November Book: Snow in Havana by Carloe Eire

Dan F will host the November book at his humble abode.
REview pending

Sept book: "After Lucy" by Dan Jones

Young widower Porter Ellis, adrift after his beloved wife, Lucy, dies of breast cancer, trades in her old car for a dilapidated hippie van and takes his two children for a road trip across the country. This piquant debut novel starts off appropriately quiet and torpid, as the ambivalent, grief-numbed Porter flounders before taking the plunge into adventure. Once the Ellises leave their Pittsburgh home and get on the road, however, the story blazes with intensity. The kids, Kaylie, 12, and Ben, eight, are up for the ride, but complications ensue involving Lucy's doting, affluent parents, who are understandably over-protective of their grandchildren and consider Porter's jaunt irresponsible and dangerous. Indeed, Porter, a frustrated artist with a dead-end graphic design job, has no idea where he's going. He and the kids are headed perhaps for Rocky Mountain National Park, but they stop at an Indiana ramshackle "RV resort and spa" established by Deadheads, where the major activities are nude bathing, smoking pot and listening to the Grateful Dead. There, they befriend one of the residents, Delilah, a pregnant masseuse with a gentle touch. Trapped by a bad hangover, angry in-laws and a leaky transmission, Porter finally confronts his grief, his increasingly complex and intimate relationships with his children, and his future. Jones uses humor deftly (the family is plagued with problems involving a cell phone) and sensitively portrays the anger, guilt, frustration and possibilities of renewal that follow the death of a loved one.

October Book: Thirteen Moons @ Steve's

Frazier brings a rough-and-tumble pioneer past magnificently to life, indicts America with painful bluntness for the betrayal of its native people and recounts a romance rife with sadness. In a departure from Cold Mountain's Inman, Will Cooper narrates his own story in retrospect, beginning with his days as an orphaned, literate "bound boy" who is dispatched to run a musty trading post at the edge of the Cherokee Nation. Nearly nine mesmerizing decades later, Will is an eccentric elder of great accomplishments and gargantuan failures, perched cantankerously on his front porch taking potshots at passenger trains rumbling across his property (he owns "quite a few" shares of the railroad). Over the years, Will—modeled very loosely, Frazier acknowledges, on real-life frontiersman William Holland Thomas—becomes a prosperous merchant, a self-taught lawyer and a state senator; he's adopted by a Cherokee elder and later leads the clan as a white Indian chief; he bears terrible witness to the 1838–1839 Trail of Tears; a quarter-century later, he goes to battle for the Confederacy as a self-anointed colonel, leading a mostly Indian force with a "legion of lawyers and bookkeepers and shop clerks" as officers; as time passes, his life intersects with such figures as Davy Crockett, Sen. John C. Calhoun and President Andrew Jackson. After the Civil War, Will fritters away a fortune through wanderlust, neglect and unquenched longing for his one true love, Claire, a girl he won in a card game when they were both 12, wooed for two erotic summers in his teen years and found again several decades later. In the novel's wistful coda, recalling Claire's voice inflicts "flesh wounds of memory, painful but inconclusive"—a voice that an uncertain old Will hears in the static hiss when he answers his newfangled phone in the book's opening pages. The history that Frazier hauntingly unwinds through Will is as melodic as it is melancholy, but the sublime love story is the narrative's true heart.