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All tagged Texas
Last month, my husband and I headed down to Austin, Texas for a vacation and ATX Fest. In case you haven't heard of the festival, it focuses on television, with panels, reunions and other events about television past and present. This was the final year they were incorporating Friday Night Lights into the festival, and so I thought this was the year to go.
I wanted to share a bit about the fest, the good and bad, and the whole experience, even though I'm a bit late in doing so.
Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.
This week's Recommendation Tuesday is part of our Verse Novel Week celebration! View all of the past recommendations over here.
And the pomegranates,
like memories, are bittersweet
as we huddle together,
remembering just how good
life used to be.
— Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall
Under the Mesquite is one of those books that will just suck you into its words and rhythm, and the verse format adds so much to that feeling as Garcia McCall weaves together Mexican American immigrant Lupita's story of family, loss and hope.
"Recommended for fans of Friday Night Lights, comfort food, and top-notch storytelling."
Queen (Queenie) Elizabeth Wake's mother, the late B.J. Wake, gave her a big name so she could escape the Wake family destiny: that of serving the role of resident lowlife of the Hill Country town of North Star, Texas.
Queenie's sister, Merry Carole, followed in their mother's footsteps, having a scandalous teenage relationship with the town's golden boy football player and their son now is--quite controversially--the rising star quarterback on the North Star football team. Queenie, however, got out of North Star, first thanks to college in Austin, and then thanks to a series of chef jobs all over the United States. Yet once again, she's been fired--this time from a New York CIty hotel restaurant because she refused the ketchup a customer requested (I'm right there with you, Queenie). Out of options and with nowhere left to go, Queenie returns home to North Star.
The red light blinks. Welcoming me home. What's the exact opposite of blaze of glory? I look around my dusty Subaru, cut-off jeans, and think: me. This. This is what the exact opposite of a blaze of glory looks like.
Lily was a spirited woman, a passionate teacher and talker who explained in great detail what had happened to her, why it had happened to her, what she'd done about it, and what she's learned from it, all with the idea of imparting life lessons to my mother.
Walls' "true life novel" presents the events in the life of Lily Casey Smith, a colorful and fascinating person spicing the pages of this book. This retelling of stories from her family's oral history were handed down through the years, and Walls admits that she does take a few storyteller's liberties.
Growing up in west Texas where horses and buckboards were the only mode of transportation, Lily learned to live tough, face obstacles and come out swinging regardless of what she faced. Her father spouted philosophy like a flash flood of insight that went straight into the fiber that made Lily Casey one of the strongest, most durable individuals in Texas.
“Most important thing in life.” he would say, "is learning how to fall.”
“If I owned hell and west Texas,” he said, “I do believe I'd sell west Texas and live in hell.”
“When God closes a window, he opens a door. But it's up to you to find it.”
Lily's mother, though, stood in stark contrast to her father. Pious to a fault, she was a woman certain that everything that happened came straight from the hand of God.
If you want to be reminded of the love of the Lord, Mom always said, just watch the sunrise. And if you wanted to be reminded of the wrath of the Lord, Dad said, watch a tornado.
“I know what I like,” I say. “It’s a certain type of music and I’m just not into stuff like bluegrass and banjos.”
“Music is music, Priscilla,” says Russ. “If you love music, you give it all a listen. You see what there is to learn in every song you hear. You take chances on shows. That’s part of it.”
I’ve been just dying for a great summer-themed read, so a couple of weeks ago I blew though five or six books I hoped would fit the bill. Among those books was Melissa Walker’s 2009 novel, Lovestruck Summer, which was exactly what I was hoping to find and earned itself a spot as a summer read I’ll definitely revisit.
Don’t let the cutesy cover fool you. Lovestruck Summer has quite a bit of meat to it with excellent, believable character development—as well as some very smart humor—and most definitely fits into the spectrum of older-YA/”new adult” that’s becoming so popular right now.
Quinn (who’s real name is Priscilla, but no one had better call her that) has just graduated from high school in North Carolina when, on a whim, she calls her favorite record label at 3:00 a.m and asks for a summer internship. To her surprise, the label agrees, which means she’ll be spending the summer in America’s live music capital, Austin, Texas.
Quinn finds herself living with her super sorority girl cousin, Penny, a UT student who has a bedroom and wardrobe for her dog, and whose next-door neighbors include Russ, a 21 year-old cowboy/frat boy combo (think Matt Saracen if he drove Tim Riggins’ truck) who loves country music and annoys the hell out of Quinn. She often “escapes under her headphones” because these people are so different, and Quinn doesn’t know how to cope with the Bachelor marathons and pop-country that are the soundtrack of her cousin’s apartment.
I tug on Penny’s arm. “I hate country music,” I whisper through clenched teeth.
“What?” she asks, clapping her hands to the beat and hardly turning around. “I hate country music!” I shout, way too loudly. The back half of the restaurant turns to scowl at me.
Oh, Laura Griffin, why can’t I quit you?
For real… you’d think after I went mildly ballistic over the Magical Missing Condom Syndrome in Griffin’s previous novel, Snapped* and wanted to strangle the main character in One Wrong Step (Celie is the worst main character I’ve ever read—I wanted the bad guys to kill her and leave her body in a ditch), I’d be able to make a clean break from Griffin’s books. But, oh no… a new Tracers book magically accidentally landed on my Kindle and I devoured it in a couple of evenings.
This is my problem: I enjoyed the hell out of Laura Griffin’s Glass Sisters duology (especially the first one, Thread of Fear). Those two books were the perfect formula for awesomesauce brain candy: decently suspenseful but not too stressful, smart/tough women, smart/tough guys, an interesting setting. I also really, really enjoyed the first book in the Tracers series (which is kind of connected to the Glass Sisters series), Untraceable, because one of the main characters is a female computer hacker for good, which is incredibly badass. So, I keep reading Griffin’s books, hoping to recapture that magic.
She’s got a snappy, journalist style and doesn’t get bogged down in procedure or unnecessary details. (Do not bring details and nuance into my brain candy!) Yet, with that said, her novels still seem well-researched—more so than your average CSI episode at least. Trust me on this.
Since I have lost my stomach for a lot of mysteries in the last few years, I’ve tried a lot of the fluffy rom/suspense writers and most of them are just not at all my thing. They tend to be painfully formulatic and beyond ridiculous. (Ridiculous**, I can handle, in fact, I kind of love ridiculous—beyond that… no thanks.)
Also, I have learned two things about Texas from Laura Griffin’s books:
Editor’s Note: This is a special guest post from my mom. Sandra is a retired high school English teacher with a lot of opinions and a newfound love of YA literature and urban fantasy—she’s a longtime fan of horror, campy mysteries and police procedurals. As a kid, her goal was to grow up to be Nancy Drew, so much so that she carried around a notebook to report on her neighbors’ potential criminal activities.
In my little Pacific Northwest town of the fifties, women stayed home, took care of the house and centered their lives on their families and husbands. Nancy Drew, the brilliant and virtuous sleuth, gave preteen girls a glimpse of another world, of what could be.
Independent and clever, she drove her blue roadster into mysteries that never quit evolving, into places where atmosphere cloaked young girls in other worlds and thrilling tales.
I loved Nancy.
