THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE by Alan Bradley has one of the most engaging and original sleuths in recent years, and she’s eleven years old!  It is the summer of 1950 and several strange events have occurred at Buckshaw, the deLuce family’s English country home.  Flavia deLuce (an aspiring young chemist with a fully equipped Victorian laboratory) investigates, and is clearly the most intelligent person in her family, as well as the funniest.  It’s a delightful book, extremely well-written and I loved it!  Highly recommended by Rochelle and due the end of April 2009 (hardcover $23.00).

The infamous 1967 McKinley climb of 1967 that took the lives of seven promising young mountaineers brought scandal and finger-pointing for years after. A climber himself and former Outside writer, Tabor tries to sift through the details and competing accounts (two of which were made into books of their own) to get to the still-beating heart of the matter. This is a riveting book.  Recommended by Kelly.

THE GLASS BOOKS OF THE DREAM EATERS (Volumes 1 & 2) are extremely entertaining.  They’re a blend of Victorian suspense, adventure, science fiction, with a little eroticism and humor thrown in.  Miss Temple, Cardinal Chang and Dr. Svenson are truly unique characters who find themselves in more than a few harrowing situations.  One review said, “Like Wilkie Collins on acid.”  Highly original and fun!  Recommended by Rochelle.

Kelly McMasters
author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From an Atomic Town
public reading/discussion/signing
Thursday, April 2
7PM @ The Raven

Memoirist shares story of New York town’s environmental hazards.

Check Kelly out at http://www.kellymcmasters.com/

“Welcome to Shirley is an uplifting and disturbing hybrid of the personal and the journalistic.” –Meredith Hall

“This intimate portrait of hardscrabble Shirley, Long Island, shows through individual lives—and deaths—how environmental injustice works.” –Suzannah Lessard

(from book jacket)
“Kelly McMasters grew up loving her blue-collar hometown of Shirley. A service-town to the glittering Hamptons on the ast ent of Long Island, the place, though hardscrabble, was full of strong, hard-working families and an abundance of natural beauty. comforted by the rhythms of small-town life, Kelly and her neighbors were lulled into a sense of safety. But, while they were going to work and school, setting off fireworks at Fourth of July barbecues, or jumping through springklers in summertime, a deadly combination of working-class shame and the environmental catstrophe of a nearby leaking nuclear laboratory began to boil over.
This toxic helix reared its head again and again in the 1980s and ’90s, as Kelly and her family watched neighbors become ill and die….”

Please spread word of this event to anyone who cares about the environment, small towns, health, reading or creative nonfiction.