Book Options
Student/Staff Book Club
October 6, 2010
Story Collections
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson
A Southern writer with a bent sense of humor offers a fine debut collection of stories,
some unlike anything you've read before.Wilson (English/Univ. of the South) displays a
marvelous sense of narrative ingenuity. One of the more resonant entries, "Grand StandIn," concerns a woman who joins a blossoming industry, playing grandmother to
fractured families. Other stories sensitively document the emotional trials of adolescence:
In "Mortal Kombat," two teenaged boys do battle with their budding, bewildering
sexuality, and in "Go, Fight, Win," a reluctant young cheerleader muses that "sex seemed
like chicken pox, inevitable and scarring." Hints of Southern Gothicism may be found
among these pages. One story, "Birds in the House," details a bizarre ritualistic contest
whose winner will inherit an antebellum estate, while another, "The Shooting Man," finds
a young man named Guster obsessed with that most rural of spectacles, the traveling
sideshow. More often, though, the author tells stories that ring true, and that feature
innovative plots and the wit of indie comedy. The best of the lot, "Blowing Up on the
Spot," concerns a man, Leonard, who works as a sorter at a Scrabble factory when he's
not coping with his suicidal brother, crushing on the girl who works in the candy shop
and, well, worrying about what is, for him, the very real danger of spontaneous
combustion.Weird and wonderful stories from a writer who has that most elusive of gifts:
new ideas. (Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2009)
Historical Fiction
The Bride’s Farewell by Meg Rosoff
Two social outcasts find each other against a background of harsh social circumstances in
a sorrowful tale from Carnegie Medal winner Rosoff (What I Was, 2008, etc.).There's a
flavor of Thomas Hardy to the British novelist's story of survival and suffering in mid19th-century southern England. Rosoff, author of several books for children and young
adults, plunges readers straight into the story of Pell Ridley, whose impoverished family
is dominated by her alcoholic, violent father. Accompanied by her mute stepbrother
Bean, both of them riding on her horse Jack, Pell is fleeing the prospect of a loveless
marriage to the simple-hearted boy next door. She has a gift for horses and wants better
for herself. At Salisbury Fair, a horse-buyer, assisted by a poacher, offers cash in
exchange for Pell's advice, but in the process she loses Bean, Jack and the money.
Nevertheless, alone and on the road, Pell remains indefatigable and fortunate. A gypsy
named Esther and her family offer advice, sustenance and a dog. Eventually Pell finds the
poacher, a man of few words, who becomes her lover. Later she learns her parents have
been killed in a fire; she must rescue her sisters from the workhouse. There's a blissful
period while Pell works as a groom, but she can't rest until she finds both Bean and Jack.
Fragmented and overloaded with coincidences, but emotionally engaging, treading the
line between YA and adult fiction. (Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2009) .
Alligator Bayou by Donna Jo Napoli
Kirkus Review (February 15, 2009)
1
Book Options
Student/Staff Book Club
October 6, 2010
A haunting story based on a tragic historical event--the lynching of a group of Italian men
in Tallulah, La., in 1899. Recently orphaned, 14-year-old Calogero has moved from
Sicily to Louisiana to work with his father's friends in their produce business. Although
the Sicilians are prospering, Calo learns that their social position is precarious. In a town
strictly divided between black and white, Sicilians are considered neither, and
furthermore, they carry undeserved reputations as cheats and murderers. The Sicilians'
insistence on treating customers of all races with respect, their thrift--townsfolk complain
that they take in money but do not spend it--and the fact they can't seem to keep their
goats off other people's property combine to ignite a spark of unspeakable violence. All
five members of Calo's new family are murdered. Only Calo escapes with his life. Napoli
brings social issues into sharp focus but balances them with details about Calo's everyday
life, creating an engaging story with many avenues to deep reflection on our country's
treatment, past and present, of its immigrants. (afterword, notes on research) (Historical
fiction. 12 & up)
Fiction
My Abandonment by Peter Rock
The engaging but limited perspective of 13-year-old Caroline, “the hillbilly girl that lived
in the park,” reveals a highly circumscribed world. When first met, Caroline and Father
are scavenging for materials to make a shelter in the “forest park” outside of Portland,
Ore., where they seem to be hiding out. They make cautious trips into the city to the
supermarket and the library, but a lapse by Caroline brings police attention, and they are
taken into custody. Jean Bauer, whose profession is unclear, helps Father secure
employment and brings pots and pans and school clothes for Caroline. Who are these
two? Caroline walks “past posters with my face on them, my old name, and no one sees
me.” Father says: “If I weren't your father... how could I have walked right into your
backyard and walked away with you and no one said a word?” This is a tale of survival,
of love and attachment, of mystery and alienation. It is an utterly entrancing book, a bow
to Thoreau and a nod to the detective story. Every step of this narrative, despite providing
more questions than answers, rings true. (Mar.) --Staff (Reviewed November 24, 2008)
(Publishers Weekly, vol 255, issue 47, p33)
Crazy by Han Nolan
Since his mother's recent death, his mentally ill father, who tried to bury him alive at age
six, has donned a homemade Spartan helmet as protection from mythological Furies,
leaving 15-year-old Jason Papadopoulos feeling like he's living a Greek tragedy. And the
chorus consists of a cast of characters in his mind-a fat, balding movie critic, a kid who
once Krazy Glued his fingers together, Sexy Lady (who always finds Jason hot), Aunt
Bee from The Andy Griffith Show and his own laugh track-whose commentary
punctuates his first-person narration throughout. In this distinct and effective blend of
sorrow and humor, Jason, once invisible to his classmates and used to the chaos at home,
suffers the effects of change when he's enrolled in a lunch-hour group therapy with other
wayward teens and his father is taken away. Wracked with guilt (why couldn't he fix his
parents?), grief (why did they abandon him?) and fear (do the voices in his head make
2
Book Options
Student/Staff Book Club
October 6, 2010
him crazy too?), he slowly learns, with the help of his new friends and foster parents,
normalcy and how to care for himself first. (Fiction. 12 & up)
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow
Durrow's first novel, inspired by a real event, won the 2008 Bellwether Prize for best
fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. The young protagonist, Rachel, is
the only survivor after her mother apparently threw her and her two siblings from a roof
and then jumped to her own death. Like a good mystery, this book builds to the startling
revelation of what really happened and why a loving mother would kill her children. But
there's much more, and if the novel has a weakness, it's that it oozes conflict. Rachel, who
is biracial, is abandoned by her father; a boy who witnesses the rooftop incident has his
own difficulties, including a neglectful mother who's also a prostitute. But one can't help
but be drawn in by these characters and by the novel's exploration of race and identity.
Verdict With similar themes to Zadie Smith's White Teeth and a tone of desolation and
dislocation like Graham Swift's Waterland and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, this is
also recommended for readers intrigued by the psychology behind shocking headlines.Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC Copyright 2009 Reed Business
Information.
The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin by Josh Berk This witty tale of mainstreaming,
misfits and murder glitters like the "Future Diamonds" that coal-mine souvenirs promise
to someday become. Sixteen-year-old Will lives in Pennsylvania coal country. Correct
guesses on a hearing test and a false promise to wear hearing aids allow him to
mainstream for the first time. Being fat and deaf is no social boost, and lip reading--easier
for Will than for someone deaf since birth, but still sketchy--only goes so far. In a droll
present tense, ironic and self-mocking but somehow also centered, Will talks about his
ancestor namesake's appearance in a history book as a ghost, his class's field trip that
turns murderous and his dry acquiescence to sleuthing, à la the Hardy Boys, with eager
geek pal Smiley. Dickinson and Poe receive equally keen references (a stolen "Deaf
Child" traffic sign beats metaphorically under Will's bed). Only a clichéd fatness
explanation (overeating) and the implausibility of such highly successful lip reading
distract; but the funny, clever voice and the small but spot-on thread of deaf politics make
this a winner. (Fiction. 12-16)
Graphic Novels
Stitches by David Small
Prolific, Caldecott Medal–winning Small makes the leap to the graphic novel with a spare
and unflinching memoir. Set on a black page, the haunting words I was six preface a
scene of 1950s, soot-stained Detroit. Successive panels dolly slowly in on a boy sprawled
out on the floor, drawing. “Mama had her little cough” breaks the reverie, and we’re off
into the nightmare of Small’s upbringing, dominated by his mother’s hateful silences and
his physician father’s pipe-smoking impassivity. At 14, the boy goes in for minor throat
surgery (which was secretly for the cancer his father gave him by subjecting him, as a
baby, to X-rays) and wakes up maimed and effectively muted with a severed vocal
3
Book Options
Student/Staff Book Club
October 6, 2010
cord—an outcome made all the more devastating because it is so potently metaphoric of
his family life. The suffocating silences of the household swell in grays and blacks with
more nuance than lesser artists achieve with full rainbows of color, and Small’s stark
lines and intricacies of facial expression obliterate the divide between simplicity and
sophistication. Like other “important” graphic works it seems destined to sit beside—
think no less than Maus—this is a frequently disturbing, pitch-black funny, ultimately
cathartic story whose full impact can only be delivered in the comics medium, which
keeps it palatable as it reinforces its appalling aspects. If there’s any fight left in the
argument that comics aren’t legitimate literature, this is just the thing to enlighten the
naysayers.
Non Fiction
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Wilkerson, Isabel
With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells the story of the decades-long migration of
black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, from 1915 to 1970,
through the lives of three unique individuals.
4