Perilous Times by Thomas D. Lee (Ballantine Books), picked by bookseller, Riona Jean
Do you want to fight climate change, battle a dragon, reminisce about lost friends, fight the patriarchy, and more!? Try this new Arthurian Legend on for size.
Bookseller Riona Jean picked Perilous Times as the August featured staff pick because it mixed her favorite genres, fantasy and dystopias.
“It remixes the Arthurian Legend in a new and dynamic way,” she writes.
“Mariam is an ecowarrior with FETA, fighting to save the planet from extreme climate change and rising sea levels. Kay is one of King Arthur’s knights, bound to a resurrection tree by Merlin, called to action whenever Britain is in trouble. With great swaths of the UK under water and major cities falling into ruin, Mariam and Kay stumble their way through trying to do the right thing. Watch out for Lancelot, corporate greed, and a nefarious plot to resurrect Arthur getting in the way!”
“Witty, insightful, and poignant, Perilous Times perfectly marries fantastical legend and dystopian new world order.”
Ed note: Riona read Perilous Times on her Kobo Clara 2E, it’s waterproof, made with recycled plastic, and we have them at the bookstore!
Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen (Algonquin Books), picked by store manager, Emily
Maeve Murray has complicated feelings on just about everything: her family, her friends, her English boss, Protestant co-workers and most of all preparing to leave her small town in Northern Ireland.
In the Summer of 1994 as they wait for their school test results Maeve and her two best friends, Caroline and Aoife, take the only jobs available to them. Working in a shirt factory is hard but made all the more difficult with The Troubles brewing inside and outside of the factory walls.
I found this book to be in turns funny and somber. Gallen captures the time and place but with characters so relatable everyone can enjoy their story.
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.
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.”
White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link (Random House), picked by Social Media Manager Robin
“With White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link puts her sui generis magic to work on the older magic of fairy tales, forging something revelatory. These stories delight and terrify us, and seem to say, Yes, this is the way the world works—haven’t you been paying attention?I am now. What a glorious and bewitching gift this book is.
— Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson
Clare is better at this than I am. I just want to stand around the store and hand White Cat, Black Dog to people. Kelly Link’s newest collection of fairy tale-inspired short stories defies easy description, but is a joy to read.
It’s hard to explain, I say, but it’s really good. It’s smart, funny, creepy, and sneaky. I wouldn’t steer you wrong. It’s excellent – and different – and, after you read it, you might find yourself even more afraid of business travel.
Link takes a nugget of a fairy tale, even if you don’t know the story, you’ll recognize the elements – three princes sent on three quests, the dangers of debts owed to the fae. She takes something from the original tale, and weaves something new and unexpected, meaningful and unexplained.
These are the kind of stories that stick with you. Sometimes enchanting, sometimes scary, always thought-provoking. Highly recommended.
In this “magical trip worth taking” (Associated Press), the New York Times bestselling author of In Five Years returns with a powerful novel about the transformational love between mothers and daughters set on the breathtaking Amalfi Coast.
Bookseller Gina writes, “One Italian Summer will immerse you in the magic of Positano, and the complex yet powerful bond of a mother and daughter. Katy and Carol will take you to a place you don’t want to leave and on a journey you won’t want to end!”
“Every time I re-read it, I want to book a flight to Italy, just like watching Under the Tuscan Sun.”
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
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.
It’s 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time.
Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood.
As the novel crisscrosses eras, moving between Lillian’s youth—the Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashville—and her middle-aged life in 1980, we see her striving to build a career in the male-dominated world of country music, including the hard choices she makes as she tries to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms.
Allison enjoyed both the book and audiobook versions of this novel. She writes, “Stephanie Clifford fills out the singular story of one woman’s hard rise to country music stardom with the history of country music and the evolution of American culture. Water Lil is a character you won’t soon forget.”
“This well researched novel is also a love letter to country music and the west. If you’ve spent time with either, this novel will be hell bent on tugging at your heartstrings.”
Allison’s playlist for the book includes Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (the song “Bo Weavil Blues” is central to the novel).
At the beginning of the 20th Century, America was a cultural backwater, with no sense of the art revolution in Europe. This is a sterling thriller about how a scrappy group of modern art lovers, through two world wars, founded the now iconic MOMA and brought Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh and the world of modern art to America. And in the process saved countless works from Nazi hands and established this country as the center of the art world. A nonfiction page turner.
~ George Cooper
“[Eakin] has mastered this material. . . . The book soars.” – The New York Times Book Review
Bookseller Lori read a lot of books for the upcoming Key West Literary Seminar, Singing America: A Celebration of Black Literature, for which she is serving this year as chairperson, and one of the standouts was The Secret Lives of Church Ladiesby Deesha Philyaw.
Lori writes, “This book explores the passions, vulnerabilities, sensuality and raw emotions of four generations of black women who want – and desperately need- to be so much more than ‘good’ church women all their lives. It’s raw and very relatable to a former church girl like me.”
The award-winning collection is also currently in development for TV by HBO Max.
The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton (Dec. 6, 2022, Grand Central Publishing) picked by store manager Emily
Tragic, but hopeful and completely enthralling. The Light Pirate is an essential read.
After living in Florida for nearly a decade, I’ve prepared for a few hurricanes. I was drawn to the first few lines of the description – a family prepares for a storm. I’ve been very lucky when it comes to storms, but I know as well as anyone the internal drama that comes with deciding if you should stay or go as a hurricane approaches. I thought it would be an interesting read but I wasn’t prepared for how deep it would take me down the rabbit hole.
Since reading this book, not a day has gone by that I haven’t brought it up in conversation. As Key West prepared for Hurricane Ian (or didn’t prepare as the case may be) I found my chatter increased. I think I became a little annoying as I told all of my fellow booksellers that they needed to read The Light Pirate.
The book begins as the Lowe family, Kirby, his wife Frida (pregnant with their first child) and his two sons from a previous marriage prepare for an incoming hurricane. This is nothing new for the family living on the east coast of Florida. But Frida feels this one is different, and of course she is right. It’s a story of our changing planet, yes, but at its core it’s a story of family and what and who makes a place a “home.”
