ain peals out of the sky over central California, gently shrouding Palo Alto in a wet blanket, and two sisters make their way to dinner.  Thus opens Allegra Goodman’s latest novel The Cookbook Collector. Emily and Jess are five years of age apart and complete opposites.  Emily, the elder, is straight-laced and pin-striped.  An MBA graduate, she has spent all of her time getting her business start-up off the ground, and she has succeeded.  Her power-suited, cropped haired, thin-bespectacled form stands in complete opposition to her younger sister Jess’.  Jess is a free spirit; a book lover; a corduroy, cafe-going bohemian who can’t even remember the last time she cut her hair.  She’s works in a rare and used bookshop as a side job while she pursues her PhD in philosophy.

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tarvation lake,  is the not-very-becoming name of a little out-of-the-way tourist town in Northwestern Michigan. A town with a preoccupation with hockey. And murder. Dun dun DUN!

Okay, it’s definitely a mystery, but it’s not quite like that. Written by Chicago north-sider Bryan Gruley and a finalist for the 2009 Great Lakes Book Award, this book makes for decent read.  It’s fun to get to know Gus Carpenter, your narrator. He’s a newspaper man with a history in Detroit that follows him home to the small town where he goes right back to playing goalie with his childhood friends, and a few not-so-friends as well. While he’s at it, however, he digs up a bit of a murder mystery–or should I say the mystery washes up for him.

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hicago author Christina Henríquez was interviewed today by Time Out Chicago about her debut novel The World in Half, published by Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group USA. Henríquez speaks of her struggles to complete the novel, including a complete overhaul after she wrote the first 300 page version, and gives an overview of the novel, which focuses on a Panamanian narrator who goes to college in California, and must deal with her mother’s Alzheimer’s in addition to other struggles. Head to Time Out Chicago to view the full article.

Devil’s Due Publishing, Chicago-based comics publisher, is printing two comics for release in June that feature none other than President Obama.  With the titles, “Barack the Barbarian: Quest for the Treasure of Stimuli” and “Drafted: One Hundred Days”, these comics are sure to be a hit.  Devil’s Due founder and President Josh Blaylock spoke of the comics with the Chicago Tribune: “I said, let’s just go do something nuts. I want people to look at this and say ‘What the hell is this?’”

You can pre-order both comics at Devil’s Due.  “Barack the Barbarian” is only $3.50 and “Drafted” is $6.00.  You can also order this poster for $6.00.  Questions (like: is that supposed to be Michelle Obama clinging to Barack’s leg in the poster??), comments or concerns can be sent to obamacomics@devilsdue.net.

ris Mazza wants to remind her readers that the 80s cannot simply be summed up by things like Vh1’s series I Love the 80s.  In the introduction to her book Trickle-Down Timeline she explains that the 80s were not simply the glitz and glamor of a generation gone wild with hair bands, Back to the Future, and side ponytails.  “For some people,” she writes, “the surplus and glut [of the 80s] were part of some other world, not theirs; and it couldn’t be a ‘me-generation’ if they didn’t know who they were or where they were going.  They were often just finding out what they were going to want; or they were, in starting out, already where they were going to end up” (1).

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eview from Julie at Publish Chicago of Chicago author Andrew Farkas’ new book Self-Titled Debut.

Though the novel is what is usually published, advertised, and well distributed in mainstream bookstores, and even non-mainstream bookstores, it is important to remember the power of the short story, and short story collections. Concise, evocative, and to the point, the short story offers an alternative to a long narrative that can be both freeing and challenging for the reader and writer. In a collection, each story must stand alone, but all the stories must come together to form a poignant or moving whole.

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“Cleverly elucidating the somber diaspora of Iraqi Jews, this collection of stories explores the little-publicized migration of a people escaping oppression, only to be confronted with the difficult realities of new nations and customs. Tova Murad Sadka’s work spans Iraq, Israel and the U.S. with beautiful, laconic prose, magnifying the everyday adversity of immigrants.

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“KJ Bradley and Alyson Beaton created Grow to take a child (2-5 years of age) through a typical day, implementing a “normal” routine that is environmentally and socially sound. The sharply designed book helps parents teach children very early on how easy it is to take steps for a cleaner earth. The text focuses on words like “share” and “grow” to instill basic social concepts that resound in larger impacts, and the images encourage the child to actively participate in the daily routine and timeline that follows along the bottom of the pages. The book was based on the developmental findings of Clotaire Rapaille, which say that as a child’s vocabulary develops he or she makes connections to specific items. For example, if a child associates the word “coffee” with “starbucks” the word “starbucks” will likely be an association for life. Grow hopes to instill brandless, positive routines that can benefit community, health, and an awareness of self that’s connected to the larger world.

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“It is 1703, and Rachael Penrose is confined to Bedlam Insane Asylum in London after discovering her uncle Victor plans to kill her brother in order to inherit the family fortune. Victor leads a gang of criminals and uses French privateer/smuggler Sébastien Falconer as the scapegoat for his crimes. When Victor spreads the lie that Rachael informed the authorities of Falconer’s smuggling activities, Falconer vows revenge on the girl.

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“A houseful of people he loathes is not Sir Arthur’s worst problem…

“It should have been a lovely English country-house weekend. But the unfortunate guest-list is enough to exasperate a saint, and the host, Sir Arthur Billington-Smith, is an abusive wretch hated by everyone from his disinherited son to his wife’s stoic would-be lover. When Sir Arthur is found stabbed to death, no one is particularly grieved—and no one has an alibi. The unhappy guests fi nd themselves under the scrutiny of Scotland Yard’s cool-headed Inspector Harding, who has solved tough cases before—but this time, the talented young inspector discovers much more than he’s bargained for.”

-from the publisher’s site

“Elisha walks through Brooklyn with side curls tucked behind his ears and an oversized black hat on his head. He is a Chassidic Orthodox Jew and the son of a revered rabbi in whose footsteps he’s expected to follow. When he leaves his insular world to take classes at a secular college, he vows to remain unchanged…”

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“To Serve Them All My Days is the moving saga of David Powlett-Jones, who returns from World War I injured and shell-shocked. He is hired to teach history at Bamfylde School, where he rejects the formal curriculum and teaches the causes and consequences of the Great War.

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“Henry, a brownie prince, loves the fairy Rose. Forty years ago, a bitter wizard cursed them to be forever apart and forever silent. Rose is trapped in a magic painting and Henry is trapped in a book. Neither can leave their prisons, or speak a single word, or the other will die. But Moonflower is going to lead a mission to release them, for every seventy two years a wishing star appears and with the help of the Pearl of Love, she, along with a jack rabbit, a unicorn, and two brownies, are going to set the cursed couple free.”

-from the publisher’s site

“The Mississippi River is as much an American symbol as it is a river, carrying the hopes and despair of many in its timeless currents. It thus serves as an apt backdrop for the midlife crisis of Harry McNeil, a man who leaves the hard-hitting world of television journalism for the life of a riverboat pilot in The Great River.

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n reading over my review of Before I Forget, by Leonard Pitts, Jr., I realized that I had not said all I wanted to say about the book, so I’m revisiting it now.

In my previous review of the book I focused on how dramatic it is, but I don’t think that the drama in the book is exactly similar to soap opera drama, as I earlier asserted. The truth is that the book is driven forward by dramatic, that is to say intense and often emotional, events. The story of the book kind of explodes outward like the Big Bang must have. We start the story with Mo, a singer that was popular during the Motown era of music, who discovers that he has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and his son Trey, who robs a convenience store with two of his friends. The plot explodes out from here, where we meet characters that are connected to these two, like Mo’s wife, Trey’s child, the family of one of Trey’s friends, etc. This enormous web of characters who all seem to be going through significant life events creates the illusion that the story is overly dramatic, but really, the story is plot focused more than anything, which will often create the illusion of excess drama.

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received this book about a week ago from Agate publishing. The book was produced by a division of theirs named Bolden, which specializes in African American fiction and nonfiction. They’re pretty hyped about this book over there, as it’s written by Leonard Pitts, Jr., a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who’s been a columnist over at the Miami Herald since 1991.

The story is a dramatic (and when I say dramatic, I mean dramatic, think soap operas) story of a grandfather who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and takes his son, an immature 19-year old with aspirations to be a rapper, on a cross country road trip to see his (the grandfather’s) dying father. On the way all kinds of stuff happens; it seems like every time you turn the page one character or another is having some incredibly dramatic life event occur.

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’ve only given myself a few hours between finishing Toni Morrison’s Beloved and writing this post, and my thoughts are still a bit jumbled about the book. I’m torn between spouting about how masterful elements of the book were, and complaining a bit about things that I thought could have been done better. Perhaps I’ll do a bit of both.

This is not the first novel of Morrison’s I’ve read. About six months ago I plowed through Song of Solomon, her third novel and one of four books to be selected by Oprah’s Book Club. It was a fantastic read. I won’t go into a full review here, but I found the detail to be rich, the language to be appropriate of the time period, and the characters to be profoundly moving. Morrison, if nothing else, is a masterful writer of emotion and of history. Song of Solomon follows the life of a young black man in the early 20th century as he struggles to learn about his heritage and find a place for himself in a world that is not altogether friendly. Sounds like an Oprah’s Book Club book, doesn’t it?

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