So much has been written about the Beach Boys during their extraordinary fifty-five year history, but Mike Love as the group’s front man and principal lyricist has the inside scoop on the history of the legendary American band with his new book Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. Their origins were middle class; […]

  There is a lot I could  say about Mischling, Affinity Konar’s new Holocaust novel; it’s heartbreaking and beautiful and horrific. Twelve-year-old twin sisters Stasha and Pearl are sent to Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather, and come to the attention of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, who specialized in grotesque experiments on twins,  subjecting […]

In Charlie Quimby‘s follow-up to his debut novel Monument Road, he returns to his native western Colorado and the city of Grand Junction, a town built at the confluence of the Colorado and Gunnison rivers. And it is at the river where Quimby’s story begins. The river banks, covered in the invasive tamarisk, have become […]

El Paso is Winston Groom’s first work of fiction in almost 20 year since Forrest Gump. It is a brawny, sprawling novel, part legend, part history, of outlaws, revolutionaries, railroad tycoons, kidnappings, and daring rescues. While Europe plunges into the Great War, the Mexican Revolution intrudes on the still wild American southwest. When railroad tycoon […]

Inspired by  a true historical episode, Girl Waits with Gun, by Amy Stewart, starts with an automobile crashing into a buggy carrying the Kopp sisters.  It’s 1914 in Paterson, New Jersey, and the villainous Henry Kaufman, drunken and erratic son of a rich factory owner, refuses to pay for the damages.  He and his thugs soon begin […]

O, Ove, How I’ll miss closing my days with you. In Chapter 1 you tested my patience; I could laugh only because I wasn’t the one trying to explain the “computer that is not a computer” to you. In Chapter 2 you were so bitter and severe I almost walked away, but by Chapter 5 […]

We don’t often talk about spin-offs in book form, but there is one novel that has a surprising number of published sequels or retellings or just plain knock-offs.  At Mesa County Library, we have at least 25 different titles that are based on Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.   Some are sequels that tell […]

Childhood friends Gordon Walker and Leigh Ransom plan to attend college together in the fall, but over the summer, unsettling events in the dying Colorado plains town of Lions ruin those plans. Businesses close and residents leave for a better life elsewhere. The derelict sugar beet factory and the rusted grain elevator prompt the few […]