In Winter's Kitchen by Beth Dooley

In Winter's Kitchen.
Growing Roots and Breaking Bread in the Northern Heartland
by Beth Dooley

Books and Food go together well.  In fact, they are two of my favorite things so I was thrilled to get a chance to read this book.  I adored, In Winter's Kitchen and read it slowly, one chapter at a time, to savor it.  Each chapter is about a particular food that thrives in the Midwest, like apples, wheat, potatoes, cranberries, corn, wild rice, turkey and many more.  Beth writes about her family and meets with local farmers at the farmers market and even meets them at their farms.  She talks about conventional food and organic and details the path from farm to table.  Beth connects our love of food with our love of family and love of the land. She reminded me that buying food is making a choice for a better world and a healthy body which is very important to me since I have a food allergy to corn and most canned, packaged store bought food contains some form of corn. So I have to make most of my families meals from scratch everyday.  In Winter's Kitchen has taught me so much about the food I eat and the companies I buy from.

In Winter's Kitchen is part memoir, part food history and part midwest guidebook with really good recipes tucked inside.  There is one recipe per food chapter so for example the Apples chapter has a recipe for applesauce, which I made and it was delicious. This is the first time I made homemade applesauce and it was super easy and super good.  I haven't eaten applesauce in years. Here is a picture.

This is a great book to read this winter.  Read it and then make some great food.
In Winter's Kitchen was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in 2016.

Here are some links to help further your reading experience.

Visit Beth at her website where you will find lots of information and delicious recipes
http://www.bethdooleyskitchen.com/

Listen to Beth on the Splendid Table podcast.
https://www.splendidtable.org/story/beth-dooley-on-the-joy-of-cooking-and-the-future-of-wheat

Gardens, Kitchens and the Great Midwest.  U of MN episode of Read This Book features Beth Dooley and another of my favorite authors Ryan Stradal.
https://youtu.be/_pLrg10D-Lc

Listen to this story from MPR which includes two recipes from the book.
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/11/18/books-appetites-beth-dooley

An awesome book review from Heavy Table
http://heavytable.com/in-winters-kitchen-by-beth-dooley/

The Firebug of Balrog County by David Oppegaard

The Firebug of Balrog County by David Oppegaard

I'm in love with a firebug. David Oppegaard's novel is set in a fictional small town in Minnesota. The main character is a high school senior named Mack who is grieving the loss of his mother to cancer. He feels the need to start fires and at first he starts out small but then things spiral out of control quickly like a rapid burning flame.  Mack has a great family and a interesting set of grandparents, all who are wounded and grieving. His grandpa is the mayor who is trying to catch the culprit who is setting fires and begins a cat and mouse game between the two of them.

The Firebug of Balrog County is a well-written novel that was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in 2016.  The story is told in short chapter bursts and full of wry wit and angsty humor.  You will fall in love with the main character and his family and even the small town. I was laughing and crying and rooting for Mack with all my heart.  Mack is charming and quirky and never been kissed and in desperate need of a girlfriend. In some ways Mack reminds me of Duckie form Pretty in Pink and David Oppegaard reminds me of a modern John Hughes.

The Firebug of Balrog County needs to get into the hands of teenage boys.
I would pair The Firebug with A.S. King's- Everybody Sees the Ants.


Go Beyond the book with this link:

Listen to a 4 min interview on Minnesota Public Radio of author, David Oppegaard.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/10/01/books-thread-david-oppegaard

In Reach by Pamela Carter Joern

In Reach by Pamela Carter Joern

From Pamela Carter Joern comes a book of short stories that focuses on characters who live in the small town of Reach, Nebraska.  Inside of, In Reach, you will find 14 short stories of varied length, all of which contain wonderfully imagined characters who feel like your next door neighbors.

How you read a short story collection varies from book to book and person to person.  I personally love to read short stories in between novels and I like to read at least one short story a week.  With Joern's collection, I read one story a day.  I just wanted to immerse myself in this little town and get to know its residents.

Pamela is a great writer and masterful storyteller and she draws the reader into her stories with finesse. Each story is unique and rooted in reality of human life and filled with compassion.  Some were heartbreaking while others made me smile and laugh.  Each one is just so good, its hard to pick my favorites.  I adored the story, All the Wildness in Her (great title) of a widowed couple who sneak out of town to enjoy each other's company and steal kisses.  I loved the story, Redeeming the Time Being about a mother and daughter grieving the death of a spouse/parent that takes place in Seville, Spain ( I have visited here recently) and I loved the story, The Sky is Falling about Ella who has just been saved at a revival meeting and how her husband Buck handles her new found religion.  Oh my, all the stories are just so, so good.  You need to read it for yourself.

Pamela Carter Joern is not a well known author but she should be.  You should remember her name.  She is a really talented writer and super creative.  Her stories leap off the page with realism, honesty and grit.  I can't wait to read more of her books and stories and maybe even visit Nebraska someday (since it's pretty close to Minnesota).

In Reach was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in 2015. Pamela has won the Nebraska Book Award for her book, The Floor of the Sky (which I also read and it was awesome).

If you liked Olive Kitteridge you will love In Reach by Pamela Carter Joern.

Sex & Violence by Carrie Mesrobian

Sex &Violence by Carrie Mesrobian

Evan Carter is a teen who has learned to move, he has moved more times than should be counted as normal, since his mother died.  He has also learned how to make the moves on girls, not caring about the ramifications of his actions.   As the perpetual "new guy" he has learned to identify the girls who will probably say "yes" to sex.

He meets Collette at his newest school and he knows she used to date his roommate but he doesn't care.  He is hot for her, and has big plans involving a condom.  Evan's risky behavior eventually catches up to him and he is physically assaulted and beaten to a bloody pulp.
His father decides to bring Evan to the family cabin, located on a Minnesota lake in a small town, to heal.   Evan begins to see his past and his present converge and he wonders if life will ever be normal again.

Carrie Mesrobian has written a novel about teen hook-up culture and the consequences of it.  Ultimately Sex & Violence is about teen violence and its connection to sex but it is about so much more than that.  It covers a range of teen issues from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to the virginity pact.  Since I teach at the high school level, I see a lot of teen fights over boyfriend/girlfriend issues and the drama goes on and on.  Mesrobian has captured this part of teen drama and culture expertly.

Sex & Violence is an excellent novel for the mature teen.  It is gripping, honest, raw and a bit shocking.  Evan is a swearing, beer drinking, weed smoking, girl using, character you hate to love, he is multi-faceted and trying to become a better person.  Mesrobian has captured the male teenage voice perfectly.  Sex & Violence is a great first novel and Mesrobian is a writer I want to read more of.  Love it or hate it, Sex & Violence is a part of the culture teens grow up in the U.S. and Mesrobian doesn't shy away from the tough nature of the subject matter.

Sex & Violence won the 2014 Minnesota Book Award.

With or Without You by Brian Farrey

With or Without You by Brian Farrey

With or Without You opens with a beating and the shock of it immediately draws you into the story.  Two teens on their way home from school get beat up by local school bullies.  They are singled out for being gay.  Evan and Davis are best friends who have wanted to fit in all their lives.  For each of them the summer after high school graduation is a time of change and of growing up.

Before they head off to college, Davis is forced out of his family home and moves into the Rainbow Youth Center.  Here he learns about a group of young gay men called the Chasers and he joins with strong need to gain acceptance and influential friends.   Evan has a boyfriend named Eric that he has kept secret for over a year.  He is an artist who is scared and largely ignored by his family and he is torn between his friendship with Davis and his love for Eric.  Evan also joins the Chasers but realizes that something is not quite legitimate about this group and he lies to protect himself.

The Chasers are a group of gay men who actually set out to contract the HIV/AIDS virus.  Calling it "The Gift".  Evan has seen the reality of the disease and knows that they are being misled but is hopeless to stop it.

Farrey has created a well written young adult novel that is like nothing I have ever read before.  It is unique, fast paced and shocking.  With or Without You is a endearing love story, a mystery and a work of art.  Mainly set in Madison, Wisconsin with the college town as a back drop, the story is realistic, multi-layered, news worthy and timely as it tackles issues many teens and adults deal with today.

With or Without You won the Minnesota Book Award for Young Adult Fiction this year and I can see why.  Farrey's has created a wonderful character in Evan who narrates the book in several mediums.  He makes up news stories in his head, he creates art and mimics famous artists, like Van Gogh or Keith Haring.

Farrey is an excellent writer who paints with words and the result is a novel that is radiant!

Minnesota Book Awards 2012

Minnesota Book Awards 2012

The Minnesota Book Awards were presented on Saturday, April 14th, 2012 to a sold out crowd.
I would love to say I was in attendance but I was not.  Next year, I hope to attend and read some of the book finalists before I get there. 

FYI:  Click on the book image and it will take you to Amazon.

And the winners are........

Children's Literature:  BookSpeak! Poems About Books by Laura Purdie Salas, illustrated by Josée Bisaillon (Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company)

A collection of wacky, whimsical poems about books and all the treasures they contain. Laura Purdie Salas, the acclaimed author of Stampede!, is back with another collection of wild and weird, wacky and winsome poems about all the magic to be found on a single bookshelf. In BookSpeak!, each poem gives voice to a group that seldom gets a voice . . . the books themselves! Characters plead for sequels, book jackets strut their stuff, and we get a sneak peek at the raucous parties in the aisles when all the lights go out at the bookstore!Illustrator Josée Bisaillon’s mixture of collage, drawings, and digital montage presents page after page of richly colored spreads filled with action and charm. Together, Salas and Bisaillon deliver a unique collection brimming with ideas as much about spines and dust jackets as they are about adventure and imagination. (Goodreads)

General Nonfiction:  Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto (Rodale)

"Whenever the people are well informed," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "they can be trusted with their own government."

But what happens in a world dominated by complex science? Are the people still well-enough informed to be trusted with their own government? And with less than 2 percent of Congress with any professional background in science, how can our government be trusted to lead us in the right direction?

Will the media save us? Don't count on it. Of the 2,975 questions directed to the candidates for president in early 2008, just six mentioned the words "global warming" or "climate change," the greatest policy challenge facing America. To put that in perspective, three questions mentioned UFOs.

Today the world's major unsolved challenges all revolve around science. By the 2012 election cycle, at a time when science is influencing every aspect of modern life, antiscience views from climate-change denial to creationism to vaccine refusal have become mainstream.

Faced with the daunting challenges of an environment under siege, an exploding population, a falling economy and an education system slipping behind, our elected leaders are hard at work... passing resolutions that say climate change is not real and astrology can control the weather.

Shawn Lawrence Otto has written a behind-the-scenes look at how the government, our politics, and the media prevent us from finding the real solutions we need. Fool Me Twice is the clever, outraged, and frightening account of America's relationship with science -- a relationship that is on the rocks at the very time we need it most. (Goodreads)

Genre Fiction:  Big Wheat by Richard A. Thompson (Poisoned Pen Press)

1919 on the high prairie, and a small army of people and machines moves across the land, bringing in the wheat harvest. Custom threshers, steam engineers, bindlestiffs, cooks, camp followers, and hobos join the tide. The threshing season is on.

But there is also an evil upon the land. A killer who calls himself the Windmill Man believes he has a holy calling to water the newly plucked earth with blood. The moving harvest is an endless supply of victims. He's been killing for years and has no plans to stop. Who could stop him? Nobody knows he exists.

But then a young man named Charlie Krueger, jilted by his childhood sweetheart and estranged from his drunkard father, joins the harvest as a steam engineer. But in a newly harvested field in the nearly black Dakota night, he comes upon a strange man digging a grave. Now he is the only person who can stop the evil. But the killer knows his name and when next they meet, one of them will have to die….
(Goodreads)  
 


Memoir and Creative Nonfiction:  A Song at Twilight: Of Alzheimer’s and Love by Nancy Paddock (Blueroad Press)

"A Song at Twilight: Of Alzheimer's and Love" is a feature-length memoir by acclaimed Minnesota poet Nancy Paddock. The book tells the story of her parents' descent into the netherworld of Alzheimer's, and the challenges and choices for care that she and her sisters faced while confronting this most baffling and tragic of diseases, now afflicting millions of people and their families. This is one daughter's story of Lois and Ralph Pearson, whose love of life and each other transcended the darkest moments of war, separation, heartache, and family tragedy to achieve a memorable state of grace spanning six decades of marriage.
Paddock recalls her parents' early lives together on St. Paul's East Side, including their playful courtship on the city's ice rinks, as well as her own fond recollections of growing up in the post-war glow of the 1950s and '60s.



Minnesota Award:  Pioneer Modernists: Minnesota’s First Generation of Women Artists by Julie L’Enfant (Afton Press)

In the early twentieth century Frances Cranmer Greenman, Alice Hugy, Elsa Laubach Jemne, Clara Mairs, Evelyn Raymond, Jo Lutz Rollins, and Ada Wolfe established successful careers as artists in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. They played significant roles in the development of the art schools, galleries, and arts organizations that make the Twin Cities a major cultural center today. Yet their strong reputations were eclipsed mid-century by the rise of Abstract Expressionism and other male-dominated modernist movements.
Drawing on unpublished papers, contemporaneous accounts, and interviews with their students, descendants, and collectors, Pioneer Modernists presents a new picture of their cosmopolitan art training, multi-faceted careers, and sometimes unconventional lives, set in the context of the tumultuous events of the twentieth century. (Goodreads)



Novel and Short Story:  The Law of Miracles and Other Stories by Gregory Blake Smith (University of Massachusetts Press)

These stories take place in the space where the rational and irrational intersect the space governed by The Law of Miracles. Writing with a remarkable range of invention, Gregory Blake Smith has created a world in which his characters navigate between the everyday and the extraordinary: an aged Russian woman who lives simultaneously in the St. Petersburg of iPods and BMWs and in the starving Leningrad of the Siege; a Venetian art conservator who loves the women of the Renaissance paintings he restores but cannot bear the touch of the woman at his side; a down-and-out slot-machine technician who calculates the probability of his wife s dying. Yet for all their variety of setting and subject, there runs through each of these stories a thread of the miraculous, a suspicion that the transcendent lies just at the edge of perception. We watch the characters of The Law of Miracles struggle toward that transcendence, whether it be through love or art or violence, until we as readers feel like the main character of the Pushcart Prize winning Presently in Ruins that if we could only parse the seemingly random details of our existence some new pattern of meaning would emerge, some new magic that would transform our lives. (Amazon)

Poetry:  Whorled by Ed Bok Lee (Coffee House Press)

What does it mean to be a Global Citizen in an era of constant war, rampant industrialization, and ever-advancing technology? Lees ever-wandering cultural and spiritual nomads struggle to make sense of what it means to be a citizen of an increasingly homeless world. In a world where "all love is immigrant," Whorled confronts and celebrates the many complications of global politics through meditations on war, migration, and culture. In settings from San Francisco to Seoul, the Midwest to Kazakhstan, Ed Bok Lee considers what it means to be a citizen in a world where "you can't win the past / or stalk redemption."Raised in South Korea, North Dakota, and Minnesota, Ed Bok Lee is the author of Real Karaoke People, which won the PEN Open Book Award. He is an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Goodreads)

Young People's Literature:  With or Without You by Brian Farrey (Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division)

Eighteen year-old Evan and his best friend, Davis, get beaten up for being loners. For being gay. For just being themselves. But as rough as things often seem, at least Evan can take comfort in his sweet, sexy boyfriend Erik--whom he’s kept secret from everyone for almost a year.

Then Evan and Davis are recruited to join the Chasers, a fringe crowd that promises them protection and status. Davis is swept up in the excitement, but Evan is caught between his loyalty to Davis and his love for Erik. Evan’s lied to keep his two worlds separate. Now his lies are about to implode…and destroy the very relationships he’s been trying to protect. (Goodreads)

Reader's Choice:  The Tanglewood Terror by Kurtis Scaletta (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House Children’s Books)

When 13-year-old Eric Parrish comes across glowing mushrooms in the woods behind his house, he's sure there's a scientific explanation. But when they start encroaching on the town—covering the football field and popping up from beneath the floorboards—Eric knows something's seriously wrong. Not that much else is going right: his parents are fighting, his little brother Brian is a little pill, and he's had a falling-out with his football team—over a pig.

Then a runaway girl from a nearby boarding school warns Eric that the fungus could portend the town's doom and leave it in rubble—just like the village that inexplicably disappeared in the exact same spot over 200 years ago. Eric, Brian, and Mandy set out to solve a very old mystery and save the town of Tanglewood. (Goodreads)

 There you have it.  The best books in Minnesota right now.  I am excited to say that the young people's literature winner, Brian Farrey, has agreed to be an author in the spotlight here on BookSnob in the Fall of 2012.  I am really excited about it.

Have a great weekend.
Read Minnesota!

 

 

Minnesota Book Awards 2011

Minnesota Book Awards 2011

The Minnesota Book Awards were presented on Saturday, April 16th, 2011 to a sold out crowd.
I would love to say I was in attendance but I was not.  Next year, I hope to attend and read some of the book finalists before I get there.

And the winners are........



Fiction Category  
Vestments
By:  John Reimringer
I can't wait to read Vestments.  Milkweed Press sent me a copy to review.  So be on the lookout for my book review.

Genre Fiction Category
The Tale of Halcyon Crane: A Novel
By:  Wendy Webb
A ghost story that is sure to cause you to lose sleep.  Another book I am looking forward to reading.

Young Adult Category
Blank Confession
By: Pete Hautman
I love Pete Hautman.  I have read several of his books and recommend them to students on a regular basis.


Poetry Category
Find the Girl
By:  Lightsey Darst
This poetry collection looks really intriguing.  Love the cover art!

Reader's Choice Category
News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist
By:  Laurie Hertzel
I met Laurie in January at the Loft Literary Center.  She is the current Books Editor at Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Memoir and Creative Non-fiction category
Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA
By:  Bonnie J. Rough
Check this one out.  It would be so hard to know you have a genetic condition that you could pass on to your children.  This looks powerful.

General Non-Fiction category.
The Opposite of Cold: The Northwoods Finnish Sauna Tradition
By:  Michael Nordskog and Aaron W. Hautala
Really great photography in this book.  What person doesn't love a sauna?

Children's Literature category
My Heart Is Like a Zoo
By:  Michael Hall
Animals that are cut out in the shapes of hearts.  Any child would love this book.

Minnesota category
North Country: The Making of Minnesota
By:  Mary Lethert Wingerd



The title says it all. 

Congratulations to all the authors who won and to all the finalists.
Read Minnesota!