"H" Authors -- Home, Hearth, and Heartbeat

Author's note: A couple of years ago, my library system added blog posts to our website. Many of the posts were short collections of book reviews, often following a theme. I tried writing a few of these, but never felt like I could keep up with the thought-provoking themes of my librarian colleagues. It was a good challenge, a growth opportunity, and I was honored to have been selected to write for our site. After a few successes, and several wadded-up-and-thrown-in-the-trashcan failures, I realized that what I needed was my old writing partner to get me going again. Enter Polo! 

All of the books reviewed here are available as downloadable audiobooks.

Polo in "active sleeping" mode, ears cocked to listen to book

The Word is Murder

Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz, creator and contributor to many BBC television series (including Foyle’s War) and the popular Alex Rider books for young adult readers, also writes fiction for adults. Imagine that! Mr. Horowitz inserts himself into this story, supposedly observing former police detective Daniel Hawthorne as he works to unravel a suspected murder case. Horowitz cannot keep his fingers out of the pie, though, and he becomes enmeshed in the story. The narrator of the audiobook is amazing, bringing a radio drama presentation to his narration, and I’ll be looking for more audiobooks featuring Rory Kinnear.

Polo’s take: “I like accents when they’re easy to understand, like these. Hawthorne has a hard edge. Horowitz is nicer, believable but sometimes a little clumsy. Good woof!”

The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens

Brooke Hauser

Nonfiction stories of immigrant and refugee teens in a New York City high school and at home. Although we live in one of the most diverse communities in the nation, this is no New York City. We could relate to the students’ histories, though, because refugees are refugees, and their varied backstories have common threads of navigating life despite upheaval, relocation, poverty, and strong cultural identity. The staff at the International High School at Prospect Heights is diverse, quirky, and all-in dedicated to the students who come through their doors. For many of the teens, earning a high school diploma seems a dream – yet the staff do all they can to urge the students to aim for college, to be able to help their families in bigger and better ways over the long haul.

Polo’s response: “I wish I could smell the foods these people eat. The students and their families all sound very interesting… but the dad who comes to cook spicy Chinese dinner for his daughter could be my best new friend!”

A Deadly Grind

Victoria Hamilton

First in the series, “Vintage Kitchen Mysteries.” Antique shopping can be fun, except when it turns deadly. Avid collector Jaymie Leighton has her eye on a 1920’s Hoosier-brand kitchen cabinet, but after she brings it home she finds that someone else wanted it, too, and will do anything to get at it. Murder and lurking villains ensue, while Jaymie works on cleaning up her treasure and stumbles on an unexpected piece of history that is much more valuable than her beloved cabinet. The descriptions of the cabinet brought back memories of a metal cabinet that my parents had in their beach cabin. It was a heavy two-piece thing, too tall to be assembled, so the bottom part lived beside our sink while the top part held dishes and canned goods next to the stove. It was useful at the beach because its construction kept the mice out better than any wood cabinets could.

Polo’s feedback: “I like kitchens. There’s lots of make-fooding there, you know. And this story had food. This story also has a dog, but it’s small and not my kind of DOG. I could have helped a lot more. Still, a woof for this one.”

Spy Secrets That Can Save Your Life

Jason Hanson

Scary at first, but practical “keep your head on a swivel” reminders and suggestions. Polo regularly assures me (barking at the top of his lungs at any crunch of gravel on the street) that he is keeping me safe from everything. That’s great, when I’m at home, but I do leave the house to go to work, shop, or dine out. For these situations, I appreciate being prompted to pay attention to my surroundings, to people who might be watching me a little too closely, and to anything that seems a little “off.” If I am confronted by someone with ill intent, the author impressed on me that I do not have to follow normal social custom in response. Move! Step forward or step aside, look them in the eye or look around for help, but do NOT freeze. Good to know.

Polo’s thoughts: “If I had more language, I would tell you these things. If I am with you, watch my body language. But I don’t ride in car, and I don’t go to the library, so listen to this book again to keep it fresh. Although, if you’d take me to restaurants, I could learn to like car rides.”

The Right Hand

Derek Haas

Spy thriller, black ops, car chases and hiding and explosions and murder… with so many twists and turns that you can only guess at the identity of the villain. The fast pace and action of this story count, for me, as aerobic exercise because of the heart-pounding effect. CIA agent Austin Clay is assigned to find and protect a young Hungarian woman who may have stumbled onto a deadly secret. Hit men are out to get her, there’s a mole in the CIA, the main characters are far from home and safety. Yikes! The scenes play like a movie in your mind, enhancing the effect of the drama.

Polo’s feedback: “Scary! Exciting! Kept raising the fur on the back of my neck!”

Hello? Hi? Is Anybody There?

Golly, when did the wallpaper get changed to this very innocuous light blue fluff? At least I fixed the text so it's black on white. More readable and all that, you know. I've learned a little about writing with accessibility on the Web.

So I've been paying a lot of attention to that daily time-stealing, friend-conversing, mainly-used-by-my-generation face thing. A lot of attention, as in, several years' worth of attention. One lonely blog post here last year. Yikes. I'm sorry! I think often about blogging, but it takes so much time and energy to write up and edit (and edit, and re-edit) multiple paragraphs here. Meanwhile, on that other platform, there are pretty pictures and greetings from friends and more pictures, and I can scroll through a hundred short pieces in an hour and feel as though I've caught up with my people.

But this blog thing has value. Sure, the posts really are short, and they're not deeply personal, but I can pretend that hundreds of kind strangers (or no one at all) will read and nod in understanding. Is there still a place for blogs any more? My, how quickly things change.

I'm blogging for work, though only occasionally. I'm supposed to be able to post book suggestions -- not reviews, exactly, because I don't think I should say that something is so awful that no one should pick it up. I wanted to do this because it's writing, and I'm a writer. (Being a writer, in this case, does not necessarily mean that anyone will choose to read my writings. But I like to write.) Once I got all trained and instructed in the professional aspects of writing for work, I did a few posts... and lost my motivation. Crickets.

Recently, however, I re-discovered my muse and became re-energized to blog again. My alter ego, my writer-side, was right there in front of me all the time. I just hadn't been looking to him for help, because this was supposed to be professional, you know, for my career, writing. This muse of mine, you see, has a sweet face, a black and pink mottled nose, and a long wagging tail. It's Polo. It's so much easier to imagine my dog's responses to things than to write my own highly edited thoughts. Polo is straightforward, honest, and only a little bit cynical about human nature. He's kind and witty. And he uses a simpler vocabulary than I can muster. (Another rule about writing for the work blog is to keep it very readable for English language learners. I don't mean to sound high-falutin' -- it just happens to be how the words fly off my fingers.)

So, I'm taking my dog to work these days, hoping he can get away with writing book stuff for me. We'll see how it goes. At least 30% of the blog posts on our website are read by fellow staff members, and everything is carefully reviewed as soon as it's published. If Polo isn't allowed on that blog, at least he can come back here to lend a paw regularly.

Thanks for checking in. I'll try to get back here more often. Mostly, I'll try to write. Somewhere. Like this guy on the side of a building at the University of Washington. Because he's been at it a long time, and he isn't finished yet.

I Love a Parade!!!

When I was a kid, The Parade* was a big deal. I was fortunate enough to be able to play in a school band starting in the fifth grade, and it was tough for me to choose between learning the very melodious french horn or playing the drums so I could make other hearts pound with my cadence. I chose percussion, although I later spent a summer trying to learn the horn. (One upperclassman had said I'd get beaten up if I showed up to play drums in the high school band.)

 

These assorted photos are a little memento of three hours spent standing on the sidewalk with a good friend. Since I like to keep my blog semi-anonymous, the images are jumbled and blurred and tiny. However, in honor of my trombone-playing brothers and *that* high school, I included a photo of the back of their mascot's head in this collage. The rest of the photos are either percussion-related or some other special interest.

 

 

There's a little more to the story. My friend had to listen to my rants about how they've changed the parade route (no more waiting for the train crossing), no shoes could be worse for your feet than discount-chain deck shoes, no uniform could be uglier than my band's, and no drums these days are as heavy and ungainly as those I carried. And it was uphill both ways, in the snow, in 90-degree weather, with lots of reminders that there were mounted units ahead of us. That's how it was, back in the day.


*Actually, there are four parades in this neck of the woods. All on the same day, all celebrating the gloriousness of daffodils and the joys of a capitalist economy.

And now for a P.S.
The photo collage that looked so good on my screen was apparently too good to load, so it had to be replaced with a few individual shots. Those shots were hand-pasted into the text, taking much time and effort because they kept covering bits of said text. Argh! Since I'm doing this postscript, I'd like to add that my favorite band uniforms are shown in the last drum line photo. The school's mascot is a logger, and the band gets to wear tan Carhartts, work shirts, and orange suspenders! Too cool for words!

The Beautiful Palouse Region

About 20 years ago, my husband and I lived in the Palouse area of Washington state. I have many wonderful memories of this season of our lives, and the scenery of the countryside evokes strong emotions in me to this day. I wrote this piece on one of those homesick days, to share my memories with a friend. Do an image search after you read this, and see how close your mental image is to some of the real thing.


I miss the rolling hills of the Palouse country. I enjoyed the pace and the common ground (pun intended) of a community with one main occupation to support. I liked the change of seasons -- not just the weather, but the activities and demands. The seasons flowed gently from one to the next, and it was good.

I never tired of driving through and looking at the Palouse hills. The roads wound gently between the hills, meandering in the general direction you wanted to go. The Palouse region of Washington is the only place on earth, I think, where wheat is grown on rolling hills. It requires special rigging on the tractors to be able to ride the hills and keep the implements down in the soil. The farmers drive the tractors around the hills, not straight over them, so the view from the air is almost a topographic-map design.

The furrows looked like plain brown corduroy, until the wheat started to grow. Winter wheat would sprout early and the fields would just barely begin to turn a little bit greenish. Then the wheat would get a little taller and you'd definitely see the green. When the grass was a few inches tall, the wind would make waves across the fields, up and down the hills. Then the stalks would get stronger and didn't wave, but grew taller and fuller.

Towards the end of summer, the wheat dried out and began to die. It was always good to see the change in color, because then we could start hoping for a good harvest.

The not-so-pretty time was right after harvest when the fields were all stubble and dirt clumped together. No more neat rows of corduroy, but chopped up rows interrupted by clods and upside-down stubble. Some fields would lie fallow over the winter, and they looked scruffy like that until they were plowed in the spring. But the fields that were planted with winter wheat were groomed and made into smooth brown corduroy again in the fall.

Snow added more interest to the patterns. A light snow would melt off the tops of the rows, while each little furrow-valley stayed white. Striped corduroy. When there was more snow, it covered everything with a winter white blanket, insulating the sprouts of winter wheat and protecting them. Eventually the snow would melt wherever the sun hit it all day, making random crescents of brown along the hills and curves.

The sidehills had strips where a hill crested too steeply to be able to plow it. The farmer would leave a little grass along the top of a hill, just below the acme, and it had a sort of eyebrow shape. Sometimes people would plant sunflowers in these, just for fun, but nothing invasive that would try to intrude in the wheat crop.

The Palouse is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. It was my privilege to live there for a while.

Railroad Nostalgia

One of the reasons I love working in libraries is that I get to see what other people are reading. Don't ask me to tell you all about the latest novel by a best-selling author, because I never seem to remember to get my name on the waiting list before publication. (I think I'm number 947 on the list to get a copy of Sue Grafton's T is for Trespass.) But I've learned to let other people do the legwork for me, and I come across the most interesting books just by chance.

I picked up a copy of Gary Krist's White Cascade when I noticed its binding was broken. Right in the center of the book, where the photographic pages were inserted, it was coming apart. Since I had the book open, the photos caught my eye, and I had to see what it was about. Turns out, this fiction writer from Maryland stumbled across news accounts of a train disaster in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest in 1910, and he was hooked. There was a tremendous snowfall that winter that ended up blocking the track and stranding a trainload of travelers high in the Cascades. They begged to be moved to a safer spot, but there didn't appear to be anyplace to go. Besides, what were the chances of an avalanche coming down on that particular spot? This was a great read, and the suspense of waiting for the storm to subside gave me chills for many nights.

A couple of weeks after I finished that book, I saw a wonderful collection of photos taken by former Northern Pacific telegrapher and dispatcher Jim Fredrickson. Railroad Shutterbug contains not only photos, but the stories behind them. Looking through the book will make you want to pull out an old map, unless your old Washington geography skills are very sharp.

The dogs don't care much for books, by the way, but they're happy that I'm willing to sit with them and read for a few hours on a cold Saturday.

Free Nostalgia (t-shirt extra)

While drinking my coffee this morning, I came across a reference to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store chain. There was a Piggly Wiggly store in my neighborhood when I was young. I can almost remember the funny smell of clean, old, wooden grocery shelves. The checker had a little card she had to consult as she finished ringing up our purchases on the old cash register. (The joys of growing up before computers, in a state with a sales tax.) The Safeway store had some kind of guarantee that you'd always get the sale price or your money back, but I don't think Piggly advertised such a promise. My mom's favorite checker was Bonnie Birch. And it was in that checkout line at Piggly Wiggly, in my monochrome community, that I first noticed people with different colored skin. I couldn't help but stare at them... because they were wearing terrycloth robes... in broad daylight... in the grocery store... Wow, that was so weird. This might have been one of the few times I embarrassed my mother.

If you grew up in a Piggly Wiggly store, you might enjoy their website. For only $6 you can get a cool Mr. Pig logo t-shirt of your very own! Did you know that Piggly Wiggly stores were hugely innovative? This was the first "self-service" grocery store chain in America! True, it wasn't quite as self-serve as Prairie Market, but it was an amazing new idea for its day, and it changed the way Americans would shop.

Ah, that was a nice little walk down memory lane. Thanks for coming with me.