Dancing on Glass

Literature & Fiction

Chehak, Susan Taylor

Literary

Foreverland Press

Harmony

This powerful novel of love and adultery recounts the story of Clodine Wheeler and the small Midwestern town where she was born and raised. As Clodine tells of her upbringing, courtship, and marriage, her narrative circles ever closer to the troubling secret and shocking death that stand at its center. It is a tale of passion and domestic violence – and their incalculable consequences. No one knows exactly when Lilly Duke, wife of a convicted killer, arrived to seek refuge in a cabin on the shore of Harmony Lake, but her arrival changes Clodine's life forever. At first Lilly finds no friends except Clodine – and Clodine's wayward husband, Galen. But after her child's body is found drifting on the lake, the town crowds to Lilly's aid. Still, no one can explain what Lilly was doing when her baby crept out of the cabin. The answer to this question leads to the shattering climax of this unforgettable novel. "Haunting . . . Clodine Wheeler is the bemused narrator who strings together brilliant beads of descriptive phrases as she sorts through her memories . . . Chehak skillfully depicts small-town meanness and ironic generosity . . . . Her mesmerizing tale has classic resonances." – Publishers Weekly

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

The Story of Annie D.

She's seen her times and her town change forever, and when murder destroys the peace, she knows that nothing can be the way it once was.    "Absolutely stunning... Reads with the force and generational sweep of some ancient rural myth." —New York Times Book Review  In this old-fashioned tale of murder and retribution we meet a strong-minded woman who has always feared for her family and tried to protect her father and her two sons. Annie D. was raised in Nebraska, all flat farmland and cornfields, except its rivers. Widowed and living in the town of Wizen River, she tends to her beloved garden and enjoys frequent visits from her old high school friend, Phoebe Tooker. Then one fine morning Phoebe drives her Chevy off the road, into a ditch, and up an oak tree, and Annie D. is forced to take stock.  Life in Wizen River appears to be idyllic. But we soon learn that the idyll has been disrupted by two violent killings, and when a third young woman is found strangled and raped, we trust to Annie D., with her sharp tongue and good heart, to make sense of it all.  A Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award Nominee

Los Angeles Times Bestseller. International Association of Crime Writers Hammett Prize Nominee. "Vivid [and] intense SMITHEREENS has brooding, ominous atmosphere, sexual awakening, loss of innocence, murder. It could be described as a gothic coming-of-age novel, but it's far too good to lend itself to any label. Susan Taylor Chehak is a meticulous writer, an evocative stylist whose mastery is evident on every page." --The Boston Globe Set in the heartland of America, this novel pairs two unlikely friends in a dark tale of seduction and murder. It is May Caldwell's sixteenth summer, and life couldn't be more dull in Linwood, Iowa. Vaguely suicidal and haunted by half-remembered scenes from her early childhood, May is a girl waiting for her life to happen. And happen it does with the unexpected arrival of Frances Anne Crane, a.k.a. Frankie, a girl with too much past and nothing to lose. Together they seduce an older man as Frankie awakens all that May has been holding inside: the mystery of her uncle Brodie's illicit past, the painful truth of her grandparents' slow dissolutions, and her own emerging sexuality. Where Frankie leads, May follows, and what's left is a murder no one can pin, a family's buried past resurfaced in a wild night of mayhem, and May's safe world blown to smithereens in this unforgettable of betrayal and desire.

Smithereens

Four critically acclaimed novels...A master of the Midwestern gothic... If you haven't discovered Susan Taylor Chehak: Welcome to Rampage Madlen Cramer has come back home with her two young children to be reunited with her childhood friend Rafe, the sexy drifter who has abducted a four-year-old girl from an abusive foster family, leaving the parents for dead. Once again Chehak has mined her Midwestern roots and produced a highly charged novel where the questions of the present and the past are inextricably bound up with the secrets of the past. In this novel, Chehak sets her story in a small town called Rampage, and as its name implies, it is a place where much violence converges on those whose lives are bound up in its dark history. As the novel begins, Madlen Cramer has come back home with her two young children to be reunited there with her childhood friend Rafe, the sexy drifter who has abducted a four-year-old girl from an abusive foster family, leaving the parents for dead. During this hot Iowa summer, the past will refuse to stay past as painful truths begin to emerge: about Rafe's own foster family; about Madlen's marriage, whose bonds had begun to unravel in the months before her husband's tragic accident; and about her beautiful self-absorbed mother, whose passions bring about the devastating entanglement of two families in an embrace that cannot be undone until Rafe has gone on the rampage that will destroy everything in sight and leave readers breathless. A master of the Midwestern gothic, Susan Taylor Chehak is that rare writer who brings the closely observed detail to a level of storytelling that has earned her both an Edgar nomination and the praise of critics nationwide. Rampage is for people who understand, on every level, that you really can't go home again.

Rampage

"A tremendously funny and touching book. I really loved it." —Diane Keaton Kerry Madden-Lunsford's fresh, often hilarious, debut novel presents a bittersweet and unforgettable tale of adolescence. On the surface, the Donegals seem the picture-perfect norm of a nuclear family in the 1970s. But seen through the eyes of Liz Donegal, her world teeters on the brink of disintegration. Liz's father, an assistant college football coach, uproots his family annually with the motivational compassion of "Get your ass in the car." Her brothers Joe-Sam and Leo, whose first words are "hut, hut, hike," and sister, Peaches, a wannabe cheerleader, pick apart their lives and tentatively pull together in whatever town they land in, whether it's Bobcat Country or Shark Territory. While chaos reigns within the Donegal household, outside the family dog Halfback is busy digging up his predecessor Bear Bryant. At the center of this remarkable cast of characters, Liz creates a world for herself spun out of best friends, books, secret glimpses at sex manuals, and a few adults who actually understand what it means to grow up "offsides." Fostered by the creativity of her aunt Betty and uncle Peter, Liz first glimpses life beyond football games and Catholic school. When she isn't busy rebelling, singing Lou Reed songs, or transforming herself into Helen Keller or Anne Frank, Liz is falling in love, discovering herself, and learning that life also has some painful lessons.

Offsides

MADDEN-LUNSFORD, KERRY

Genre Fiction

"It begins like a storm—with that pensive heavy stillness of dead air pressing in, with a soft rustle of the wind just barely stirring in the trees, a bruising over of the summer sky, a somber gray and yellow horizon glittery with lightning, bloated full of thunder, swept by sheets of rain—it begins when old man Krejci bumps his head. And then—like that same storm spent, blown past to leave the ground and the air around feeling new and fresh and washed crisp clean—the next morning when Meena peeks into her father's sun-spilled bedroom to find that he has not moved, but is still lying on the bed with his head flat back on the pillow, in just exactly the same way she left him there eight hours before, everything will be changed..." It begins when Meena Krejci, not sure what to do and fearing she'll be blamed for the injuries that have caused her father's death, panics and takes flight, driving west across Nebraska and into Colorado, where she encounters an apocalypse-predicting madman, his captive sister—the troubled young woman in whose release Meena will create a violent version of rebirth for herself—and a bear. Told through alternating narratives—a portrayal of the last few days of Meena's life and an account of the events in the past that have brought her to where she is now—this is the story of a woman running away from home for the first time and the strong, nearly universal desire to shed one's identity to become somebody else.

The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci

t's clear that this is not the seventh grade that Kyle Reedy had planned. He can deal with the yeti-sized Ross Wilkie, who harasses Kyle like it's his job. Kyle can accept the fact that he made a mistake in filling out the form for his school's required community service. (Yes, he'd planned to be stocking shelves in the food pantry, which sounded pretty easy, and instead he discovered he'd be on scooper duty at the local greyhound rescue.) But the part that he can't handle, the part that is absolutely wrong, is what happens in band. Kyle, who loves making music more than anything else, learns on the first day that the coveted seat in his band's first clarinet section, a seat that should be his, a seat that was destined to be his, has been given to someone else. Her. Ashley Templeton. And he's pretty sure that every single problem he's having is all her fault.[Middle Grade: Ages 8-12]

Ashley Templeton Is Ruining My Life

Teen & Young Adult

Aspengren, Kate

Lois Phillips Hudson was a novelist, essayist, professor at the University of Washington, environmental activist, and mother of two daughters. She was born in 1927 in Jamestown, North Dakota. Because of the Depression, her family was forced to move back and forth between North Dakota and Washington State. In 1937 her family finally settled on a twenty-acre homestead in the rural Sammamish River Valley near the town of Redmond, Washington, population, then, only about 300. Unrestorable Habitat: Microsoft Is My Neighbor Now recounts how that valley was transformed over the course of Hudson’s lifetime, roughly the sixty-five years from 1937 to 2003. The Sammamish River Valley was for her what Walden Pond was for Thoreau, what the Lake District was for Wordsworth, what the farm at Port Royal, Kentucky, is for Wendell Berry. It was both her home land and it was the womb of her imagination. Day after day, year after year, she rode her bicycles, first along the county gravel roads of her youth, then along the asphalt pathways of the Kings County Park and Trail System. As she rode, she observed the natural order and its cycles; she observed the human habitation of this world and how it changed the natural order; she saw rivers where salmon had once been plentiful now dammed for power generation and straightened for flood control. Parking lots covered wetlands. Golf courses and soccer parks replaced farm fields. Suburban housing developments overran apple and cherry orchards. Hudson’s rural habitat of small farms, salmon streams, forests, and the human community closely tied to the natural world were transformed into the suburban technological-capitol of the world, the headquarters of Microsoft, Hudson’s new “neighbor.” Unrestorable Habitat: Microsoft Is My Neighbor Now was not published during Hudson’s lifetime. Hudson left a manuscript that is substantially complete, but not fully finished. The book tells a unified story. It has a clear beginning, coherent development of ideas, and a satisfying conclusion. But it is obvious that Hudson had not done her final editing. There are many parenthetical comments within the text where she reminds herself to recheck sources, to verify facts, and to delete repetitions. We are able to observe Hudson’s thought process as she makes suggestions for further revision of her book. Also, there are a few typographical mistakes. However, the text is being published as Hudson last left it, without editorial corrections.

Unrestorable Habitat: Microsoft Is My Neighbor Now

Science & Math

Hudson, Lois Phillips

Biological Sciences

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