Death is Only the Beginning

What better month than October to consider books where death isn't the end of anybody's story? In these three wildly different books, it's only the beginning.

Croak - Gina D'Amico
Wild child Lex is the despair of her family. She doesn't know why she acts so bad, just that she does. Then her Uncle Mort turns up and explains that her nature is to be a Grim Reaper, and she's scheduled to start right now. Swept away to a town full of Grim Reapers, Lex is just starting to settle in when everything starts to go wrong, and she gets blamed. The story continues in Scorch and concludes in Rogue.

Putting Makeup on Dead People - Jen Violi
Her father has been dead for four years, yet Donna still feels as if it happened yesterday. As her senior year comes to an end, she's floundering around, trying to decide what she wants to do with her life. To her surprise, and the consternation of her family, she decides to go to school to become a mortician. Is she spiraling into a pit of morbid depression, or has she found her true calling?

Nightspell - Leah Cypess
When her sister was sent away to marry a foreign king, Darri vowed to rescue her. But when she arrives in the aptly-named Ghostland, she discovers that the baby sister she remembers has grown into a stranger. In this land populated with the living and the dead, it's not always obvious who's on your side.

GLBT Favorites

Our GLBT Services Committee is hosting a great author event in April, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk it up and recommend some other favorite books, too! Sister Spit is a dynamic audio/visual performance headlined by Dorothy Allison and Michelle Tea, plus other special guests. They will be performing with two free shows at Fluxx Gallery, 414 E. 9th St., on Saturday, April 7th, at 4 and 9pm. (Dorothy Allison will be at the first show only.) Read on for more GLBT books...

The Forgotten Waltz

Anne Enright explores adultery - Irish style - in her latest novel The Forgotten Waltz as Gina Moynihan recalls her attraction to Sean, the resulting affair and the casualties resulting from the dissolution of two families. What starts as a story about a self-absorbed love affair becomes an unsentimental cautionary tale told through sharp observations and unflinching prose.  As with all of us, Gina's recollections are not linear and the most compelling are the dynamics between Gina and her beautiful excessive parents, and Sean with his brittle wife and fragile daughter.

The Library Journal summarizes this complicated tale best when describing it as, "A breathtaking work that will surprise you." Be surprised by this and other fine works by Anne Engright including her Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Gathering at your Library.

Vicki Ann

Terrorism Up Close and Personal

Some lives and some novels are dramatically altered by one defining moment.  Incendiary by British journalist Chris Cleave is a brilliantly haunting example of Before and After.

On a lovely spring day, the narrator's husband and four year old son are happily attending a football match when 11 terrorist bombs explode in Arsenal Stadium blowing them and a thousand other spectators to bits and pieces.

Death, Cataloged

I'm a big believer in judging a book by its cover! I browse the library's new arrivals all the time, looking for a catchy title, an author I've heard good things about, or a description that grabs me. The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham was one that appealed to two very different sides of me: the one that loves catalogs (naturally, since I work at the library!), and the one that morbidly enjoys grief memoirs. In this National Book Award finalist, Wickersham crafts the stark, painful story of her father's suicide, organized in an index.