August 31st, 2011 WSL NW & Special Collections Posted in Washington Reads Comments Off on Many become one in an experiment at the Hotel Angeline
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.
Available at WSL, NW 813.6 Hotel A 2011
Available as an eBook.
Not available in talking book or Braille editions.
August 10th, 2011 WSL NW & Special Collections Posted in Washington Reads Comments Off on The Good Times, The Bad Times, and the Grape Thief.
Grape Thief. By Kristine L. Franklin. Candlewick Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003. 290 p.
This charming tale revolves around Slava Petrovich, growing up in the coal-mining town of Roslyn, Washington in the 1920’s. Slava is nicknamed “Cuss” because he can do just that in 14 languages. Roslyn is a mix of ethnicities, which gives Cuss the opportunity to learn bits and pieces of many languages.
Cuss loves school, and even enjoys his seventh-grade opportunity to learn Latin from the local priest. But he’s definitely no sissy, and the book’s title comes from the fact that every year, Cuss and his friends scheme to “lift” boxes of grapes from the annual grape train that chugs into town from California.
When his older brothers have to flee due to a mix-up with mob-controlled bootleggers, Cuss and his family, headed by his widowed Croatian mother, struggle to survive. Will he be the first in his family to finish the eighth grade? Or will he have to go to work in the coal mines like his father before him?
Give this book a chance, and you’ll get caught up without realizing it. You’ll laugh, and you’ll cry, and the pages won’t turn fast enough. Described as a novel for young readers, this heart-warming tale will appeal to anyone from age 9 to 99.
ISBN: 0-7636-1325-8
Available at the Washington State Library, NW 813.6 FRANKLI 2003
Available as a digital book, a talking book on cassette and as a Braille edition.
Not available as an eBook
Note: this book was re-released by Candlewick Press under the title “Cuss” in 2007.
July 27th, 2011 WSL NW & Special Collections Posted in Washington Reads Comments Off on Cultivating beauty in The Garden That You Are
The Garden That You Are. By Kate Gordon. Winlaw, B.C. : Sono Nis Press, c2007. 192 p.
Recommendation by:
Rand Simmons, Acting Washington State Librarian, Tumwater, WA.
This is a lovely book. Perhaps I feel that because I am a gardener. I just spent an hour (or was it more) drifting through this book. Take the photos in first before you read the text. Gardeners love to talk about gardening – to anyone – but nothing is richer than gardeners talking to gardeners.
In The Garden That You Are, Kate Gordon opens a portal to the lives of eight gardeners in British Columbia’s Slocan Valley. Here we meet Edda West, Steven Mounteer, Victoria Carleton, Rabi’a, Brenda Elder, Gail Elder, Eliza Gooderham and Pete Slevin. They tell us about their gardens and their lives and how they are intertwined. We learn about “their favorite friends” calendula, cherries, kale, potatoes, hyacinths and more and about herbal medicinal and more. The photographs are engaging. I urge you to read this book. Go down the rabbit hole.
ISBN: 1-55039-160-7
July 20th, 2011 WSL NW & Special Collections Posted in Washington Reads Comments Off on Aspiring memoirist seeks success in Miss Harper Can Do It
Miss Harper Can Do It. By Jane Berentson. New York : Viking, 2009. 324 p.
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.
July 13th, 2011 WSL NW & Special Collections Posted in Washington Reads Comments Off on Snohomish plays host to supernatural thrills in the Other series
Other. By Karen Kincy. Flux. 2010. 326p.
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.
July 6th, 2011 WSL NW & Special Collections Posted in Washington Reads Comments Off on Closing the “Oregon Trilogy” with To Build A Ship.
To Build A Ship. By Don Berry.
Corvallis, Oregon: Oregon State University Press, 2004
(Copyright 1963, by Don Berry and first published by Viking Press)
There are only a few settlers living in the Tillamook area as this story unfolds, but already they have a real problem. There’s no way in or out. No way to get their supplies in, or their produce out. They are isolated by mountains and forest. There are no roads, just trails, suitable for a man and a horse, but not for hauling supplies or goods. The only practical way in and out is by sea. And now the one and only sea captain who has been willing to cross their perilous bar and visit them once a year, has died.
So, they decide to build their own ship. That endeavor soon captures all of them – heart, mind and soul. Except for their shipwright, a strange and tortured creature who causes trouble when he falls in love with one of the Indian women.
Through this seemingly small crack, evil manages to pry its way into the story, leading to a chilling denouement midway through, providing an unwelcome stress point near the center of the tale which functions in the novel much like the pass over the coastal mountain range, which must be surmounted whenever anyone travels from the Tillamook country into the central Oregon valley, or vice-versa. This unwelcome bit of byplay, in which the Indians naturally come out suffering the worst, only serves to emphasize even more strongly the overwhelming nature of the hold the idea of the ship has over all of them.
This is the third segment in Don Berry’s masterful trilogy exploring the early era of Oregon history, centered around Tillamook. I’ve already written about the first two, Trask and Moontrap, respectively. This is the final chapter, and what a masterpiece! This is the best yet: a more powerful or effective novel has rarely been written. Highly recommended!
ISBN: 0-87071-040-0
Available at the Washington State Library, NW 813.6 BERRY 2004
Available as a talking book on cassette.
Not available as an eBook or Braille edition.
June 30th, 2011 WSL NW & Special Collections Posted in Washington Reads Comments Off on Telling Frontier & modern-era stories “West of Here.”
West of Here. By Jonathan Evison. Chapel Hill, NC : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2011. 486 p.
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
June 23rd, 2011 WSL NW & Special Collections Posted in Washington Reads Comments Off on The Story of Ms. Lillian Walker, a civil rights pioneer.
Lillian Walker, Washington State Civil Rights Pioneer: A Biography and Oral History. By Lillian Walker & John C. Hughes. Olympia, WA : Washington State Legacy Project, Office of the Secretary of State, c2010. 198 p.
Recommendation by:
Rand Simmons, Acting Washington State Librarian, Tumwater, WA.
“It was 1944, the apex of World War II, and on the home front the Navy was keeping an eye on its Negroes. Twelve hundred worked at the Bremerton shipyard, including 300 newcomers in the first eight weeks of the year. They were angry because many businesses, including cafes, taverns, drug stores and barber shops, displayed signs saying, “We Cater to White Trade Only.” One of the dissidents was 31-year-old Lillian Walker, whose husband worked at the shipyard. She was the recording secretary of the Puget Sound Civic Society, a civil rights coalition formed by the newly chartered Bremerton branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” (Excerpt from Lillian Walker: Civil rights pioneer, John C. Hughes, http://www.sos.wa.gov/legacyproject/oralhistories/lillianwalker/default.aspx.)
This is the definitive biography of Ms. Walker, a civil rights pioneer in Washington State. It is both a biography and an oral history and eminently readable. Readers interested in race relations, civil rights history and the civil rights of African American women in particular will enjoy this book. This book is about the history of Bremerton, Washington and will appeal to those with an itch to read well written local history as well as to those who love to read biographies.
ISBN-13: 978-1889320229
June 15th, 2011 WSL NW & Special Collections Posted in Washington Reads Comments Off on Hit Skid Road with a classic Washington Read.
Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle. By Murray Morgan. New York : Viking Press, c1951. 280 p. Reprinted in 1960, 1971, and 1982.
“Skid road” is a phrase that conjures up many images and every Washingtonian should know the story behind that phrase because it had its genesis right here in western Washington. Skid Road, the book by Murray Morgan is a true page turner that takes you through the history of Seattle via the lives of some of the more colorful residents of the city. It is an exceptional book and very good read. So go find a copy in a library or online and the next time you hear the phrase “skid road” you’ll not only have all the modern imagery in mind but the historical picture as well.
This book also has the distinction of inclusion in The Washington 89, a list of essential Washington and Pacific Northwest history compiled by noted historian and bibliographer George H. Tweney.
June 8th, 2011 WSL NW & Special Collections Posted in Washington Reads Comments Off on Head to the San Juans with “The Search”
The Search. By Nora Roberts. New York : G.P. Putnam’s Sons, ©2010. 488 p.
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.
