Got the email today informing me I have Guest status for Dragon*Con. Very exciting. It is so much fun to spend Labor Day weekend submersed in Science Fiction and Fantasy in Atlanta. I haven’t faxed back my letter of agreement yet so my name isn’t on the list but the list of confirmed guests is at http://www.dragoncon.org/dc_guests_list.php.
Baby Shark by Robert Fate was one of my favorite books of 2006 so I was glad to hear from the author that it was being offered for FREE on Kindle (http://tinyurl.com/freebabyshark) for a few days. I went back to my old review at http://www.genrefluent.com/vol11no3.html#babyshark
Please let me know if you read it and what you think.
Crime/ Noir/ Mystery/ Historical/ 1950s
Baby Shark
Fate, Robert
Capital Crime Press0977627691 2006
Kristin Van Dijk was only seventeen on the west Texas October night in 1952 when an outlaw biker gang overran Henry’s pool room killing her father and Henry’s son, beating and gang raping her, and burning the place to the ground. Henry, a Chinese immigrant, and Kristin survive. When they are healed from the beatings they wonder why the police don’t seem to be concerned with chasing down the murderers. The insurance company has paid the claim as an accidental fire. Henry and Kristin start training to survive, knowing that they won’t be safe as long as the four bikers are on the loose and that there is a mystery behind why they targeted Kristin’s father, a pool shark. Kristin takes up her father’s trade and acquires the nickname Baby Shark. This first novel is Texas noir at its best. Readers will be eagerly awaiting Baby Shark’s Beaumont Blues.
In Jo Knowles best book to date we meet a family that runs a restaurant called Harry’s. They are ordinary except for the fact that their lives revolve around the family business, originally started by Fern’s grandfather. The parents share some of the annoying and embarrassing traits many young teens see in their own. The children of the family are all named after book characters, Sarah who has already graduated from high school, Holden who is in high school and is bullied, Charlie, the three-year-old baby of the family who has become an emblem of Harry’s, and Fern, twelve-years-old (putting this at the youngest end of YA and also for middle grade readers) who is coming into her own when tragedy strikes.
It has been two and a half months since I read the ARC of this book and I can feel its power by the way Charlie’s stickiness and smelliness still come immediately to mind. This is a heart wrenching, sad, beautiful, extraordinary tale of loss, guilt, and going on again. Not to be missed.
This spells total frustration.
How the heck did I miss the announcement? Anyway, here are the nominees. http://www.yalsa.ala.org/thehub/2012/04/12/yalsas-teens-top-ten-nominations-announced/ I’m feeling pretty good about staying on top of my reading since I have already read 22 of the 24 nominees. Yay. Now I just have to go find Hourglass by Myra McEntire and Page by Paige by Laura Lee Gulledge.
With speeds like this, I’ll not be online much today. Wish we could find an ISP that could deliver on what they promise.
Woodson tackles a tough topic, a fifteen-year-old killing herself with meth, in a sensitive and compelling way. Laurel’s life changed when a hurricane swept through Pass Christian, Mississippi. Her dad had taken her and her brother to their aunt’s house in Jackson but her mother stayed in their home with her grandmother who refused to leave. Two years after the tragedy, Laurel’s father takes a job in a small town far from Pass Christian. Laurel finds a best friend and becomes a member of the cheerleading squad bringing her to the attention of a football player who gives her first kiss and starts her on meth. A few months later she is homeless, begging in the streets of a nearby town and meets Moses, a teen in foster care who paints murals of people who have killed themselves with meth. I love that Woodson is skilled enough that she can pull no punches in presenting a bleak story but still include redemption and hope.
