October Author in the Spotlight

October Author in the Spotlight

Happy October!
Things are cooling down in Minnesota, I think we might get frost tonight so I have to cover my flowers.  I'm so sad to see the sun go south for the winter.  I'm already lamenting the fact that I won't be able to sit outside on my porch swing with my beloved dog and read.

Looking forward to the Twin Cities Book Festival on Saturday and I just returned from a reading retreat in the north woods run by two amazing ladies who started the Women's Press.

My life has been pretty busy lately and I have been re-thinking how to continue to write this book blog so stay tuned for some changes here. One thing I know for sure, I want to keep featuring amazing Minnesota authors, like David Oppegaard.  I just discovered David's novels last year, when one of my book buddies handed me his new Young Adult book. and I'm so glad she did.

Here are some of many books he has written and their synopsis from Goodreads:A firebug has woken inside my heart.

The Firebug of Balrog County

Dark times have fallen on remote Balrog County, and Mack Druneswald, a high school senior with a love of clandestine arson, is doing his best to deal. While his family is haunted by his mother’s recent death, Mack spends his nights roaming the countryside, looking for something new to burn. When he encounters Katrina, a college girl with her own baggage, Mack sets out on a path of pyromania the likes of which sleepy Balrog County has never seen before.

A darkly comic tour-de-force, The Firebug of Balrog County is about legend, small towns, and the fire that binds.

The Suicide Collectors:

The Despair has plagued the earth for five years. Most of the world’s population has inexplicably died by its own hand, and the few survivors struggle to remain alive. A mysterious, shadowy group called the Collectors has emerged, inevitably appearing to remove the bodies of the dead. But in the crumbling state of Florida, a man named Norman takes an unprecedented stand against the Collectors, propelling him on a journey across North America. It’s rumored a scientist in Seattle is working on a cure for the Despair, but in a world ruled by death, it won’t be easy to get there.

Wormwood, Nevada

Tyler and Anna Mayfield have just relocated from Nebraska to the sun scorched desert town of Wormwood, Nevada. They find themselves in a strange new landscape populated with old school cowboys, alien cultists, meth dealers, and doomsday prophets. Loneliness and desperation pervade Wormwood, and when a meteorite lands in the center of town, its fragile existence begins to unravel as many believe the end of the world is near, while others simply seek a reason to believe in anything at all.

The Ragged Mountains

The Hollow is a peaceful village, a farming backwater among the free cities of the Western Lands, but when a local girl named Penelope Bell is kidnapped from her home in the middle of the night, that peace is shattered.

Unwilling to accept the loss of Penelope, a young striker named Gabriel Rain joins Penelope’s brother and sister on a quest to bring her home. Their journey takes them across the dangerous Grasslands and as far as the legendary Ragged Mountains themselves, where they find themselves caught between two sides of a bloody war. Along the way, they face dark wizards, ancient gods, and discover that the Ragged Mountains always take as much as they yield.


The third novel by Bram Stoker nominated David Oppegaard (author of The Suicide Collectors (St. Martin's Press) and Wormwood, Nevada (St. Martin's Press) The Ragged Mountains is a dark YA fantasy in the tradition of The Hunger Games, The Warded Man, the Earthsea Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

This month you can expect a book review, an author interview, a giveaway and hopefully a guest post.  You can find David on his blog at https://davidoppegaard.com/  

Happy Reading and Happy Fall.