by Kelly Pickerill

It can be a little frustrating to find out that you’ve read a book out of sequence.  You pick up an attractive-looking book or a book you’ve heard good things about, not realizing that it has characters that were introduced in an earlier book.  While other readers are coming back to a world they’ve already explored, indulging themselves in the nostalgia and familiarity, you are playing catch-up for the first fifty pages or so.  Veteran readers tend to avoid this at all costs, I think.  I know I do.  I even go so far as to read earlier, unrelated books by an author that I’m newly interested in.  My interest has been piqued by their newest book, and it’s hard for me to resist going back to check out what I missed.

That said, I recently read Jim Harrison for the first time.  Instead of going back to somewhere near the beginning, though, I just plunged right in to his newest book, The Farmer’s Daughter.  These are three novellas that are linked by a Patsy Cline song, “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.”  The second novella, “Brown Dog Redux,” features a recurring Harrison character, the half-Indian libido-driven Brown Dog.  Instead of feeling lost as to who this person was, I was delighted to discover that Brown Dog could make me laugh and blush just as well without having met him before.  BD is hiding in Canada after various bouts with the law (some of which I assume are hilariously recounted in earlier stories) with his stepdaughter, Berry, who suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome.  In this novella BD has to deal with the pain of losing Berry to a bureaucracy that thinks they can take care of her better than he can.  For the first half of the novella, that uneasiness combined with the disorienting feeling of being away from his beloved woods put BD in a flux.  Once he returned to the natural glory of the Michigan upper peninsula, though, fishing in his familiar creeks and eagerly anticipating a visit from a special lady, both BD and I could breathe easy.  I feel after reading “Brown Dog Redux” as though I’ve known BD for years.

And now I’ve done it again!  I’m several chapters along in Bone Fire by Mark Spragg.  At the opening of the novel, Griff takes her favorite horse to explore her grandfather Einar’s land to make sure it’s fit for grazing.  When she notices the fence is broken down at one place, she calls on three men to help her mend it.  As I read about McEban, Kenneth, and Paul pulling up to the ranch in an old pickup, I experienced a feeling of reunion; it was almost as though they walked up to Griff and Einar in movie slow-mo.   I felt as though I were meeting old friends for the first time, and rightly so, for Spragg’s first novel, The Fruit of Stone, centers around McEban and a then nine-year-old Paul.  Bone Fire takes place a decade or so after the events in this novel and his second, An Unfinished Life.  In that novel, Griff is a precocious ten-year-old; now she’s nineteen and struggling with the decision to leave her grandfather to go off to college.  She and Paul are dating, but at the end of the summer he will be leaving for an internship for his masters in Uganda.  Spragg is a master at portraying the atmosphere of the West, and his sparse prose subtly and beautifully takes the reader to a place both foreign and familiar.  I am excited to get to know these people at this, the next stage of their lives.

Everyone in the store is really looking forward to Monday, March 22, 2010. Chang-rae Lee is coming to Lemuria!!  He will be signing (5 pm) and reading (5:30 pm) his new novel, The Surrendered.  He has never been to the bookstore before so I thought I would take a little time and introduce him to you.

Chang-rae Lee was born in Seoul, Korea in 1965 and immigrated to the United States in 1968 with his family.  Lee was raised in the suburbs of New York and graduated from Yale University in 1987.  He began his career as a equities analyst on Wall Street but quickly realized that writing was his passion.  He soon finished an unpublished novel, Agnew Belittlehead, and was accepted to the creative writing program at the University of Oregon where he earned his MFA in 1993.  He has since published four novels, Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999), Aloft (2004) and The Surrendered (2010).  He has won various awards throughout his writing career including: “New Voices Award,” Oregon Books Award, ALA Notable Book Award, American Book Award, and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.   In 1999, The New Yorker named him one of the 20 best American writers under the age of 40.

Here is a video of Chang-rae Lee discussing The Surrendered with WNYC on the The Leonard Lopate Show:

You don’t want to miss this event and we look forward to seeing you on March 22!!

I heard The Girl Who Fell from the Sky reviewed on public radio; the review whetted my appetite. This novel is not for the faint of heart, but for those who read it, a powerful experience emerges.  The author, Heidi W. Durrow, a graduate of Stanford, Columbia School of Journalism, and Yale Law School, received  a Bellwether Prize of Fiction for this her debut novel.

As the novel opens, the reader meets Rachael,  a bi-racial young girl, whose mother is Danish and father is African American. Because of a horrific accident, which left her as the only survivor,Rachael has recently  gone to live with her very strict African American grandmother. Having been reared as a “white girl” in Europe where her father was a serviceman, she is now thrust into an American black community and quickly learns that her very blue eyes will constantly be an attention getter, for good and for bad. Set in the early 1990s in Oregon, the novel flashes back and forth in time, and the reader slowly learns about Rachael’s past while cringing with her about the  unfamiliar social norms and customs which she encounters in the black community. She knows there is a mystery behind her mother, s0 Rachael tries to fit pieces of a missing puzzle together.

Friendships with positive and negative people, both old and young, develop for the adolescent girl as she grows from year to year. Unbelievably a childhood friend who met her father and witnessed first hand the horrific accident, appears in Rachael’s neighborhood and a renewed friendship develops. Filled with sadness, pangs of adolescent development and experience, heartbreaks of love lost, and limited hopefulness, this provocative novel will make its mark on readers as they decipher their own views of our newly changing American culture.

See Heidi W. Durrow’s website.

-Nan