Thanks for your support!

 

Five years ago I set out to write a blog.  It was meant to be free and easy.  Well, I seem to have run into a problem keeping it that way.  Mail chimp has not been delivering for the past six weeks--I tried deleting archives, I can not get tech support because I use a free version.  So in frustration, I am stopping a weekly post.  I have not stopped reading!! I will research and hope to return in 2023.

Thanks for your support,

Barbara

Planning next book club titles

After two years of pandemic altered schedules, it's Back to School time.  It's also back to "normal" routines.  Will your book club meet in person or via zoom?  What will we read?  There is a wealth of new paperbacks coming in September which are very discussion worthy.  Socialize in September and deride what to read the rest of your book club year.  Here are my top suggestions:  

Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel by Anthony Doerr
  Among the most celebrated and beloved novels of recent times, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a triumph of imagination and compassion, In the 15th century, an orphan named Anna lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople. She learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds what might be the last copy of a centuries-old book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the army that will lay siege to the city. His path and Anna’s will cross.
   In the present day, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno rehearses children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege.
   And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father.
   Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno, and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders whose lives are gloriously intertwined. There is much to discover, discuss and enjoy in this story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope, and a book.   

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach
   What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.
   Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and "danger tree" faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter’s Square in the early hours before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. She taste-tests rat bait, learns how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.
   Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature’s lawbreakers. When it comes to "problem" wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem—and the solution. Mary Roach has a way of educating us about the mysteries of science through her research and sense of humor.

 Songbirds: A Novel by Christy Lefteri
   Yiannis is a poacher, trapping the tiny protected songbirds that stop in Cyprus as they migrate each year from Africa to Europe, and selling them on the black market. He dreams of finding a new way of life, and of marrying Nisha, who works for Petra and her daughter Angela. Nisha is raising Angela, mothering her own child back in Sri Lanka by the screen of a phone.
   When Nisha disappears, Yiannis is convinced he is responsible, paralysed by heartbreak and fear. Petra is forced to care for her child again, and when little Angela insists that they find Nisha, she begins to see that Nisha hasn't simply run away, and that no one else will bother to look for her.
   With infinite tenderness and skill, Christy Lefteri has crafted a story about the unseen who walk among us, cleaning our homes and caring for our children—what it is to migrate in search of freedom, only to find yourself trapped. Songbirds is an exploration of loss, the strength of the human spirit and the unbreakable bonds of courage, and of love. 

 The Sentence: A Novel by Louise Erdrich
   The Sentence asks what we owe to the living, to the dead, to the reader, and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading “with murderous attention,” must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
   The Sentence begins on All Souls’ Day 2019 and ends on All Souls’ Day 2020, as Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story: a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman’s relentless errors.

 Honor by Thrity Umrigar
   Indian American journalist Smita has returned to India to cover a story, but reluctantly: long ago she and her family left the country with no intention of ever coming back. As she follows the case of Meena—a Hindu woman attacked by members of her own village and her own family for marrying a Muslim man—Smita comes face to face with a society where tradition carries more weight than one’s own heart, and a story that threatens to unearth the painful secrets of Smita’s own past. While Meena’s fate hangs in the balance, Smita tries in every way she can to right the scales. She also finds herself increasingly drawn to Mohan, an Indian man she meets while on assignment. But the dual love stories of Honor are as different as the cultures of Meena and Smita themselves: Smita realizes she has the freedom to enter into a casual affair, knowing she can decide later how much it means to her.
   In this novel about love, hope, familial devotion, betrayal, and sacrifice, Thrity Umrigar shows us two courageous women trying to navigate how to be true to their homelands and themselves at the same time.  

Her Hidden Genius: A Novel by Marie Benedict
   Rosalind Franklin knows if she just takes one more X-ray picture—one more after thousands—she can unlock the building blocks of life. Never again will she have to listen to her colleagues complain about her, especially Maurice Wilkins who'd rather conspire about genetics with James Watson and Francis Crick than work alongside her. Then it finally happens—the double helix structure of DNA reveals itself to her with perfect clarity. But what happens next, Rosalind could have never predicted.
   Marie Benedict shines a light on a woman who died to discover our very DNA, a woman whose contributions were suppressed by the men around her but whose relentless drive advanced our understanding of humankind. 

Remember these titles are coming to bookstores throughout the month of September, so pick one for your October meeting!

 My apologies for interrupted blog emails, I hope I have figured out the problem!  I was gone for a few weeks and scheduled posts for future posting.  It appears they all posted to the website but did not get emailed.  IF this is received, you can catch up on the past by going to the right hand side of this message. 

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Visit the Reading Challenge

For the past six years, Missoula Public Library has sponsored a yearly Reading Challenge. Patrons are asked to read one book in each of 50 categories, with suggestions given and links to some actual book-lists in some cases. Some of the categories this year include:

• A Book You’ve Been Meaning to Read
• Body Part in the Title
• Collaborative Authors
• Immigrant Experience
• Natural Science
• Novel by Dickens
• Orange Cover
• Poetry Collection
• Protagonist is a Doctor
• Redheads

For the complete list check here

The category I chose to highlight today is Picaresque, which the Merriam-Webster online dictionary explains that a picaresque novel “centers around a wandering individual of low standing who happens into a series of adventures among people of various higher classes, often relying on his wits and a little dishonesty to get by.” Now doesn’t that sound like fun?  Here are some of  the suggested titles: 

 

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain  

   In recent years, neither the persistent effort to “clean up” the racial epithets in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn nor its consistent use in the classroom have diminished, highlighting the novel’s wide-ranging influence and its continued importance in American society. An incomparable adventure story, it is a vignette of a turbulent, yet hopeful epoch in American history, defining the experience of a nation in voices often satirical, but always authentic. 

 

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole’s hero is one Ignatius J. Reilly, “huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, and a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original character, denizens of New Orleans’ lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures” (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun Times)

 

Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes

Don Quixote is the epic tale of the man from La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza. Their picaresque adventures in the world of seventeenth-century Spain form the basis of one of the great treasures of Western literature.  

 

 

 

 

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece of the Beat era was first published by Penguin Books in 1959 and continues to provide a vital portrait of a generation adrift, as well as inspiration for travelers, dreamers, and artists in every generation that has followed. 

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.

ANOTHER SUGGESTION:

FIND OUT WHAT IS ON THE SUMMER READING LIST OF YOUR GRANDCHILDREN

 

I recently noticed that posts may not be arriving on a regular basis, I apologize for the disruption.  If I plan to be gone, I schedule posts in advance but did not follow one step in the process last month.  So if you want to read what you missed go to the list of posts on the right-hand side of this post.

 

 

Much to look forward to in August

 Only a few more weeks to enjoy summer lake or mountain activities, complete summer household projects, and prepare for back-to-school.  Here are books coming out this month that I hope distract me from high temperatures and world affairs:  

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy : A Novel by Jamie Ford
   Dorothy Moy breaks her own heart for a living.
   As Washington’s former poet laureate, that’s how she describes channeling her dissociative episodes and mental health struggles into her art. But when her five-year-old daughter exhibits similar behavior and begins remembering things from the lives of their ancestors, Dorothy believes the past has truly come to haunt her. Fearing that her child is predestined to endure the same debilitating depression that has marked her own life, Dorothy seeks radical help.
   Through an experimental treatment designed to mitigate inherited trauma, Dorothy intimately connects with past generations of women in her family: Faye Moy, a nurse in China serving with the Flying Tigers; Zoe Moy, a student in England at a famous school with no rules; Lai King Moy, a girl quarantined in San Francisco during a plague epidemic; Greta Moy, a tech executive with a unique dating app; and Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to set foot in America.
   As painful recollections affect her present life, Dorothy discovers that trauma isn’t the only thing she’s inherited. A stranger is searching for her in each time period. A stranger who’s loved her through all of her genetic memories. Dorothy endeavors to break the cycle of pain and abandonment, to finally find peace for her daughter, and gain the love that has long been waiting, knowing she may pay the ultimate price. 

Shutter by Ramona Emerson
   Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. Her excellent photography skills have cracked many cases—she is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita has been hiding a secret: she sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues that other investigators overlook.
   As a lone portal back to the living for traumatized spirits, Rita is terrorized by nagging ghosts who won’t let her sleep and who sabotage her personal life. Her taboo and psychologically harrowing ability was what drove her away from the Navajo reservation, where she was raised by her grandmother. It has isolated her from friends and gotten her in trouble with the law.
  And now it might be what gets her killed.
   When Rita is sent to photograph the scene of a supposed suicide on a highway overpass, the furious, discombobulated ghost of the victim—who insists she was murdered—latches onto Rita, forcing her on a quest for revenge against her killers, and Rita finds herself in the crosshairs of one of Albuquerque’s most dangerous cartels. 

Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure by Rinker Buck
   Seven years ago, readers around the country fell in love with a singular American voice: Rinker Buck, whose infectious curiosity about history launched him across the West in a covered wagon pulled by mules and propelled his book about the trip, The Oregon Trail, to ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, Buck returns to chronicle his latest incredible adventure: building a wooden flatboat from the bygone era of the early 1800s and journeying down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.
   A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat Patience accompanied by an eccentric crew of daring shipmates. Over the course of his voyage, Buck steers his fragile wooden craft through narrow channels dominated by massive cargo barges, rescues his first mate gone overboard, sails blindly through fog, breaks his ribs not once but twice, and camps every night on sandbars, remote islands, and steep levees. As he charts his own journey, he also delivers a richly satisfying work of history that brings to life a lost era.  

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy
   Distilling the massive, unprecedented national health crisis down to its character-driven emotional core as only she can, Beth Macy takes us into the country’s hardest hit places to witness the devastating personal costs that one-third of America's families are now being forced to shoulder. Here we meet the ordinary people fighting for the least of us with the fewest resources, from harm reductionists risking arrest to bring lifesaving care to the homeless and addicted to the activists and bereaved families pushing to hold Purdue and the Sackler family accountable. These heroes come from all walks of life; what they have in common is an up-close and personal understanding of addiction that refuses to stigmatize—and therefore abandon—people who use drugs, as big pharma execs and many politicians are all too ready to do.
   Like the treatment innovators she profiles, Beth Macy meets the opioid crisis where it is—not where we think it should be or wish it was. Bearing witness with clear eyes, intrepid curiosity, and unfailing empathy, she brings us the crucial next installment in the story of the defining disaster of our era, one that touches every single one of us, whether directly or indirectly. A complex story of public health, big pharma, dark money, politics, race, and class that is by turns harrowing and heartening, infuriating and inspiring.  

The House of Fortune by Jessie Burton
   Amsterdam, 1705. It is Thea Brandt’s eighteenth birthday. She feels ready for adulthood, but life at home is difficult. Her father Otto and her aunt Nella argue endlessly over money, selling off furniture to try to keep the family home.
   As catastrophe threatens to engulf the household, Thea seeks refuge in Amsterdam’s playhouses. She loves the performances. But even better, in the backrooms of her favorite theater, Thea can spend a few precious minutes with her secret lover, Walter, the chief set painter. The thrill of their hidden romance offers Thea an exciting distraction. But it also puts her in mind of another secret that threatens to overwhelm the present: Thea knows her birthday marks the day her mother, Marin, died. Thea’s family refuses to share the details, and they seem terrified to speak of “the miniaturist”—a shadowy figure from their past who possesses uncanny abilities to capture that which is hidden.
   Aunt Nella believes the solution to all Thea’s problems is to find her a husband. An unexpected invitation to Amsterdam’s most exclusive ball seems like a golden opportunity. But when Thea finds a parcel containing a miniature figure of Walter, it becomes clear that someone out there has another fate in mind for the family . . .
   A feat of  magical storytelling, The House of Fortune is a novel about love and obsession, family and loyalty, and the fantastic power of secrets. This is a stand-alone companion novel to The Miniaturist that features the magic of 18th-century Amsterdam. 

 EAT.  SLEEP.  READ.

CELEBRATE THE LAZY HAZY CRAZY DAYS OF SUMMER!

End of another month

Featured July releases that helped pass the last few weeks: 

The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories by Jess Walter
   From the author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a collection about those moments when everything changes—for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous—as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places.
   We all live like we’re famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don’t want others to see. In these stories, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during “the year of my reinvention” finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams. 

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty
   Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.
   In twelve stories, author Morgan Talty—with humor, compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s projects the past onto her grandson; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs. 

Death Doesn't Forget by Ed Lin
   Jing-nan, owner of a popular night market food stall, is framed for a string of high-profile murders—why does it seem like he's always the one left holding the skewer? Taipei is rocked by the back-to-back murders of a recent lottery winner and a police captain just as the city is preparing to host the big Austronesian Cultural Festival, which has brought in indigenous performers from all around the Pacific Rim to the island nation of Taiwan. Jing-nan, the proprietor of Unknown Pleasures, a popular food stand at Taipei’s largest night market, is thrown into the intrigue. Is he being set up to take the rap, or will he be the next victim? The fallout could jeopardize Jing-nan’s relationship with his girlfriend, Nancy, who is herself soon caught up in the drama, and is increasingly annoyed at Jing-nan’s failure to propose to her.
   Jing-nan also has to be careful not to alienate his trusty workers Dwayne and Frankie the Cat, who are facing their own personal trials. Dwayne struggles to reconnect with his roots as a person of aboriginal descent, while septuagenarian Frankie helps a fellow veteran with dementia, intertwining stories that illuminate decades of Taiwanese history.
   Jing-nan, meanwhile, has to untangle the mystery of the killings while keeping his food stall afloat against hip new competition. Both his lives, and his Instagram follower count, hang in the balance.
   Seems I came late to this character, as this is the fourth of Ed Lin's Taipei mystery series. More to add to my never ending stack! 

The Elephant Girl by James Patterson, with Ellen Banda-Aaku, and Sophia Krevoy
   Clever, sensitive Jama likes elephants better than people. While her classmates gossip—especially about the new boy, Leku—twelve-year-old Jama takes refuge at the watering hole outside her village. There she befriends a baby elephant she names Mbegu, Swahili for seed.
   When Mbegu’s mother, frightened by poachers, stampedes, Jama and Mbegu are blamed for two deaths—one elephant and one human. Now Leku, whose mysterious and imposing father is head ranger at the conservancy, may be their only lifeline.
  This young adult novel was inspired by true events, The Elephant Girl is a moving exploration of the bonds between creatures and the power of belonging.  

Keya Das's Second Act by Sopan Deb
   Shantanu Das is living in the shadows of his past. In his fifties, he finds himself isolated from his traditional Bengali community after a devastating divorce from his wife, Chaitali; he hasn’t spoken to his eldest daughter Mitali in months; and most painfully, he lives each day with the regret that he didn’t accept his teenaged daughter Keya after she came out as gay. As the anniversary of Keya’s death approaches, Shantanu wakes up one morning utterly alone in his suburban New Jersey home and realizes it’s finally time to move on.
   This is when Shantanu discovers a tucked-away box in the attic that could change everything. He calls Mitali and pleads with her to come home. She does so out of pity, not realizing that her life is about to shift.
   Inside the box is an unfinished manuscript that Keya and her girlfriend were writing. It’s a surprising discovery that brings Keya to life briefly. But Neesh Desai, a new love interest for Mitali with regrets of his own, comes up with a wild idea, one that would give Keya more permanence: what if they are to stage the play? It could be an homage to Keya’s memory, and a way to make amends. But first, the Dases need to convince Pamela Moore, Keya’s girlfriend, to give her blessing. And they have to overcome ghosts from the past they haven’t met yet.
   A story of redemption and righting the wrongs of the past, Keya Das’s Second Act is a warmly drawn homage to family, creativity, and second chances. Set in the vibrant world of Bengalis in the New Jersey suburbs, this debut novel is both poignant and, at times, a surprising hilarious testament to the unexpected ways we build family and find love, old and new.

ENJOY THE LAST DAYS OF SUMMER.     

BOOKS LIKE TO TRAVEL WITH YOU!

 

James Welch Festival July 28-30

 This is the vision statement for the James Welch Festival:

There is no space in America for Native artists to talk publicly about our work with each other. This festival will be that place, open to anyone interested in this extraordinary conversation. Join us for an inaugural event celebrating the beauty of Native literature and the legacy of James Welch, one of the greatest and most original of Native writers.

Fear not there will be plenty of conversation with an amazing lineup of authors and panels featuring a who’s who of contemporary Native writers.  Read the schedule here     

Winter in the Blood by James Welch, with a forward by Joy Harjo
   During his life, James Welch came to be regarded as a master of American prose, and his first novel, Winter in the Blood, is one of his most enduring works. The narrator of this beautiful, often disquieting novel is a young Native American man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. Sensitive and self-destructive, he searches for something that will bind him to the lands of his ancestors but is haunted by personal tragedy, the dissolution of his once proud heritage, and Montana's vast emptiness. Winter in the Blood is an evocative and unforgettable work of literature that will continue to move and inspire anyone who encounters it.

Other featured titles and authors include:  

The Night Watchman: A Novel by Louise Erdrich
   Based on the extraordinary life of Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota to Washington, D.C
   Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953, and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom—it’s a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans?
   Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike other girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, to Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.   

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer
   Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative. Because they did not disappear—and not despite but rather because of their intense struggles to preserve their language, their traditions, their families, and their very existence—the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention.
   In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.   

There There by Tommy Orange
   A wondrous and shattering novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.
   Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.  

Winter Counts: A Novel by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
   Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.
   They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.
   Winter Counts is a tour-de-force of crime fiction, a bracingly honest look at a long-ignored part of American life, and a twisting, turning story that’s as deeply rendered as it is thrilling.   

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
   The Between Earth and Sky trilogy was inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas and woven into a tale of celestial prophecies, political intrigue, and forbidden magic.
   A god will return
   When the earth and sky converge
   Under the black sun
   In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial even proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.
   Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain. 

Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse
   Book two of Between Earth and Sky trilogy.
   The great city of Tova is shattered. The sun is held within the smothering grip of the Crow God’s eclipse, but a comet that marks the death of a ruler and heralds the rise of a new order is imminent.
   The Meridian: a land where magic has been codified and the worship of gods suppressed. How do you live when legends come to life, and the faith you had is rewarded?
   As sea captain Xiala is swept up in the chaos and currents of change, she finds an unexpected ally in the former Priest of Knives. For the Clan Matriarchs of Tova, tense alliances form as far-flung enemies gather and the war in the heavens is reflected upon the earth.
   And for Serapio and Naranpa, both now living avatars, who struggle for free will and personhood in the face of destiny rages. How will Serapio stay human when he is steeped in prophecy and surrounded by those who desire only his power? Is there a future for Naranpa in a transformed Tova without her total destruction?
  now is your chance to ask about Book Three! 

EXPAND YOUR READING KNOWLEDGE

CELEBRATE INDIGENOUS WRITING