If
you’re looking for a good book this summer, you won’t need to look further than
Hamline’s Graduate School of Liberal Studies, whose faculty, alumni, and students
have churned out enough titles to please the pickiest of readers. From children’s
literature to adult, historical fiction to poetry, there’s something for everyone in their
latest crop of books. Find a hammock, grab a snack, and dig in!
FICTION
Falling Boy
Professor
Alison McGhee
Picador
(also
suitable for young adults)
March
2007 Talking Volumes feature
“Did
you really rescue your mother from a fate worse than death on a cliff
overlooking the sea?”
After
a mysterious accident left him paralyzed, sixteen-year-old Joseph finds himself
living with his father in Minneapolis and working hot summer days in a bakery.
What happened to the life he used to live? How did he come to be here? Although
they approach the mystery in different ways, two people in Joseph’s new
life—seventeen-year-old Zap, who also works in the bakery, and Enzo, a fierce
and funny nine-year-old girl—both want to find out.
“Are
you really a superhero?” whispers Enzo, who secretly longs for her world to be
transformed. “Please be a superhero.” Stoically quiet, Joseph has never thought
of himself as a superhero, especially now that he is in a wheelchair and can’t
feel his legs. But others disagree. Who is the hero? Who is the enemy? Is
redemption possible, and if so, where is it to be found? In Alison McGhee’s
strange and powerful Falling Boy, a small band of tough kids turn the
myth of the superhero inside out as they face down the shadows of childhood.
The Floor of the Sky
Pam
Carter Joern MFA ’00
University
of Nebraska
2007
Alex Award
2006
Holiday Barnes and Noble
Discover
Great New Writers selection
In
the Nebraska Sandhills, nothing is more sacred than the bond of family and
land—and nothing is more capable of causing deep wounds. In Pamela Carter
Joern’s riveting novel The Floor of the Sky, Toby Jenkins, an aging
widow, is on the verge of losing her family’s ranch when her granddaughter
Lila—a city girl, sixteen and pregnant—shows up for the summer. While facing
painful decisions about her future, Lila uncovers festering secrets about her
grandmother’s past—discoveries that spur Toby to reconsider the ambiguous ties
she holds to her embittered sister Gertie, her loyal ranch hand George, her
not-so-sympathetic daughter Nola Jean, and ultimately, herself.
Propelled
by stark realism in breakneck prose, The Floor of the Sky reveals the
inner worlds of characters isolated by geography and habit. Set against the
sweeping changes in rural America—from the onslaught of corporate agribusiness
to the pressures exerted by superstores on small towns—Joern’s compelling story
bears witness to the fortitude and hard-won wisdom of people whose lives have
been forged by devotion to the land.
Cirkus
Patti
Frazee MFA ’02
Alyson
In
this astonishing debut novel, enchantment and illusion casually commingle with
reality as the Borefsky Brothers Circus makes its way across the American
Midwest in the summer of 1900. Mariana, the fortune teller, makes herself
invisible and drifts through the nighttime circus, listening in on conversations
and watching over her beloved Shanghai, a fire-breathing dwarf who closely
guards his secrets, even from Mariana’s second sight. Conjoined twins Atasha
and Anna cling to each other and weep for their home and for their mother and
father who sold them to the circus. Jakub, the circus manager and husband to
Mariana, fears his wife’s gifts, grieves his own failures, and drinks to forget
it all. The stories and closely guarded histories of the troupe of performers
dance around each other until a love affair between Shanghai and Atasha
destroys the delicate balance.
As
secrets are revealed and old wounds are opened, the consequences are unbearable
to some and liberating to others. Cirkus is a haunting novel of
devastating heartbreak and exquisite loveliness.
When CharlotteComes Home
Maureen
Millea Smith
MFA
’00
Alyson
2007
Minnesota Book Award
Unspoken
and unrequited love, loss of life and loss of innocence, facing change and
changing times—these are the elements of this subtle and beautifully written
novel of regret and redemption.
Looking
back over the past thirty years of his life, Fred Holly recounts the loss of
his younger sister Charlotte during his senior year in high school.
Simultaneously, his circle of friends is now beginning to go their separate
ways. The direction of Fred’s life changes course over the years to deliver him
to where and who he is today, but the regret of all this loss still haunts him.
Through
the subtle telling of his story, Fred finds the strength to let go of regret
and seek happiness with his life as it is today.
YOUNG ADULT
Someone Named Eva
Joan
Wolf MFA ’01
Clarion
On
the night Nazi soldiers come to her home in Czechoslovakia, Milada’s
grandmother says, “Remember, Milada. Remember who you are. Always.” Milada
promises, but she doesn’t understand her grandmother’s words. After all, she is
Milada, who lives with her mama and papa, her brother and sister, and her
beloved Babichka. Milada, eleven years old, the fastest runner in school. How
could she ever forget?
Then
the Nazis take Milada away from her family and send her to a Lebensborn center
in Poland. There, she is told she fits the Aryan ideal: her blond hair and blue
eyes are the right color; her head and nose, the right size. She is given a new
name, Eva, and trained to become the perfect German citizen, to be the hope of
Germany’s future—and to forget she was ever a Czech girl named Milada. Inspired
by real events, this fascinating novel sheds light on a little-known aspect of
the Nazi agenda and movingly portrays a young girl’s struggle to hold on to her
identity and her hope in the face of a regime intent on destroying both.
Strays
Professor
Ron Koertge
Candlewick
Sixteen-year-old
Ted O’Connor’s parents just died in a fiery car crash, and now he’s stuck with
a set of semi-psycho foster parents, two foster brothers—Astin, the cocky
gearhead, and C.W., the sometimes gangsta—and an inner-city high school full of
delinquents. He’s having pretty much the worst year of his miserable life. Or
so he thinks. Is it possible that becoming an orphan is not the worst thing
that could have happened to him?
Master
novelist Ron Koertge brings his best work yet, a smart, surprising story full
of trademark wit and sharp insight about a boy learning to run with a new pack.
Could life as a foster kid lead to unexpected benefits? A teenager’s link to
animals gives way to human connection in a smart, incisive new novel.
Tomorrow the River
Dianne
Gray MALS ’96
Houghton
Mifflin
With
a long list of her mother’s dos and don’ts swirling in her head, and with a
ticket that will get her only halfway home at the end of the summer,
fourteen-year old Megan Barnett boards the eastbound train. Her destination,
the Mississippi River at Burlington, Iowa, is twenty-four hours and a host of
unfamiliar seatmates away. The most pleasant of these characters is Horace, an
engineering student whose passion for newspapers, as well as a sharp curve of
the tracks, lands him nearly in Megan’s lap. The parade of interesting
strangers—some of whom are not what they seem—doesn’t end with Megan’s arrival
in Burlington, where she joins her sister’s family on the riverboat the Oh My.
River travel, as Megan quickly learns, is fraught with danger, both on the
water and off. A keen eye for seeing beneath the surface of things can make all
the difference. Leaving a trail of discarded rules and newspaper headlines in
her wake, Megan takes on the river and reaps its rewards.
In Search of Mockingbird
Loretta
Ellsworth, student
Henry
Holt and Co.
Sometimes
the things that need to be discovered aren’t so easily found at home.
Erin
is certain that this is true in her case. A book is all that connects Erin to
her mother, who died when she was a baby. But how much can Erin really learn
about her mother from a tattered copy of To Kill a Mockingbird ? On the
eve of her sixteenth birthday, Erin decides it’s finally time to find out. And
so begins her bus journey from Minnesota to Alabama in search of Harper Lee,
the reclusive author of Mockingbird.
In
a novel full of quirky characters, strange coincidences, and on-the-road
adventures, Loretta Ellsworth deftly traces a unique voyage of self-discovery.
CHILDREN
Someday
Professor
Alison McGhee
Atheneum
What
parents wish for their child is a chance to live life at its fullest—to
experience great joys, to stretch, to grow, to understand sorrow, to have a
future…to have a someday. Alison McGhee and Peter H. Reynolds have taken this
idea and turned it into something so poignant yet so simple and pure that it
will deeply touch readers of every age.
POETRY
Willow Room, Green Door:New and Selected Poems
Professor
Deborah Keenan
Milkweed
Editions
Written
over the course of three decades, this extraordinary collection of new and
selected poems presents a body of work from Deborah Keenan that is expressive
variously of love and rage, vulnerability and authority, distraction and focus,
and perhaps above all, a sharply empathetic sense of observation. Deborah
Keenan’s work balances holding on to what is dear with letting go of what she
cannot change.
From
a Minneapolis Star Tribune review of the book: “This collection is full
of the author’s earthy lyricism and strong maternal love. ‘Willow Room,’ for
example, recounts the storied childhoods of two girls exploring the Twin
Cities—from Lake of the Isles to St. Kate’s campus—in canoes, kayaks, and
buses. After a storm, in language so evocative that readers will smell the
rained-soaked earth, the ‘two beauties’ gather fallen willow boughs and fashion
their own paradise indoors.”