The Sisters Brothers. By Patrick deWitt.
New York: Ecco, 2011. 328 p.

Recommendation by:
Carolyn Petersen, CLRS Project Manager, Tumwater, WA.

In The  Sisters Brothers author Patrick deWitt has produced a darkly comic tour of the Old West. Brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters are hit men who work for an enigmatic boss.  The story begins in 1850’s Oregon City when the brothers receive orders from the “Commodore” to kill a man who is working a mining claim outside of Sacramento.

As they journey to find this man, they encounter a witch, a bear, a parlor full of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers.  These encounters allow deWitt to explore the human costs of the clichés of the Old West. This revisionist and subversive western tale received much critical acclaim.

ISBN-13: 978-0062041265

Available at WSL, NW 813.6 DEWITT 2011
Available in talking book or Digital Book editions.
Not available in a Braille edition.

Title contains adult themes.

Breach of Duty: A J.P. Beaumont Mystery. By J.A. Jance. (New York: Avon Books, 1999. 384 p.)

Recommendation submitted by:
Will Stuivenga, Cooperative Projects Manager, Washington State Library, Tumwater, WA.

This is mystery writer J.A. Jance’s 14th Seattle-based J.P. Beaumont police procedural. In it, Beaumont is investigating the arson murder of a woman whose death would not have been particularly noteworthy, if $300,000 had not been found hidden in an old refrigerator in her garage.

Meanwhile, a Native American woman, who happens to be a professor of physics at the University of Washington, shows up and warns Beaumont and his partner of a powerful curse. It seems that someone has stolen the bones of an important shaman and bad things start happening to those who handle them, as predicted.

Meantime the chief of police retires, and his replacement is a co-worker of Beaumont whose dislike for him is heartily reciprocated. Oh, and did I mention that Beaumont’s current partner, Sue Danielson by name, divorced mother of two, is worried because her deadbeat ex is coming to town?

Talk about a plot with lots of complications and disparate story lines! Jance weaves all of these lines together throughout various seedy locations of the greater Seattle area. For those who enjoy well-written – if slightly superficial – police-procedural style mysteries set in Seattle, J.A. Jance and J.P. Beaumont could easily become a habit!

ISBN: 0-380-97406-1

Available at the Washington State Library, NW 813.6 JANCE 1999.
Available in eReader, Braille, Large Type and Audiobook (Cassette, Digital Book) editions

The Clear Cut Future. Edited by Clear Cut Press (Astoria, Oregon: Clear Cut Press, 2003. 528 p.)

Recommendation submitted by:
Will Stuivenga, Cooperative Projects Manager, Washington State Library, Tumwater, WA.

This is a most peculiar book, to misquote singer songwriter Paul Simon. First off, there’s its unusual size: 5 ¾ inches by 4 inches, and about an inch thick. Second, the contents. The book is a wild mélange of essays, criticism, short stories, excerpts from novels, poetry, photo essays, and the like by a variety of authors, whose only commonality appears to be that they are mostly from the Pacific Northwest, although that is never stated, and may not even be true. But many of the items contained in the book have NW settings, themes, or connections.

The quality of the various components arbitrarily concatenated here also varies wildly. The most entertaining and thought provoking include the title piece, which is a photo essay by Robert Adams, Corrina Wycoff’s short story “The Adjunct” and Pravin Jain’s essay “Capitalism Inside an Organization.” The latter provides an insightful glimpse into the workings of the Enron Corporation and some of its NW connections. “The Adjunct” describes the nightmarish existence of an instructor of first-year college writing courses who has to shuttle from campus to campus with never enough hours to complete her work, all to earn a barely subsistence-level “living.” The “Clear Cuts” photography consists of photos depicting exactly what the title says.

Also rich in NW verismo is Casey Sanchez’s “As Bad as It Comes, as Good as It Gets: Canning Salmon in Alaska,” which describes the social and economic phenomena, as well as the actual day to day rigors of traveling to the north country and working in a fish packing plant. The least readable, for me personally, were the academically absurdist writings of The Office for Soft Architecture.
If you are a fan of anything and everything NW, or if you like experimental writing and the good old fashioned avant-garde, you’ll definitely want to check out this book. Otherwise, you needn’t bother.

ISBN: 0-9723234-1-4

Available at the Washington State Library, NW 813.5408 CLEAR C 2003
Not available in eReader, Braille, or Audiobook editions

View other works by Clear Cut Press

Lean on Pete.  By Willy Vlautin. New York : Harper Perennial, c2010. 277 p.

Recommendation by:
Carolyn Petersen, CLRS Project Manager, Tumwater, WA.

Vivid character development distinguishs this latest book from novelist Willy Vlautin.  15 year old Charley Thompson just wants the normal life of a teenager.  He longs for the opportunity to play football and go to high school.  When his father moves him from Spokane to Portland, he hopes for better luck than his down and out dad has had previously.

After Charley’s dad more or less abandons him, Charley lands a job working with horses at a nearby racetrack.  There he develops a strong bond with a broken down racehorse with the improbable name of Lean on Pete.   When Lean on Pete is threatened with destruction, Charley decides to save both of them.

He and Lean on Pete will travel to Charley’s only living relative in Wyoming.  Individuals who appreciate a spare and intense writing style will find it in this book.  As one critic puts it “Willy Vlautin plumbs the depths of despair but finally rewards you with redemption.”

ISBN-13: 9780061456534

Available at the Washington State Library, NW 813.6 VLAUTIN 2010
Available as an eReader edition.
Not available in Braille or Audiobook editions.

Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices. New York, NY : Open Road Integrated Media, 2011. 256 p.

Recommendation submitted by:
Sean Lanksbury, NW and Special Collections Librarian, Washington State Library, and as a first foray into eBook reading . . . on a 9 cm smartphone screen, no less!

Thirty-six Pacific Northwest writers stepped into the Cabaret at Richard Hugo House to contribute a single chapter during The Novel: Live! – a week-long onstage writing event in front of a live audience and writing overlord/librarian Nancy Pearl. All the profits from the event benefited nonprofit organizations making a difference through literacy programs and support of the local arts.

In the end, Seattle’s Capitol Hill District plays canvas to this exquisite corpse of a novel, Hotel Angeline.  The story follows fourteen-year-old Alexis Austin, the daughter of an absent matriarch to a band of misfit progressives in a former mortuary converted into low-income apartments, and the trouble that they face after uncovering a plot to sell the hotel. As the plot progresses, the whorl of intrigue surrounding Alexis’ mother and long-gone father deepen and the heroine battles her own identity issues while she is forced to faster than she had anticipated.

You can sense that the deadline, structure, and subject matter forced many of the authors outside of their comfort zones. In the end the characterizations are pretty consistent and a solid and engaging – if sometimes overreaching – storyline emerges. There is plenty of each writer’s style present, while from chapter-to-chapter the narrative voice stays surprisingly consistent.  Not all chapters are created equal, and understanding the conditions surrounding the storytelling provides the reader insight necessary to appreciate the story’s many charms. Quite a feat, really.

One caution:  Despite the coming-of-age themes, this book is not necessarily intended for children or young teens, as there is plenty of adult language and subject matter in the story.

Chapter 1 / Jeannie Shortridge — Chapter 2 / Teri Hein — Chapter 3 / William Dietrich — Chapter 4 / Kathleen Alcalá — Chapter 5 / Maria Dahvana Headley — Chapter 6 / Stacey Levine — Chapter 7 / Indu Sundaresan — Chapter 8 / Craig Welch — Chapter 9 / Matthew Amster-Burton — Chapter 10 / Ed Skoog — Chapter 11 / David Lasky and Greg Stump — Chapter 12 / Kevin O’Brien — Chapter 13 / Nancy Rawles — Chapter 14 / Suzanne Selfors — Chapter 15 / Carol Cassella — Chapter 16 / Karen Finneyfrock — Chapter 17 / Robert Dugoni — Chapter 18 / Jarret Middleton — Chapter 19 / Deb Caletti — Chapter 20 / Kevin Emerson — Chapter 21 / Kit Bakke — Chapter 22 / Julia Quinn — Chapter 23 / Mary Guterson — Chapter 24 / Erik Larson — Chapter 25 / Garth Stein — Chapter 26 / Frances McCue — Chapter 27 / Erica Bauermeister — Chapter 28 / Sean Beaudoin — Chapter 29 / Dave Boling — Chapter 30 / Peter Mountford — Chapter 31 / Stephanie Kallos — Chapter 32 / Jamie Ford — Chapter 33 / Clyde Ford — Chapter 34 / Elizabeth George — Chapter 35 / Susan Wiggs

Available at WSL, NW 813.6 Hotel A 2011
Available as an eBook.
Not available in talking book or Braille editions.

Miss Harper Can Do It.  By Jane Berentson. New York : Viking, 2009. 324 p.

Recommendation by:
Carolyn Petersen, CLRS Project Manager, Tumwater, WA.

Debut novelist and Pacific Lutheran University graduate Jane Berentson follows the dictum of “write about what you know” when she sites her story in Tacoma.  (I live in Tacoma and this is the first novel I have ever come across that described the middle class Tacoma with which I’m familiar.  There have been crime or detective novels set there, but I don’t hang out in seedy bars or back alleys!)

Annie Harper is a third grade teacher whose boyfriend is deployed to Iraq at the beginning of the novel.  To get through the year without her boyfriend Annie decides to write a memoir which she daydreams will become a blockbuster best seller.  The titles change as her life and mood progresses. The first title is: Wartime Alone Time: When Abstinence Fights for Freedom.

This book manages to be warm, funny and bittersweet.  Annie and her supporting characters are engaging.  Her class is spot on which is maybe why School Library Journal gave this title a starred review.  Fans of women’s fiction will hope that this new author writes another book.

ISBN-13: 978-0670020775

Available at the Washington State Library, NW 813.6 BERENTS 2009
Available as an eReader and as a Talking Book on cassette or in a digital book edition.
Not available in Braille.

Other. By Karen Kincy. Flux. 2010. 326p.

Recommendation submitted by:
Jill Merritt, Library Associate, Washington State Library Branch Services, Tumwater, WA.

Readers of Twilight will find another set of characters to love in Karen Kincy’s new series.  The first in the series Other introduces a cast of teens that are pretty normal, except for one thing, they are “Other”.  Society knows about Others: shape-shifters, centaurs, vampires, and more… not all welcome them into town, however.  Some remain hidden, while others embrace their “otherness”, but it could get them killed.  Racism, sex, love, and murder will touch the lives of Gwen and her friends as a serial killer of Others hits their small Washington town.  Follow Gwen as she tries to solve the murder of her friends and accept her otherness.

ISBN 9780738719191.

Available at the Washington State Library, NW 813.6 KINCY 2010
Not available in Braille, Talking Book or eReader editions.
Title contains adult themes.

West of Here. By Jonathan Evison. Chapel Hill, NC : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2011. 486 p.

Recommendation submitted by:
Sean Lanksbury, NW and Special Collections Librarian, Washington State Library.

Jonathan Evison was awarded the 2009 Washington State Book Award (formerly the Governor’s Writers Awards) for his debut novel, All About Lulu. His second novel, West of Here, is an ambitious historical fiction that threads two eras of Pacific Northwest development together.

Set in the fictitious, but utterly recognizable Port Bonita, the filmic narrative cuts back and forth between the struggles  of newly arrived settlers and the native Klallam in late 1880′s Olympic peninsula and how their descendants face the present-day outcomes of their ancestors’ fears and ambitions.  Against a backdrop of a vast and indifferent wilderness, characters’ desires meet and crash against harsh truths as the many characters struggle to find themselves and their place within Port Bonita as the town first forms from a frontier settlement and more than a century later as it struggles to remain a community.

Fans of historical fiction will appreciatively debate the nod given to early journals of Olympic Peninsula exploration, particularly those of James Christie and the Press Expedition. Evison’s descriptive and modestly crafted prose will edge interested readers towards the novel’s conclusion.

ISBN-13: 978-1565129528

Available at the Washington State Library, NW 813.6 EVISON 2011
Available in eBook, Braille and digital talking book editions.

The Search.  By Nora Roberts. New York : G.P. Putnam’s Sons, ©2010. 488 p.

Recommendation by:
Carolyn Petersen, CLRS Project Manager, Tumwater, WA.

Best selling author Nora Roberts moves to the San Juan Islands for another reliable romantic suspense novel.  Her protagonist trains police and search & rescue dogs on Orcas Island.  Fiona moved to the island after she had barely survived an attack from a serial killer. When a copycat killer arrives on the  island with her in his sights, Fiona needs the help of all the friends she has made on the Island to survive.

If you are a Roberts fan, you will appreciate her trademark banter and the sensuous romance she weaves so well into her stories.  The dogs bring the heroine and her hero together.  This is a good entry book for those who haven’t picked up previously read any of Roberts contemporary romance titles.  Pleasant reading.

ISBN-13: 978-0399156571

Available at the Washington State Library, NW 813.6 ROBERTS 2010.
Available in eReader and Talking Book editions.
Not available in a Braille edition.

Walking Dead (Walker Papers, Book 4) By C.E. Murphy.
Luna, 2009. 376p.

Recommendation submitted by:
Jill Merritt, Library Associate, Washington State Library Branch Services, Tumwater, WA.

Joanne Walker is coming to terms with her life as a shaman and newly minted police detective in Seattle.  However, the calm is broken by the arrival of unexpected ghosts at a Halloween party full of police.  Soon Joanne is dealing with zombies and a magic caldron that has a long history of death. Crisscrossing Seattle, Joanne follows the dark trail left by the cauldron, picking up a few hitchhiking ghosts along the way, including one very dear to the her partner’s heart.

Readers familiar with the series will enjoy the return of previous characters helping and in some cases hindering Joanne’s fight to save Seattle from the undead. The writing and subject matter leans toward more adult themes, but might appeal to older teens. Walking Dead is one installment in the Walker Paper series by C.E. Murphy that answers a few readers questions about the shaman, but leaves more unanswered.  Interested readers will eagerly look for the next story of Joanne Walker.

ISBN-13: 978-0373803019.

Available as an eBook
Title contains adult themes.