewhere, you can click here to find the nearest indie bookstore by simply entering your postal code.
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A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME
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My name is Hut Landon. I'm a former bookstore owner who now runs the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) in San Francisco.
My goal with this newsletter is to keep readers up to date about new books hitting the shelves, share what booksellers are recommending in their stores, and pass on occasional news about the book world.
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