Category: Newsletter

June Staff Pick: Stone Blind

May 26, 2023

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes (Harper), picked by Bookseller Camila

“I see you. I see all those who men call monsters. And I see the men who call them that. Call themselves heroes, of course. I only see them for an instant, Then they’re gone. But it’s enough. Enough to know that the hero isn’t the one who’s kind or brave or loyal. Sometimes – not always, but sometimes – he is monstrous.

And the monster? Who is she? She is what happens when someone cannot be saved. This particular monster is assaulted, abused, and vilified. And yet, as the story is always told, she is the one you should fear. She is the monster.

We’ll see about that” – Stone Blind

Most people that know me, know that I absolutely LOVE Greek mythology. Circe by Madeline Miller is one of my top book recommendations, and when I was just a ‘tween in middle school Clash of the Titans was a favorite of mine! I think I watched that movie over 50 times. Gods and goddesses coming to the aid of our hero Perseus (played by a young Harry Hamlin), demigod and the son of Zeus! I cheered him on while he on on his quest to save Andromeda and slay the gorgon Medusa. When I came across Natalie Haynes’ Stone Blind on the Indie Bestseller list I knew that this was going to be my next book recommendation. I couldn’t wait to delve into the legend of Medusa.

Stone Blind is a beautifully written retelling of the classic myth of the gorgon Medusa. Medusa’s story is narrated by the multiple characters in the book. Each chapter is told from various perspectives including Medusa herself, her gorgon sisters (Sthenno & Euryale), Perseus, Athene, Poseidon, Hera, and many more. We even hear from the “gorgons head” and an olive grove, truly original storytelling!

We learn how the gorgon Medusa came to be as we know her, writhing snakes replacing her beautiful hair, her eyes replaced with a burning weapon that will turn any living creature to stone and condemn her to a life of solitude. Haynes’ storytelling weaves a beautiful tale of love between the gorgon sisters and the heartbreak of what was to come. The vilified gorgons come across as the most human and caring characters while the heroes and gods are petty, callous, cruel and violent. We follow Perseus on his quest to slay Medusa, and while reading we find ourselves on the side of the monsters while abhorring the behavior of the hero Perseus and disgusted by behaviors of the gods & goddesses.

I was already familiar with the legend of Medusa & Perseus. I found myself dreading their eventual confrontation and kept hoping for a different ending. Stone Blind leaves you questioning who really is the monster? And who are the true heroes? Natalie Haynes writes with wit and heartbreak, telling a story that has you rooting for the “monsters.”

~ Camila

Celebrate Pride – A Free People Read Freely

May 25, 2023

by Robin Wood

People sometimes look at our banned books display and say: They aren’t really banned, are they? You have them for sale here.

Some of the books you’ll likely find on our Pride Reads display this year.

Yes, you can buy Judy Blume’s Forever or Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson in our store or from our online shop. But those same books can’t be found in many schools and libraries here in Florida or around the country. PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression, found that during the 2021-2022 school, Florida schools banned 565 books, many of them because they have “LGBTQ+ themes, protagonists of color, or that touch on race or racism.”

We sell books because we believe books are important. We believe books help us think about who we are and who we could be. Hiding the books doesn’t erase the history some people would like to forget, or stop people from being gay or nonbinary or transgender – but it may make those experiences harder for many people to talk about, learn about, and empathize with.

As Juno Dawson, author of This Book is Gay, says, “LGBTQ people exist. We have always existed. Banning books isn’t going to remove us from the world. What it will do is leave a vulnerable minority in real danger. Young LGBTQ people deserve the same education and information as anyone else.”

Or as LeVar Burton, former host of Reading Rainbow, says, “Read the books they’re banning. That’s where the good stuff is! If they don’t want you to read it, there’s a reason why.”

Celebrate Pride with us by reading something from our Pride Reads display or browse online: fiction & nonfiction.

* Thanks to Tracie D. Hall, Executive Director of the American Library Association, for the phrase, “Free people read freely.” (https://time.com/6276657/librarian-tracie-d-hall-full-time100-speech/)

Celebrating Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month

May 1, 2023

by Robin Wood

Here are some of the books we are reading and recommending for Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Find many more in store, and don’t hesitate to ask for a recommendation.

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang, out May 16

White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes “one of the funniest books of the year…. A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire” (The Washington Post).

A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran

This house eats and is eaten . . .

When Jade Nguyen arrives in Vietnam for a visit with her estranged father, she has one goal: survive five weeks pretending to be a happy family in the French colonial house Ba is restoring. She’s always lied to fit in, so if she’s straight enough, Vietnamese enough, American enough, she can get out with the college money he promised.

But the house has other plans.

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

An intimate and poignant debut graphic novel portraying one family’s journey from war-torn Vietnam, from Thi Bui.

This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR)

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the feeling took root—that desire to look, to move closer, to touch. Whenever it started growing, it definitely bloomed the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. Suddenly everything seemed possible.

But America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn’t know what happened to her—only that her books have been banned—and he resents that she cared more about her work than about him.

Then one day, Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, and soon he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of heroic librarians, and finally to New York City, where he will finally learn the truth about what happened to his mother, and what the future holds for them both.

Stay True by Hua Hsu

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

A Q&A with Stephanie Clifford

March 15, 2023

by Robin Wood

Author of THE FAREWELL TOUR, our March featured staff pick

Now out in paperback!

Get out your headphones, THE FAREWELL TOUR will make you want to crank up the music. But first, we are delighted to introduce you to author Stephanie Clifford, who took time out of her busy book launch to chat with us. (Read Assistant Manager Allison’s review of THE FAREWELL TOUR.)

Stephanie Clifford, photo credit: Sarah Bode-Clark Photography.jpg — Stephanie Clifford, photo credit: Sarah Bode-Clark Photography

Q: How big a music fan were you before writing THE FAREWELL TOUR? What was the first album you bought with your own money?

A: I’ve always adored music, from opera to musicals to rock, and play piano and guitar. But I didn’t fall in love with country until high school—I grew up in Seattle, and worked one summer in Arkansas doing trail maintenance in a national forest there, where the only radio station we could get was country. Suddenly, I was hooked, and returned to Seattle at the height of the grunge era to listen to, like, Tammy Wynette—no one in Seattle understood what on earth I was doing.

First album—for some reason it wasn’t an album I first bought, but a cassette-tape single: Prince (cool), “Arms of Orion” (not very cool).

Q: What was the idea that sparked this novel?

A: Before I began writing this book, I happened to be on a literature-of-the-American-West kick, so Grapes of Wrath and Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry. The landscapes they wrote about were arid and harsh, and I didn’t recognize them. I felt like there was this missing piece of the “Western” genre, that the Northwest, this place I had grown up in—and which, by the way, takes up a rather large geographical chunk of the West!—was completely ignored. So I began playing with the idea of writing a Western—not a shootout-and-saloons story, but one that considers the myth of the West, and how the landscape shapes its characters—that was set in the historical Northwest.

As I read more and more, I also came to feel that even for writers who were women or were sympathetic to women, like Wallace Stegner or Willa Cather, in the era I was writing about—the book starts in the 1920s—the women in these books literally didn’t get to leave their houses. They were stuck inside, cooking, cleaning, and sewing. And I thought of the fierce Northwest women I knew, who would basically skin a deer in the morning and then put on lipstick and go shopping at I. Magnin’s downtown in the afternoon, and I thought, just try keeping a Northwest woman inside her house; good luck.

That became the genesis for Lil, the main character. I wanted to get across the grit and battle scars that so many Northwest women of that era had, and also the desire to survive, and give her a life where she has to be out in the world—in this case, via singing country music—and see what happens.

Q: What was interesting to you about this particular time in history, women’s history or music history?

A: First of all, it’s just this incredibly rich time to imagine and research—Lil’s born on the cusp of the Depression, gets her start as a singer in WWII-era Tacoma, lands in Nashville in its golden era—all a gold mine for a writer. I also wanted her to have to navigate her career and art in a time that wasn’t very open to working women generally, and certainly not in the country music. She’s going to have to make real concessions in order to succeed, which is always interesting to write about.

Q: What were your top 3 songs of 2022? What would be your picks for saddest song? Happiest?

A: Because I was so deep into research for 2022, my Spotify most-played for the year looks like it’s out of 1962! Tammy Wynette, “Apartment No. 9” – Tammy makes everything sound heartbreaking; Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “Didn’t It Rain” – an incredible, pioneering guitar player; “He Is Fine,” Secret Sisters, a fabulous duo. Happiest – I love a musical number for a pick-me-up (my first book, Everybody Rise, has tons of musical references, and the title is from a Sondheim song) – so maybe a classic like “Seventy-Six Trombones.” Saddest, there’s a scene in the book where the characters are discussing the saddest country song, and I think Lil gets it right when she suggests Emmylou Harris’s “Boulder to Birmingham,” written after Harris’s musical partner, Gram Parsons, overdosed and died. Just try not to cry when you hear Emmylou sing that one.

Q: What are you reading and recommending these days?

A: I just (accidentally) read back-to-back two wonderful, thoughtful books on women during times of civil war/domestic terrorism in the ’70s: V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night, set in the Tamil region of Sri Lanka during the civil war there; and Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The books made perfect companions and almost talked to each other.

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes (Harper), picked by Bookseller Camila

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link (Random House), picked by Social Media Manager Robin

10 Years of Celebrating Indie Bookstores Together!

One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle, picked by bookseller Gina

Author of THE FAREWELL TOUR, our March featured staff pick

***Now out in paperback!***

Now out in paperback!