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.

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

Available at the Washington State Library, NW 323.092 WALKER 2010 / WA 353.1 St2lil w 2010.
Available in a Braille edition.
Oral history is available as a PDF edition. View online from Washington State Library.
Not available in talking book edition.

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.

D.B.: A Novel. By Elwood Reid.  New York : Doubleday, 2004.  356 p.

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

If you were alive in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970’s, doubtlessly you recall the high altitude heist of D.B. Cooper.  I lived near Camas, Washington, supposed drop point of our region’s most notorious skyjacker.  My friends and I playacted endless what-if scenarios involving Cooper that often included a Sasquatch (because what northwest kid wouldn’t add a bigfoot?) for good measure  in the forests of Southwest Washington for hours on end.

So what if “Dan Cooper” actually made off with the $150,000 that didn’t wash up on the shore of the Columbia River? D.B., by Elwood Reid, imagines the back-story and the aftermath of Cooper’s heist, from Cooper’s perspective, as a soft-boiled satire for the changing definition of gender and responsibility in the late twentieth century.  The plot follows the story from Cooper’s perspective as he plans the heist and deals with the consequences and costs of his crime and exile.  A parallel plot follows a recently retired Federal Bureau of Investigation investigator – originally assigned to the case – who now reflects on his career and evaluates his life and relationships as he heads into uncharted personal realms.

Author Reid’s tight, readable style makes for a clever piece of speculative fiction that mixes dark comedy with unsentimental reflection on modern masculinity.

ISBN-13: 978-0385497381

Available at the Washington State Library, NW 813.6 REID 2004.
Not available as an eBook, talking book, or as a Braille edition.
Title contains adult themes.

Volume 7, February 24, 2011 for the WSL Updates mailing list

Topics include:

1) FIRST TUESDAYS – AUTHORS, ILLUSTRATORS, AND LIBRARIANS, OH MY!

2) SIMPLY WASHINGTON – NEW & IMPROVED

3) LIBRARY LEGISLATION TRACKER

4) DOE GRANT – IMPROVING LITERACY THROUGH SCHOOL LIBRARIES

5) FREE WEBJUNCTION COURSES – MICROSOFT OFFICE 2007

6) FREE CE OPPORTUNITIES NEXT WEEK

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