You've met Scout Finch, Ellen Foster, and Ruth Anne Boatwright (Bone): Now meet Girl Brown, the spunkiest nine-year-old in all the South. Girl lives with Tracie, her guardian, who smokes so much pot she "can't remember a thing," and Antoe, who is "big like a grown-up" only he is Girl's best (and only) friend and playmate. She spends most of her time taking care of Antoe and making sure they both keep out of Chuck's way. Chuck is Tracie's disabled Vietnam vet boyfriend who is fighting his own demons with too much whiskey and too much heroin and he hates what he calls "sassy-mouthed" kids. And Girl is the sassiest of them all with a mouth like a sailor on leave, and fingers so sticky she can clean out the local Woolworth store in a heartbeat. Life begins to spiral out of control when she finds a friend in the only African-American girl in her class, Cerese Miller, and begins to spend time with the Millers against Chuck's demands. Things take an even grimmer turn when Chuck is thrown in jail for beating up Cerese's older brother, Brady, and Antoe is mysteriously sent away. Girl sets off on a journey to find Antoe that leads her to some unexpected allies in a monastery of Carmelite friars, and from Brother Joseph, she is able to piece together the heartbreaking truth about her parents. After Brother Joseph takes Girl back home, there is an unexpected death that she may or may not have had something to do with, and Brother Joseph offers Girl the opportunity for a different life. The Naming of Girl is a page turner of a first novel with a group of the most unforgettable characters you will ever meet.

The Naming of Girl

Teen & Young Adult

Williams, Rhonda G.

Literature & Fiction

Upper Hand Press LLC

When you step off the train in Cadillac, Oklahoma, you'll wade through currents of hilarity and romance where the sheriff is in love with the wife of a prominent lawyer, and the banker's widow and a Las Vegas sex worker team up to beautify Cadillac. Not until a young female reporter cracks open the self-satisfied surface of the town is the folly, anger, and pain revealed. The resentments of tree-huggers, storeowners, and the town fathers ignite over a proposal to create a New England-style town green in this water-starved former Dust Bowl town. 
Citizens who don't care about town politics, deal with domestic abuse, religious rivalry and stale marriages. The sheriff, Jake Hale, seeks help from a retired lawyer, Sloane Willard, in an effort to save the life of a teenage girl accused of murdering the father who raped her. The town's guiding forces of rule following, religion, and guns unite as a praying mass of church-goers overwhelm Jake's attempt to manage an out-of-control hostage situation at Cadillac's Youth Detention Center. Before you get back on the train, you will have grown to love these people and their thirst for love, beauty, water and justice.

Cadillac, Oklahoma

Smith, Louise Farmer

United States

Second Edition with Book Club notes and author interview by Ronna Wineberg, Senior Fiction Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review. In a series of interlocked stories Louise Farmer Smith, the author of ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MARRIAGE, pierces the myths through four generations of one American family's mismatched marriages--the teenage girl lifted out of the hunger and chaos that followed the Civil War; the suicidal wife isolated on the Oklahoma prairie; the china painter whose husband cannot make a living; and her daughter who dreamed of luxury. Dark? Yes, but full of humor too. These six stories move backward in time to search out the influences on the next generation--the standards, prejudices, and overheard conversations that they forget but carry with them when they choose a spouse. This novel in stories is a practical pre-history of the momentum leading to women's liberation. It is a substantial addition to the social history of American women. Thoroughly researched the stories compellingly paint the settings of post-Civil War pioneer life and the female-dominated 40s, with the men at war.

One Hundred Years of Marriage

Have you ever tried to be the perfect mother? Isabel, a DC lawyer, does everything she can to keep Phoebe from harm, but fails when the mysterious Shane appears on Facebook and flirts with her teenage daughter. 
A story about the timeless struggle between mothers and their teen daughters with a razor-sharp 21st century twist. This heart-wrenching, harrowing debut novel for fans of Big Little Lies (Liane Moriarty) and Reconstructing Amelia (Kimberly McCreight) will make you question what's needed to keep your children from harm. Phoebe's mother, Isabel, is precariously balancing her career and her family. 
Hard-working and caring, worried but supportive, all Isabel wants, in a world of bullies and temptations, is to keep her daughter Phoebe safe. With her busy schedule, though, she fails to recognize another mother's mounting fury and the danger Phoebe faces by flirting with a mysterious boy on Facebook. A cyber-bullying episode aimed at Phoebe pushes her to the edge with horrific consequences. In her search for justice, Isabel, a DC lawyer, sets out to find the culprit behind this cruel incident. 
Saving Phoebe Murrow, set amidst the complicated web of adolescent relationships, tells a story of miscommunication and malice, drugs and Facebook, prejudice and revenge.

Saving Phoebe Murrow

Feely, Herta

Free Ferry reveals the intrigue and secrecy around the first isolation of plutonium and its impact on an iconic “nuclear” family decades later. Science collides with mythology as the narrator observes her mother, Eurydice, embrace and resist an “underground” existence as postwar suburban housewife. In this 1960s snapshot of classic Americana, idyllic peace flows over undercurrents of annihilation. From outrageous alchemy to Cold War espionage, this book-length poem tracks the lyrical legacies of the first manmade element. 
The poet's father-in-law, one of the project's chief scientists, inspired the private narrative around this world-changing event that few know.

Free Ferry (Booktree Poetry Series, 1)

Cefola, Ann

Poetry

Rickie Trujillo has the means to escape his poor neighborhood in Los Angeles, a neighborhood in which schools are more important as safe havens from the danger on the streets than as places to learn; a neighborhood where tag-bangers who get crossed out get revenge; where sirens sound in the night and cops respond to another shooting at a bus stop or at a red light where someone has given the wrong answer to the question, “Where're you from?” 
Rickie is a gifted baseball player with enough skill to carry him out of this place to a safe and successful future. Rickie Trujillo is a literary YA novel that details the events during three days of Rickie Trujillo's life and his journey away from that future. 
Infuriated by his father's sudden appearance after years of silence and absence, Rickie and his tagger friend, Alex, make an ill-advised decision to rob an electronics store on a Sunday evening. When Rickie is accosted by a rookie policeman, he shoots the cop as he wrestles the weapon away from him. 
Now begins a desperate and frantic race through the neighborhood looking for a place to hide, a race that takes Rickie into a stranger's apartment in search of his baseball coach and finally brings him to the attic of an abandoned house where, in fear of the inevitable, he desperately searches for reasons to survive.

Rickie Trujillo

Bradley, Nicholas

"Two people, husband and wife, sat side by side on the wagon bench. Though they looked down the same rough road and experienced the same dazzling or dismal scenery, the diaries suggest that they lived in different worlds." Louise Farmer Smith sets us squarely by the side of the woman on the wagon bench and vividly recreates the turmoil, excitement, and trepidation pioneer women experienced as they moved into the unknown.\ The Woman Without a Voice tells the story of a pioneering family―her own, much like that of Laura Ingalls Wilder's. However this story is not seen through the perspective of a child, but of a woman, mother, and wife. Using diaries and family stories, Smith focuses on the pioneer women in her own family. Silence and submission were the lot of married women who had no property and no say in where or how their families would live.

The Woman Without a Voice: Pioneering in Dugout, Sod House and Homestead

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

These lyric poems concern poetry as a medium that transforms the daily world. Bracker invokes the works of other poets that enrich and translate his experience; his own pen powers associations that stitch biographical and sensory episodes into a spreading, bright veil of questions and freshly-discovered beauty to study.

Concerning Poetry: Poems about Poetry (Booktree Poetry Series, 2)

Bracker, Jonathan

My Virtuous Sister is a story of abuse, revenge and redemption that debuts missing 20-year-old Welsh emigrée Peddie Smout, famous as a rock star at the end of the last millennium. Among the post-9/11 rubble, her younger brother and soulmate Nate arrives in holiday-season Manhattan in search of his sister. By piecing together the ragged index cards of the makeshift diary he recovers from the Grand Central locker in which Peddie had secreted it, Nate unfolds the story of previous New Year's Eve 1999 and the brief fame of songstress Cordelia Peddie Smout, who, after having understood seduction to be a price of business, loses her record deal, gains a heroin habit, and finds salvation in the form of Alcoholics Anonymous. Or, rather, its star member, Teddy D., at whose “sober” New Year's Eve soiree the reader encounters not a few surprises. Though Nate narrates Peddie's trials from a distance through the device of her index card diary, the redemptive love of their sibling bond powers his narration, illuminating all that is resilient and luminous in Peddie's character despite her fall from stardom to very hard times.“Fowler has established himself as the voice of the new generation.” -The Stranger “A strong eye for the awkward interactions between the sexes.” -Entertainment Weekly “Who is this guy? This is who; if you were to make a list of 50 promising first novelists now working in the U.S., Fowler should be on it.” -Miami Herald "So what has changed since Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Cheever recorded the pressures and repression weighing down a sensitive middle-class man trying to make it in a capitalist world? As Fowler tells it, the pressures haven't changed much...Fowler is an expansive, lyrical, inventive writer…Fowler’s invocation of his literary heroes is a joy…” –The New York Times Book Review

My Virtuous Sister

Fowler, Nick

Literary

On a Good Friday in a picturesque village in Upstate New York, the spring weather is unusually warm and school is closed. It's an ideal day for tanning and partying in the park until Shawnee Padrushky, age 17, drives up in his dad's new pick-up and comes out shooting with one victim in mind--Gunther Smith--the only black student in Shawnee's class, the adopted son of white parents. The Crime of Being explores the effects of a racial incident―how it divides a seemingly homogenous community over the course of a summer and exposes its dark secrets. Tarred by the media as “the most racist town in America”, the people of Liberty face tangled questions of whether racism or insanity were at the root of a white teenager's violent assault of his black classmate, and whether the community as a whole can be implicated? Until the incident, the Smiths and the Padrushkys lives rarely intersected, but in its aftermath, their trajectories run strangely parallel as they are forced to look at how they have managed (and mismanaged) their parental responsibilities. Ironically, Shawnee and Gunther, perpetrator and victim, find themselves sharing the territory of otherness as their definitions of self are changed forever.

The Crime of Being

Lichtenstein, Alice

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