Written for anyone who loves a good adventure story, "Lockerboy" is a realistic thriller in the style of such classics as "Journey to the Center of the Earth," "Treasure Island," and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." Here’s a summary of the action: Chapter one: Martin McCarty’s first day at a new high school, Diablo Valley High in the Nevada desert, after growing up in the redwood forests of California. He’s 15, slender, moderately athletic, has a slight stammer when he’s nervous, and possesses a dry sense of humor that’s not loud or showy. His mother was killed a year ago in a car wreck, his father is sullen and struggling. On the bus to school he’s given warnings from all the other kids about the monstrous, overpowering principal who rules by intimidation. Principal Spyr is indeed threatening. In his first class, when Martin jokes nervously with the teacher, the principal walks in to threaten him and the rest of the students. Martin’s next classes are just as demeaning. At lunch he’s met by an older student, Peter, who invites him to come over after dinner for some explanations. On the bus ride home Martin is befriended by a creepy little kid name Simon, who has been following him around during the day. Chapter two: That night at Peter’s house Peter tells Martin the history of the school and its terrifying principal. The kids have figured out a way to deal with him (a group called the Lockerboys is mentioned), and Peter will tell Martin all about it if he can pass a test to prove his worthiness and loyalty. Chapter three: Martin’s test. Martin succeeds but in his haste to escape the dark house he leaves behind a tell-tale clue as to his identity. Chapter four: Martin is told the rest of Peter’s secret about the Lockerboys: they’re the smartest, most talented kids who have chosen to escape underground. The area is honeycombed with tunnels and caves created by a tributary of the San Andreas Fault, and access is gained through a secret entrance. Martin enters and meets these guys and girls, all of them like young commandos. He is given a remarkable tour; he’s also told how the kids live and about a tunnel the kids call Main Street, which they can use to leave the area completely when they want. Martin also hears about a subterranean presence known as the Lockerman, who is rarely seen and stays out of their way. Because his life up above is so bleak, and because he realizes he’s left that identifying clue in Spyr’s house, he decides to join this group and returns to the surface to gather a few things and leave a note for his dad. Chapter five: While at home getting ready to run away to the caves, Martin is joined by Simon, who shows up unexpectedly and pries for information. Martin feels sorry for the little outcast and has a long conversation with him, but eventually Martin chases him off and starts to write a letter to his dad. He enjoys a long memory about him and remembers his advice to think for yourself and not waste time because it could all be over instantly, as they’ve both learned from the death of Martin’s mother. Chapter six: Martin sneaks back to the secret entrance and is about to go in when Principal Spyr surprises him. Spyr flings open the entrance and climbs in, dragging Martin with him. Martin and Spyr get separated underground and Martin, because he’s already been there, knows where to go. During the thrilling chase Martin runs ahead and hides near the bottomless pit and throws his voice into it, hoping to lure Spyr below. Spyr, though, doesn’t fall for the trick and is about to pounce on Martin when the grotesque Lockerman suddenly emerges from the shadows and casts Spyr into the pit. The Lockerman then disappears and Martin goes looking for the rest of the Lockerboys, now no longer stammering and fully confident in his abilities. Chapter seven: Martin underground, two weeks later. He’s become a leader among the Lockerboys and has invented a way to make small oil lamps along the trails. We understand the wonderful system the Lockerboys have set up for gathering/distributing supplies and for helping each other. Martin teams up with a clever girl named Penny; they talk about running away to the Main Street tunnel and coming up on the surface somewhere far from the desert, where they’ll then try to contact Martin’s dad and hopefully establish a new life in a new school. Martin investigates the bottomless pit and realizes there’s a way Spyr might have survived his fall. At different times Martin feels like he’s being followed, and finally he finds out who it is, a scary scene that leads to a surprise. Martin addresses the group of underground kids and challenges them all to follow Penny and him out to the Main Street tunnel where they’ll then escape to a new, better world together. Chapter eight: Martin has an idea and, just before everyone is going to leave the caves and march to Main Street, he runs back in to try to find the Lockerman. He finds him and puts together details he’s picked up in recent weeks to arrive at a powerful conclusion about his identity. Earthquakes start to rumble through the caves and everybody heads out towards Main Street. There’s a final encounter with Spyr as the earthquakes intensify and start to collapse all the caves. Chapter nine: For days the group walks the reinforced Main Street tunnel. Kids exit at different points and then all decide to exit together, except for Martin and Penny. They want to keep on going alone. After a few more days of walking they come to a small pod on a track. They ride the pod through the tunnel to its endpoint, and they climb a ladder that takes them up to ... an unforgettable ending.

Lockerboy

Strodder, Chris

Red Hen Press

Uncovering Kerry

Bridget McAulife

City of Smoke and Sea

Humor & Entertainment

Márquez, Malia

Humor

"I urge you to read this book. Kate Gale has a dream of justice and a wry sense of how hard it is to obtain. She confronts the wrongs of sex, of gender, of husbands and lovers, and sees how easily we confuse our desires with what is right. Somehow, in this process dangerous for a poet, she enters the garden of language and returns whole, humming." 
―Benjamin Saltman

WHERE CROWS AND MEN COLLIDE

Literature & Fiction

Gale, Kate

Poetry

Blue Air

"This book claims as its territory the indefinite spaces separating us: the ground where we move together and apart, the long curve desire describes and follows. Connection seems tenable as a jet trail, 'a seam, holding together / the two halves of the sky.' Kate [Gale] Harper belongs in the company of Lorna Goodison, Margaret Atwood, Lucille Clifton―all poets who write, with force and directness, what a woman lives. I think the secret of Harper’s strength is this: from the middle of all loss, all bewilderment, her poems aspire to the condition of dancing.”
 ―Angela Ball, Mississippi Review

History & Criticism

“Angela Ball is a poet wise enough to describe love as ‘a double appetite for seeing.’ Her poems are suffused by a wary disappointment in romantic excitement, but with the piqued attention that accompanies desire she makes the world, so far as this can be done, the object of her desire.”―Williams Matthews

POSSESSION

Ball, Angela

"The grace of these poems...should be a...lesson: to those who have settled for less...those who...presumed more." ―Jim Krusoe "[Saltman]'s a fine poet, a genuine one--which is saying a great deal...Lovely...apparent plainness...depth beyond it." ―W.S. Merwin

The Sun Takes Us Away: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1996

Benjamin Saltman

A bilingual English/Spanish picture book.  When Princess Riva is born, a witch predicts that she will drive away when she turns sixteen, and never return, but a wise woman says the princess will sleep and not wake unless she does so by her own efforts within five years, in a version of "Sleeping Beauty" set in an African kingdom.A witch predicts that Princess Riva will leave when she is sixteen and never return, but a wise woman says the princess will sleep and not wake unless she does so by her own efforts within five years, in an African "Sleeping Beauty."

African Sleeping Beauty / La Bella Durmiente Africana

Children's Books

Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths

In the Sixties, the Flower Children were making love not war, the Hippies were dropping acid and protesting Vietnam and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was demanding civil rights. Cults, communes and live-ins sprang up around the country. One charismatic leader started a cult in New England that continues to this day. This shocking true story tells of one girl's life in that cult. Brought there as a three year old, cut off from all contact with the outside world, the young Andie struggles to survive in a world that is both claustrophobic and frightening. In the wake of Jonestown, Waco and Heaven's Gate, we see a closeup view of life in a cult and a young girl's escape from one brave new world to another.

Lake of Fire

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

The Alphabet Conspiracy takes its name from a 1950s -era school filmstrip of the same title. With a cast that includes patron saints for country girls and criminals, a Revolutionary War hero, the Wolfman, a sin-eater, John Wayne, and Johnny Cash, these poems swagger and sulk through an educational film turned film noir, replete with femme fatales in love. Mark Doty noted that the title poem "artfully addresses itself to the way children are taught to enter--and then become trapped by--a world constructed of language." Rita Mae Reese digs beneath the surface of dictionary entries to uncover their secrets and to discover some of her own, as in the poem "Womanless," stemming from a headword in Webster's Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary for which there is no entry:  And what about me? When I look in a mirror,  I see the parts of a woman; but if womanlessCan include me, then womanless like me too,For a few months here--not in paradise of course,But close enough--until you. Then nothing was close Enough.... The Alphabet Conspiracy is about the ways in which language itself can function as a plot, keeping us estranged from ourselves, but also about the way it can be used as a tool for recovering our truest selves.

The Alphabet Conspiracy

Reese, Rita Mae

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