Book Trailer of the Week: Maddie on Things

Time for another Book Trailer of the Week...this time for one of those up-beat, feel-good books that are really hard to resist.

Maddie on Things is a picture-filled book about Maddie, a rescued dog and the man who brought her home.  Maddie, as it turns out, has a special talent (make that two special talents): perfect balance and limitless patience with her owner.

Take a look at this - and be ready to smile:


(21st Book Trailer of the week in a continuing series of unusual and memorable book trailers spotted by Book Chase)

Chin Music

Baseball fans are a sentimental lot.  When it comes to our game, we believe in fairy tales and happy endings.  We root for the underdog, and what’s more, we expect him to win more times than not.  We love baseball so much that we sometimes stop to watch little league games randomly spotted while driving someplace else.  And we instinctively recognize likeminded souls and will spend whole games talking baseball with the new friends who just happen to sit down beside or in front of us.  Lee Edelstein, author of Chin Music, is obviously a member of the club. 

Chin Music, Edelstein’s debut novel, is one of those YA novels that will be enjoyed as much by adults as by its YA readers.  Simply put, it is a wonderful baseball fairy tale, and its Spring Training publication date could not be more perfect.  Baseball fans, already anticipating the start of the new season, love to get their hands on this kind of thing about now.

The story begins during 1926 Spring Training in St. Petersburg, Florida.  Babe Ruth and the rest of the New York Yankees are there to prepare themselves for the new season.  But Babe Ruth, being the Babe, has more on his mind than physical training - and he takes a particular shine to Zel, the lady barber who cuts his hair every week.  Now, more than eight decades later, Babe Ruth is about to rock the baseball world again.

Lee Edelstein

Ryan Buck, Zel’s great grandson, is a gifted, but under-achieving, athlete.  Two years after a horrific accident, he has no memory of the accident itself but is plagued by nightmares related to it.  Unable to focus on the moment, Ryan is ready to give up sports for good.  Susan, his mother, knows that if her two sons are to have the kind of lives she envisions for them, she will have to raise some cash – and quickly.  And that is when she remembers the pristine Babe Ruth baseball cards Zel left behind.

Knowing almost nothing about the value of baseball cards, Susan is ripe for the picking.  But when an unscrupulous Orlando baseball card dealer tries to buy the car for a fraction of its worth, Susan makes the most important friend she has ever had.  That chance meeting between Susan Buck and Sam Frank will turn out to be almost as important to the Buck family as the one between Babe and Zel all those years ago.

Chin Music is the perfect novel for the season, but it is also the kind of feel-good baseball story that non-fans will also greatly enjoy.  Ryan Buck knows he has the ability to handle the “chin music” (a fastball thrown at a batter’s head) he might encounter during a baseball game.  The real question is whether he can handle the “chin music” life has already thrown at the Buck family.

Kinsey and Me

Sue Grafton is justifiably famous for her long-running Kinsey Millhone series, a series that is rapidly approaching a major milestone as it approaches the end of the run for the alphabetically christened novels.  Because “V” Is for Vengeance was published way back in 2011, fans of the series are certain to be pleased with the release of Kinsey and Me, a collection of nine (1986-1993) Kinsey Millhone short stories and a bonus section: the “and Me” portion of the book encompasses another bunch of very personal short stories closely based on the author’s own childhood and dysfunctional family.

Along the way, Grafton also explains the mystery/crime genres and discusses why she enjoys working within the limitations of the short story format.  Unfortunately, the Kinsey Millhone stories, precisely because Grafton fails to overcome those limitations, are not nearly as effective or impressive as the Millhone novels.  The nine short stories are cleverly enough plotted, but only one or two of the cases require Kinsey Millhone to break much of a sweat.  It is just all too easy for her.

Sue Grafton

Some of the stories, though, are fun.  “Falling Off the Roof” has a nice anti-Stepford-wife twist to it that had me chuckling, and “Full Circle” builds the tension nicely considering the number of pages the author allots to it.  Others, particularly “The Lying Game,” are just too clever for their own good, when read in a story collection.  They would probably be more effective when read as single stories in a magazine or in a collection encompassing several authors.

I admire Grafton’s courage in publishing the “and Me” stories.  What these stories reveal about Grafton’s background and childhood is sad, but they explain the origin of the author’s fascination with the mystery genre and her general love of books and reading.  She is to be applauded for sharing the stories, but be warned: they are rather depressing and are not at all like anything from her that fans have read before.  Grafton’s personal story is worthy of a full-fledged memoir, something her fans would, I think, appreciate.  Let’s hope something like this is in Grafton’s future writing plans.

9th Annual Tournament of Books Has Begun

March Madness (of the best kind) is finally here.  The Morning News Tournament of Books started yesterday with a wildcard shootout between three Iraq War novels: The Yellow Birds, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, and Fobbit.  Judge Nathan Bradley, in a detailed comparison of the three novels, declared Billy Lynn to be the winner of the pre-tourney round, earning the novel a head-to-head match with May We Be Forgiven on March 12.

Official tournament play opens on March 7 with Louise Erdich's The Round House vs. John Green's The Fault in Our Stars.  Edan Lepucki will determine the winner of this first official pairing.  Including the wildcard winner, there are now 16 books in the tournament, and starting March 7, one book will be eliminated each weekday in March - right down to the eventual 2013 champion.  

I have read four of the sixteen books and I'm familiar with four or five of the others, so this one should be fun.  I'm pulling for either Alice Munro's Dear Life or Erdrich's The Round House to be the last book standing, but that is probably the kiss of death to their chances, so I will apologize to both ladies now.

You can join the fun here.

Defacing Textbooks: An Asian Art Form

Via a rather complex but entirely random web-browsing route, I ended up at Kotaku.com this morning and spotted a blog post all about how creatively Asian students deface the portraits in their school textbooks.

If these are really done by students (and who really knows?), these kids are a lot more creative than the high school population I was a part of:

Do follow the link I've highlighted to get back to the Kotaku website where you'll find lots more like these.  I suspect that some of them will make you smile this morning.

(Click on the images to view larger versions of each.)

The Accursed

In the early 1980s, Joyce Carol Oates wrote several novels in styles reminiscent of the late nineteenth century: gothic novel Bellefleur, a mystery titled Mysteries of Winterthurn, and period romance called Bloodsmoor Romance.  At that point, it seemed that Oates was done with those styles.  But, as it turns out, Ms. Oates also completed an early draft in 1984 of a second gothic novel, The Accursed, which she did not finally complete until 2012.

Set in Princeton, New Jersey, during parts of 1905-06, The Accursed is the story of the worst years imaginable in the lives of the town’s wealthiest and most powerful families.  They are cursed by supernatural forces that are determined to destroy them one person at a time, beginning with their daughters.  Particularly hard hit by the curse are the grandchildren of greatly respected theologian Winslow Slade.  Some seven decades later, M.W. van Dyck II, descendent of one of those prominent Princeton families, narrates The Accursed and presents all the evidence and history that he has assembled about those fourteen months. 

The troubles, although no one makes an immediate connection, begin with the arrival of a charming foreigner who is quickly accepted into the homes of Princeton’s finest families.  Soon dreams dominated by ghosts, vampires, and bloody slaughter become common in Princeton’s finest homes.  Even worse, the exotic “prince” is quietly using his charms to worm his way into the affections of Princeton’s young women, be they married or not – with tragic results for each of his conquests.

Joyce Carol Oates

The Accursed is filled with historical detail built around an assortment of well-known figures: Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Samuel Clemens, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London, among them.  Seamlessly mixing historical and fictional characters, Oates uses rather unflattering characterizations of these real-life figures to create the supernatural atmosphere of 1905 Princeton.  Each (especially Wilson, Cleveland, Sinclair, and London) will suffer in some way because of Princeton’s “curse.”

This novel, however, is dominated by its supernatural elements, and if it were shelved by genre, it would more likely be found on a bookstore’s Horror shelves rather than among its Fiction titles.  The demon’s horrific underworld, within which the most unfortunate victims of the curse are ensnared, is a hell on earth, a place dominated by cruelty, sexual perversion, greed, gluttony, dominance, and depravity – the perfect home for our demon and his sister.

I have read Joyce Carol Oates for the better part of three decades now, and am not surprised by the breadth of her writing.  She has done at least a bit of it all: plays, poetry, literary novels, thrillers and mysteries, journals, reviews, nonfiction, etc.  And she does all of it well.  Parts of The Accursed, however, make for tedious reading, and the novel would have been a better one if shortened by a hundred or so of its more than 650 pages.  Still, JCO fans will not want to miss this one - nor should they.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)