Overwhelmed by a failed marriage and a traumatic broken engagement, Margot Genger found temporary relief in alcohol and casual relationships. When she careened into a manic episode that led to a complete and very public psychotic breakdown, she recognized she needed to change her life trajectory. She came up with a rather unusual plan while […]
Book Review
Posted inArts + Scene
A Tale of Young Grief
Fortuna author J. Lynn Bailey’s emotional second YA novel begins with the death of Jasper Stone. His twin sister Livia is plunged into a grief so profound that she finds herself clutching at anything that will dull her pain, even for a moment. Having lived a rather sheltered life, 17-year-old Liv can’t find the inner […]
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Catch of the Day
I have been following Kirk Lombard’s blog, The Monkeyface News, for years now. His delightful writing style is a poetic blend of personal experience, history, humor and even a haiku once in a while. As a forager, freediver and angler along the California coast for more than 30 years, Lombard’s words always seem to resonate […]
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A SoHum Horror Story
OK, first off, so you won’t be thinking about it for the rest of this review: “Nepenthe, Wikipedia tells us, is “a fictional medicine for sorrow — a ‘drug of forgetfulness’ mentioned in ancient Greek literature and Greek mythology.” The best-known usage is in Poe’s “The Raven”: “Quaff, oh quaff this kind Nepenthe and forget […]
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Wicked Bugs: The Meanest, Deadliest, Grossest Bugs on Earth
Many benign and useful insects, spiders and arthropods do exist in the world, but you will not find them in this adaptation of Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects for young readers. Local author Amy Stewart is intrigued by the dark side of the bug universe; the dangerous, destructive […]
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Timber War Stories
Sometimes a book invites a reader’s favor. Darren Frederick Speece’s Defending Giants seems like a love affair for those concerned with protecting ancient forests. The book cover entices readers with a powerful image of an activist with his hand up blocking a truck, and the back features a glowing blurb from 350.org climate activist Bill […]
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All the World’s a Stage
Local author Doug Ingold’s new novel Rosyland is a tautly narrated thriller that uses Shakespeare’s theater metaphor to convey duplicity: “All the world’s a stage.” It’s not a new conceit but it gains something staged afresh in the 1980s among a colorful cast of Bay Area theater professionals, high rollers, drug dealers, cops and lawyers. […]
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Black Five
Avid readers of teen fantasy fiction will find much that’s familiar in Black Five: vampires, werewolves, witches and the odd fairy and dragon. However, local author J. Lynn Bailey has recast these creatures as denizens of a richly imagined realm called Nighmerianotte. This world lies in another dimension that roughly overlaps the U.S., Europe and […]
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The Extraordinary Voyage of Kamome: A Tsunami Boat Comes Home
The Extraordinary Voyage of Kamome tells the story of a Japanese panga boat washed out to sea in the 2011 tsunami. A little more than two years later, the small boat washed ashore near Crescent City, encrusted with barnacles, but otherwise intact. Characters on the side of the boat identified it as the property of […]
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The Invention of Nature
Alexander Von Humboldt is not exactly a household name in 21st-Century America. I, for one, knew almost nothing about him, even after living in the county bearing his name for several years. But in his day, he was “as famous as Napoleon,” the ultimate science rock star — Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye the Science […]
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Girl Waits with Gun
Amy Stewart is familiar to most people in Humboldt County as A) co-owner of Eureka Books and B) a successful author of nonfiction, most recently the bestselling The Drunken Botanist. (She’s also a former Journal columnist.) Now she has decided to try her hand at fiction with the historical novel Girl Waits with Gun. But […]
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When in Florence
“The streets met at odd angles, and urine reeked in the alleys. No one living in here could forget his basic humanity.” (When in Florence, p. 32.) This not a new book; it was published in 1986, but I only recently stumbled across it. And newness isn’t everything. In fact, sometimes it’s best to let […]