Diving Into July

A different day: June image

Without a literal dive, I submerged myself in the silky waters of Lake Michigan for the second time this summer when I took Sunday off to go to the beach with my two younger sisters visiting from Illinois. There was a haze in the air and families clustered in temporary vacation-day encampments on the beach where Bohemian Road (C.R. 669) ends at Good Harbor. Despite all the people, however, there was enough space between groups that the beach didn’t feel crowded. No one was loud, the few dogs with their families were well behaved, and the whole vibe of the day was happy and peaceful. 

 

After time in the water, I stretched out on a beach towel between my sisters, the three of us chatting idly on and off, sometimes entirely quiet. I had left both my dog and my phone at home. So peaceful! 

Beyond the crowds, from my sister's phone...

Every once in a while my mind wanted to zip back to work or ahead to check the calendar, and each time I took a deep breath and told myself, Don’t move. Be here now. I didn’t even have a book with me on the beach (although one of those big umbrellas would make reading on the beach feasible, if someone had more than a couple hours of summer vacation). Later I realized that Sunday's beach interlude was probably the most relaxed I’ve been since Christmas Day 2021 in Dos Cabezas with the Artist and our dog, eating and napping and watching movies all day, just the three of us….

 

With possible rain in Monday's forecast and a morning that began with heavily overcast skies, I decided not to take a second day off. My sisters voiced no objections. They always enjoy exploring in my bookstore, as well as going farther afield in Northport (the Pennington Collection is one of their favorite shopping stops), and this year they had lunch at Around the Corner, bringing me a quinoa burger that I was still enjoying, bite by tasty bite, at noon on Wednesday.

Until we meet again!

It was too bad my sisters had to start back to Illinois Tuesday morning, because that evening was the first of four Tuesday evenings in July at the Willowbrook featuring Michigan authors, a series put together by the Leelanau Township Friends of the Library and named for its initiator, the late Suzanne Rose Kraynak. For this first 2024 event, a presentation in memory of Nancy Giles, I was not only selling books for author Don Lystra but also interviewing him about writing in general and about his new novel, Searching for Van Gogh. We enjoyed our onstage conversation, and the audience seemed to enjoy it, also. I must say I love having other people do all the setup, so different from events in my bookstore, and everyone does a beautiful job at the Willowbrook.

 

These days at my bookstore on Waukazoo Street, I’m gradually digging out from under the latest tsunami of used books to land in my shop and trying not to think about the thousands yet to be moved before summer’s end. It’s only July, after all, so right now my focus is on books already in Northport -- although many terrific new books are coming out, too, these days -- every week, it seems -- and I am eagerly awaiting delivery of more copies of Jim Olson's People of the Dune, so popular I had to back-order when my supply ran out.

Used cookbook section is FULL!

And, surprise! Classic Isaac Asimov paperbacks --

Fiction, poetry,

and books for your outdoor adventures.

At home, with all the rain we’ve had, grass is ready to be mowed again, gardens need weeding and edging, and always there are those pesky, invading autumn olives to be checked and rooted out. Sunny and I will restart our agility sessions with Coach Mike on Monday. I’ve had a couple of new editing jobs, too, so life is busy. It's a good thing that summer days are long.

These raspberries don't pick themselves, either!

"There's just books in there."

 

Catalpa in full bloom

Thirty-one years ago a couple of summer visitors walked by the original Dog Ears on Waukazoo Street (in that long-gone little shed next to long-gone Woody's Settling Inn down the street from our present location), and one of them stuck her head in the door briefly, then reported to her companion before they continued down the sidewalk, "It's just books in there." She might have said, "It's nothing but old books in there," because Dog Ears started with exclusively used volumes. It was at least six years later before I added a few new titles. 

But the warning is apt for today's blog post, as it is an annotated list of books I read in the month of June. To refer to dates for the LTFOL Summer Author Series, see my previous post. I've kept my political opinions on an entirely different blog. This is "just books." #1 here on the June list is #97 in my year-long list (which ended June at #109), but with other things keeping me busy, my reading has slowed down considerably since the beginning of the year, and the next couple of months' lists will no doubt be shorter.

Books Read June 2024

1. Mulloy, Pamela. Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel (nonfiction). Having been raised in a railroad family – father a civil engineer for a railroad, grandfather a train-driving engineer, great-uncles who were train conductors – I had a most fortunate childhood, with many memorable train journeys. Those not so fortunate, however, may want to experience armchair train travel, which is what the author did during COVID, remembering and recounting her time on trains.

2. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (nonfiction). How to present this book briefly? That is the challenge! In the United States, our national tendency is to conflate democracy and capitalism under one heading, labeled “freedom,” but Klein demonstrates (in one case after another around the world, as well as in our own country, i.e., in New Orleans), that capitalism and democracy are easily uncoupled, given sufficient force, and that “freedom” for unregulated capitalism generally erodes democratic “freedom,” since what people want (good job, decent housing and health care, etc.) is often at odds with what predatory capitalism wants (smallest costs and highest profits). Big business plays the game all too well. They put the fear of Communism into the population while taking advantage themselves of public funds. In one country aftere another corporations (mostly American) have  dismantled public institutions and safety nets in the name of “freedom.” Think NAFTA. If globalization had really been “inevitable,” why did we have to speed up and rush into it? Death is inevitable, but that’s no reason to commit suicide today.

3. Keen, Andrew. The Internet Is Not the Answer (nonfiction). Rather than “democratizing” the world, the Internet in its privatized and heavily commercialized incarnation has increased and compounded inequality, creating a two-tier world. The worst of it is that, unlike shock-and-awe troops that did so in the wake of disasters and wars (see Klein’s The Shock Doctrine above), Internet inequality is something we have done (and continue to do) to ourselves, albeit without that intention. Falling for the hype, however, we have produced a handful of billionaires and a few bestselling authors and artists, with everyone else working without pay in the trenches, “creating content” (like this blog). I admit I skimmed this book pretty quickly, having just finished Klein’s after two of three weeks of intense concentration. Keen thinks he has the answer and quotes Canadian political theorist Michael Ignatieff: “A question haunting democratic politics everywhere is whether elected governments can control the cyclone of technological change sweeping through their societies.” Keen believes that governments, along with “voluntary, market-led solutions” can control the sweeping changes. I have my doubts, especially when we see that so many members of the United States Congress and the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court are in bed with the corporate billionaires. And how much of government has already been outsourced to corporations? (See again Klein, above.) P.S. This book would be better with an index.

4. Laing, Olivia. The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (nonfiction). I would not say the author explores “the link” between creativity and alcohol (not all creative people are alcoholics) as much as she explores the role of alcohol in the lives of half a dozen well-known American writers also known well for their alcoholism: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Laing says she will never abandon ‘hybrid’ writing for strict genre work, and The Trip to Echo Spring typifies her preference as it combines travel and personal memoir with biography and investigation of a social and medical problem. That worked for me. I might not have wanted to read book-length biographies of all the writers she includes or a memoir of her alcoholic family, and I was amused to read (after finishing the book myself) some reader responses from people who didn’t like one or another aspect and wish she told a narrower story. No, I liked the way she did it. I loved the train travel and the places she visited, found the writers’ lives and relationships fascinating (if often horribly depressing), and I was grateful for notes on recent social research and physiological findings about how people become addicted to alcohol and why the addiction is so hard to escape, with clues here and there that explained what had been mystifying behavior of alcohol-dependent people in my own life.

5. Dennis, Jerry. A Place on the Water: An Angler’s Reflections on Home (nonfiction). I did not put this book aside to read Pamela Mulloy’s and Olivia Laing’s books because Jerry Dennis failed to enchant me but because I was so thoroughly enchanted that I was in no hurry to reach the end of the book. When Hemingway couldn’t sleep, he reviewed actual fishing experiences and imagined others. When I wake in the middle of the night, I reach for a book. A Place on the Water is a book that puts me right there, midstream. Very comforting.

6. Buck, Pearl. All Under Heaven (fiction). In the author’s epilogue, she writes that this novel was put away unfinished for a long time, until she felt ready to complete and publish it. To me, it still feels unfinished -- undoubtedly because events were still in process, but between the Chinese revolution and the novel’s publication in the 1970s came the McCarthy era in the U.S., and while the story of former diplomat Malcolm MacNeil and his Russian-born wife and their family establishing themselves in the eastern United States following Malcolm’s return from 20 years in China (America a first-time experience for his wife and children), what seems like foreshadowing in the story is never developed, and Malcolm seems not to have come to any conclusions by the last page of the book. The backgrounds of the family members and their responses to their new home are interesting, but when the novel comes to an end it feels as if we have left the characters at the story’s midpoint.

7. Hamilton, Steve. The Lock Artist (fiction). I wasn’t sure how I felt about this for the first few pages but kept going and became engrossed. Very likable young protagonist gets himself into a helluva mess! Not set in the U.P. (as are his Woods Cop novels) but definitely an attention-grabber.

8. Samuels, Robert and Toluse Olorunnipa. His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice (nonfiction). You’ve heard his name. You know how he died. This book tells you how he lived. It’s one thing to read statistics about rates of arrests and incarceration for Black men and/or about how many Black families live in poverty, even to read a history of slavery and subsequent Jim Crow laws in the South. It’s quite another thing to follow generations of a family from slavery to the present and then to follow one individual from birth to death – and then to follow his family’s experiences after he died. He didn’t want to be another picture of a dead Black man on a t-shirt. He had dreams and struggles and family and friends he loved. A reader feels his presence on the page and wishes to have known him in person. His name: George Floyd. Read this book.

9. Portis, Charles. True Grit (fiction). I read this novel because Bonnie Jo Campbell said it had been one of her inspirations for The Waters. It seems many people who have discovered it take it to heart and read it over and over, but I probably won’t re-read it myself, though it was interesting. Part of the interest was in the fact that it was written and published in the middle of the 20^th century but feels like something much earlier, around the time of the novel’s setting.

10.             Franqui, Leah. Mother Land (fiction). Jake at the library in Leland got this one for me through interlibrary loan. I’d read America for Beginners and wanted to try something else by the same author. In Mother Land, an American woman who has moved to Mumbai with her Indian husband is surprised by a “visit” from her new mother-in-law, who announces that she has left her husband and is moving in with son and wife. Wife is dismayed. Mother-in-law begins to take over running of household. Son departs on a month-long business trip that stretches out beyond the month. The novel goes back and forth between the two main women characters (both in third person), which was interesting to me, but very little actually happens until, near the end, things seem to happen in a big rush. I know friends who would not persevere to that end, bored by earlier lack of action. I probably won’t re-read this book, either, but the inner lives of the two women and their struggles to find themselves kept me reading.

11.             Bythell, Shaun. Confessions of a Bookseller (nonfiction). I had a busy week. On Monday I made a deal to buy 7,000 used and rare books, the entire contents of another bookseller’s shop, inventory his widow needed to liquidate. She made me a good price. But moving 7,000 books is no picnic, and I told her I had too much going on in June and July to clear everything out until the beginning of August. She was very understanding. Still, with the help of her daughter and son-in-law we managed to pack up and transfer three carloads of books from Leland to Northport, leaving me depleted end of day and with no energy to dive into the challenge of a new book. Instead, rereading Shaun’s diary of a year in his bookstore in Scotland – stretching his year out over a full week of my bedtimes – was the perfect solution. 

12.             Kellogg, Richard. Wall of Silver: A Treasure Hunter’s Dream (fiction? nonfiction?). My neighbor (who printed this book for the author) loaned me Wall of Silver. The author swore it was a true story. Who knows? It reads like an exciting and suspenseful adventure tale, though the author is never able to return to the mine to claim the treasured silver he says was there.

13.             Caldwell, Erskine. Some American People (nonfiction). Known for his fiction, Caldwell undertook cross-country travel during the Depression to talk to Americans in all walks of life but particularly the poor, unemployed, and marginally and vulnerably employed. This picture of the Depression is as grim as any you’ll read and certainly bleaker than what we read in school history books. Back before there were strong unions and would-be workers were desperate, Detroit’s auto industry comes off as a nightmare, but there are also migrants from all over the Great Plains (not only Oklahoma), moving west in hopes of finding fertile soil to farm and rain to water it. Starving, malnourished babies; men “riding the rails”; girls and women turning to prostitution; and countless families broken by a broken economy. And yet—I doubted the first quotation so checked that Henry really said it and found the citation—Ford claimed in 1934 that "The Depression was just a state of mind. It is over for everyone who has changed his state of mind" (Ford News, back cover, April 1934). He also opined that "Man minus the Machine is a slave; Man plus the Machine is a freeman" (Ford News, p. 2, 8/1/1925). Workers who spoke to Caldwell had a different view of machines, particularly when “the line” was speeded up, workforce simultaneously reduced, and safety devices removed to avoid slowing production. It was labor unions that made auto factory work the bedrock of Detroit’s mid-20^th century new middle class. In the 1930s, fulltime work was hard to come by and easy to lose. And then the poor sharecroppers in Georgia! Be glad you are living now, friends!

Summer Is: Flowers, Family, Friends, and Books

Color riot in my front yard!
 

When the Artist was still with me in our old farmhouse, for some years I aimed at subtlety in my plantings. One year, for example, it was all white and dusty green. Then I came home from Arizona without him in May of 2022, and all I wanted in my gardens was color, a preference that is still very much alive. 

Bright colors! I need them! Especially after a Michigan winter, which was easy going as far as snow was concerned but had the usual short days with overcast skies.

During my son’s recent visit, we were out walking with the dog when I commented to him that this – July – seems like “real life.” What I meant is that in Michigan we look forward all year to summer, so while it is only a small part of the calendar year, our lives expand then to fill the long daylight hours. This year I’ve been keeping a list (somewhat haphazard, not nearly as methodical as the lists of Thomas Jefferson or Henry David Thoreau) of what I see emerging or blooming for the first time each day, starting with wild leeks in the woods in April. Now the black-eyed Susans have begun, joining daisies and coreopsis, and trees get in the act, too. 

My catalpa at home (at what a friend calls “Frost Pocket Farm”) flowered later than trees elsewhere in the county but has blossoms now, and soon the basswood will flower, and its branches will be – I hope! – filled with happy bees. And this year there were local cherries for Cherry Festival!

Overcast Wednesday morning turned sunshiny before noon.

My hiking parter from Arizona visited with her dog, my son and his wife visited, and next come my sisters on their annual northern Michigan getaway, something they’ve done every summer for years, bringing our mother with them many times, providing memories that sustain us now that she’s gone. 

 

I’ll post my “Books Read” list for June separately. For today I'm giving you timely information about Leelanau Township’s Friends of the Library (FOL) events for this new month. First, this Saturday, July 6, is the annual used book sale at the township hall, beginning at 9 a.m. You might want an umbrella this year and a few plastic bags, but the book sale is only one day, so you don’t want to miss it. 

 

Then there is the FOL Summer Author Series, every Tuesday evening for four weeks, beginning the week after the 4^th.

 

Tuesday, July 9: Don Lystra, with his third book, a new novel titled Searching for Van Gogh, a coming-of-age story set in 1960s Michigan. Don is the first presenter in this year’s series. I will be interviewing this beloved local author and will have copies of his book available for purchase, which he will be happy to sign. (In fact, I will have copies of the books of all the authors in the series at their respective presentations.)

 

Tuesday, July 16: Joan Strassmann, a summer Leland resident, brings us Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard, and who could resist that? The COVID lockdown may be over, but our love affair with birds continues. Strassman, a well-known writer on animal behavior, is Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Tuesday, July 23: Northport claims chef and author Abra Berens as one of our own, due to her history in Leelanau Township as co-farmer of Bare Knuckle Farm, established in 2009. After eight years as a farmer, she moved to Chicago to become a chef. Her two previous cookbooks are Ruffage and Grist; the new one is Pulp: A Practical Guide to Cooking with Fruit – perfect for summer!

 

Tuesday, July 30: Traverse City’s Stephen Lewis, author of Murder on Old Mission and Stone Cold Dead, brings us historical fiction this year, with From Infamy to Hope, the story of a housemaid in 17^th-century Puritan Boston who is a victim of religious persecution, branded as a fornicator, and dresses as a boy to become a soldier in the colony’s war with the Pequots.

All events in the LTFOL Summer Author Series will take place at the Willowbrook Inn on Mill Street and will begin at 7 p.m. Admission is free. 

Note: On Summer Author Tuesdays, the bookstore will close by 4 at the latest, so I can go home to my dog for a while before returning to Northport for the evening event. 

 

It’s summer! Live it up! And Happy Independence Day!!!

Crazy Week Ahead–

Open today (Tuesday), despite appearances
 

Not to say that last week wasn’t crazy, too. For one thing, I made a large purchase of books, only three carloads of which have found their way to Waukazoo Street as yet (due to everything else going on in June and July), which meant I was nearly buried in boxes of books, and boxes surround me yet today. There is an entire new subject area, American Lakes and Rivers. And the Civil War, American presidents, and nature & country living sections have all been rearranged with “new” (some very old) titles.

THEN--

Sorry if you missed her, but I do have signed copies available.

Saturday, of course—as you know if you regularly read Books in Northport—was guest author Bonnie Jo Campbell’s signing of her most recent novel, The Waters. She also signed a few copies of Once Upon a River, chatted with customers, and braved the rain after three hours to return to Kalamazoo. We had a great time, and you can see more pictures here. 

 

Later that evening my former Arizona hiking partner, a neighbor in the ghost town where the Artist and I spent several happy winters, arrived with her dog, and the four of us (2 women, 2 dogs) spent that evening and all day Sunday and then Monday morning pursuing fun. Fun in the yard, fun in the woods, fun on the beach! There’s no fun like dog fun!

So last week, what with moving books and getting ready for Bonnie in the shop and Therese at home, I was too tired at night for ambitious reading and went to bed four or five nights straight with Shaun Bythell’s Confessions of a Bookseller, a re-reading experience obviously tailored to my preoccupations. Then for two nights, after Therese and I and the dogs (after my exciting afternoon at the bookstore) were caught in a downpour on Saturday evening and came home drenched, and the following day, first at Houdek Dunes and then Good Harbor, hiked a total of six (6) miles with our dogs, I read the first sentence of a Prix Goncourt novel over and over again before turning out the light in defeat, too drowsy to retain that sentence’s sense and proceed normally to the next. Last night and this morning I finally did better with a book my neighbor loaned me, an adventure set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula….

 

Today (Tuesday) I’m back in the shop on Waukazoo Street, open despite the forbidding appearance of scaffolding in front of the door. Painters are doing some repair to the façade, as well as painting, but there is access to Dog Ears Books through Red Mullein, my neighbor just to the south in the same building. And if you haven’t checked out Red Mullein yet, you should do that, too. It’s like nothing else in northern Michigan, I promise. 

 

This week, though! Ah, complicated: 

 

      Wednesday: I have a late morning appointment so won’t be in until noon at the earliest.

 

      Thursday: CLOSED for personal reasons.

 

      Friday & Saturday: Normal hours, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

 

My next post will introduce July book news, of which there is plenty, much of it thanks to Friends of the Leelanau Township Library. Preview hint: their annual book sale is Saturday, July 6, but there's more in July, so stay tuned. 

Meanwhile, I have many projects of my own, at work and at home.

Sunny Juliet is my sidewalk supervisor on this project.

 

"How did the book signing go?"

 

Bookseller and author, together again, 2024

 

How could it be anything but fun with author Bonnie Jo Campbell? Her visit felt like a party without cake. (Why didn’t I have cake?) Lots of stories and laughter and mutual appreciation.

Yes, that is author Don Lystra with Bonnie Jo.

Bonnie visited with me and my customer-friends for almost three hours, not only signing her new novel, The Waters (and a few copies of her earlier Once Upon a River) but adding her own donkey stamp with special archival ink. When one person’s jacket design commanded attention because of its perfect connection to the rattlesnake in Bonnie’s novel, we had an impromptu photo shoot focused on the jacket. A few first-time visitors to the bookstore fell into the author’s charmed circle, also, while she was there. All in all, a lively time.

Deb's jacket, Bonnie's book

Bonnie models the jacket

Cameron from Colorado became an instant new fan of BJC.

Although my visiting author had managed to snag a parking spot directly in front of the bookstore, it was raining so hard when she left that rising waters had brought on a flood. Intrepid river woman that she is, Bonnie removed shoes and socks to wade to the driver’s side of her car. "My" authors are such good sports!

Until we meet again....

Catching Up -- Partway, At Least

Foreground: coreopsis. Background: Duck Lake.

When someone the other day told me she follows my blog, besides being surprised I was also chagrined to realize how far I’ve been falling behind on posting. It’s been almost two weeks. Yikes! That is not because nothing is happening! (Far from it. Quite the opposite.) Lots more news soon, but for now, here are a few notes from Northport and nearby.

 

 

First, the Blossoms

Old Dog Ears Books home, 1997-????

Coreopsis (opening image) are going crazy right now in Leelanau County. There is a corner down by Duck Lake (south of Leland, where M-22 meets M-204) that is almost solid gold, while in Northport, brilliant red poppies (immediately above) in front of Porcupine (once the home of Dog Ears Books, back in the late 1990s), on the corner of Mill and Nagonaba, are still vivid though beginning to fade. Spiderwort, on the other hand, will go on and on and on, something I really appreciate about spiderwort, along with the sculptural quality its leaves add to a vase of flowers, either wildflowers or blooms from the garden. There is more spiderwort in my old corner garden on the Nagonaba side, right next to this welcoming bench in front of Sally Coohon’s shop, Dolls and More (her building another of the many homes of Dog Ears Books over the years).

 

Other Northport News

 

Here on Waukazoo Street, our building is having a modest makeover. Fresh paint! Very nice! Deborah Ebbers, Studio and Gallery; Dog Ears Books; Red Mullein – all with a newly spiffed-up exterior as we head into the heart of summer.

Former Tribune, now Big Dipper

Ice cream! Northport will not be without ice cream this summer, as that wonderful Kevin Murphy (Kevin and Amy have New Bohemian Café on Waukazoo and the Omena Country Store in Omena) has teamed up with one of his café baristas to open the Big Dipper. Perfect name, isn’t it? Hard and soft ice cream, many brands and flavors. 

New restaurant, Faro, on SE corner of Waukazoo and Nagonaba

 

Meanwhile the folks who used to be in that building where you’ll get your ice cream this summer, the Tribune gang, have moved down to the corner of Waukazoo and Nagonaba and are serving meals as Faro. 

 

And did we mention (probably not yet) that Northport is celebrating its 175^th birthday this summer? 

 

Today, For Me

 

Forty-four years ago, June 18, 1980, the Artist and I were married by a magistrate in the old downtown courthouse in Kalamazoo. I picked wildflowers in the early morning for our late morning civil ceremony. Our children were our witnesses. Afterward, a dear friend took us all out to lunch, and following lunch we, the newlyweds, went home to change into old clothes and work in the yard. You see, we had had our “honeymoon” trip to the U.P. long before (never mind how long), and working outdoors together on that lovely June day felt just fine – on a day very like today, with flowers blooming and sun shining…. 

Kalamazoo, June 18, 1980

All the Artist ever wanted to do was to make a living with his paintings, but we also fantasized for years about having a bookshop in a little town. Living in the country was another dream. Leelanau County? Could any of it ever come true? Years later, we made it all happen.

 

 

Reminder: Author Visit on Saturday

 

Bonnie Jo Campbell will be at Dog Ears Books this coming Saturday, June 22, signing her latest novel, The Waters, beginning at 1 p.m. We are fortunate that Bonnie found time in her busy schedule to come to Northport – her third visit to my bookstore! – so please come and make her welcome and buy a copy of her book. A few of you have already bought the book from me, so by all means bring it with you on Saturday, and she will sign it. If you have any pictures of donkeys, bring those along, too. Bonnie has donkeys, and they loom large in her legend (as Ringo said so memorably of his drums).

BJC at home as Lady Liberty! Isn't this the coolest?

More:

Bonnie Jo Campbell, a master of rural noir, returns with the fierce, mesmerizing novel THE WATERS, a story about exceptional women and the soul of a small town.

On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp-an area known as "The Waters" to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan-herbalist Hermine "Herself" Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three daughters. The youngest, beautiful and inscrutable Rose Thorn, has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy "Donkey" Zook, to grow up wild. Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood. With a "ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world" (New York Times Book Review), Bonnie Jo Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the resilience of nature and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.

Bonnie Jo Campbell, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of the AWP's Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and a Pushcart Prize, lives outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, with donkeys.