Happy February. We just received 11 inches of snow here in Minnesota and it has been a white wonderland. I shoveled with my headphones on, dancing in the falling snow, singing off key, with my dog running in circles. It was awesome.
February is going to be a great month. My son, Max is doing his Eagle project this weekend. I am planning a weekend highlighting Chinese culture for my daughter and I. At the end of the month, I am going on a vacation with my favorite gal pals to San Antonio, Texas.
This month on Booksnob's blog, I am featuring an awesome author. Her name is Nicole Helget and I have been wanting to read her books for a long time. We met at the Twin Cities book fair briefly but her books have been on my radar forever.
This month you can expect a book review, a giveaway an author interview and if we are lucky, a guest post.
Here are Nicole's books and their book blurbs via Goodreads:
Wonder at the Edge of the World
In this captivating quest that spans the globe, a young girl who wants to know everything challenges her assumptions about family, loyalty, and friendship as she fights to save her father's legacy--and to begin creating her own.Hallelujah Wonder wants to become one of the first female scientists of the nineteenth century. She knows every specimen and rare artifact that her explorer father hid deep in a cave before he died, and she feels a great responsibility to protect the objects (particularly a mesmerizing and dangerous one called the Medicine Head) from a wicked Navy captain who would use it for evil. Now she and her friend Eustace, a runaway slave, must set out on a sweeping adventure by land and by sea to the only place where no one will ever find the cursed relic...
Stillwater:Clement and Angel are fraternal twins separated at birth; they grow up in the same small, frontier logging town of Stillwater, Minnesota. Clement was left at the orphanage. Angel was adopted by the
town’s richest couple, but is marked and threatened by her mother’s mental illness. They rarely meet, but Clement knows if he is truly in need, Angel will come to save him. Stillwater, near the Mississippi River and Canada, becomes an important stop on the Underground Railroad. As Clement and Angel grow up and the country marches to war, their lives are changed by many battles for freedom and by losses in the struggle for independence, large and small.
Stillwater reveals the hardscrabble lives of pioneers, nuns, squaws, fur trappers, loggers, runaway slaves and freedmen, outlaws and people of conscience, all seeking a better, freer, more prosperous future. It is a novel about mothers, about siblings, about the ways in which we must take care of one another and let go of one another. And it’s brought to us in Nicole Helget’s winning, gorgeous prose.
The Turtle Catcher:
In a rural Minnesota town of German immigrants in the tumultuous days ofWorldWar I, The Turtle Catcher brings together two misfits from warring clans. Liesel, the one girl in the upstanding family of Richter boys, harbors a secret about her body that thwarts all hope for a normal life.Her closest friend is Lester, the “slow” boy in the raffish Sutter family, a gentle, kind soul who spends his days trapping turtles in the lake. Yearning for human touch in the wake of her parents’ deaths, Liesel turns to her only friend—leading her brother, just returned from the war, to an act that will haunt not only both families but the entire town.
Helget’s novel is a story of loyalty and betrayal that, like her earlier book, proves her uncommon understanding of the natural world and human frailties. Both moving and heartfelt, The Turtle Catcher confirms this young writer’s exceptional talent.
The Summer of Ordinary Ways. A Memoir
Practicing baseball with Dad, then watching him go after a cow with a pitchfork in a fit of rage. Playing chicken on the county road with semi trucks full of hogs. Flirting with the milkman. Chasing with your sisters after Wreck and Bump, mangy mutts who prowl farmsteads killing chickens and drinking fuel oil. Dandelion wine. The ghost of a girl buried alive over a century ago. These unforgettable, sometimes hilarious images spill from a fierce and wondrous childhood into the pages of The Summer of Ordinary Ways.
Nicole has many other books as well. She teaches college in Minnesota.
Visit Nicole's Blog at http://nicolehelget.blogspot.com/
Have a great month of reading great books!!
