Summer Reading Recommendations by two indie booksellers, as heard on Colorado Matters (June 13) ☞ Listen to the Colorado Public Radio podcast here.
Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors
Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West by Dorothy Wickenden
Women Icons of the West by Julia Danneberg
Phantoms in the Snow by Kathleen Benner Duble
The Ringer by Jenny Shank
The Bride's House by Sandra Dallas
Philip Connors left work as an editor at the Wall Street Journal and talked his way into a job far from the streets of lower Manhattan: working as one of the last fire lookouts in America. Written with narrative verve and startling beauty, and filled with reflections on his literary forebears who also served as lookouts—among them Edward Abbey, Jack Kerouac, Norman Maclean, and Gary Snyder—Fire Season is a book to stand the test of time.
In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, close friends from childhood and graduates of Smith College, left home in Auburn, New York, for the wilds of northwestern Colorado. They made their way by spring wagon to the tiny settlement of Elkhead, where they lived with a family of homesteaders. In their buoyant letters home, the two women captured the voices and stories of the pioneer women, the children, and the other memorable people they got to know. Nearly a hundred years later, New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden—the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff—found the letters and began to reconstruct the women’s journey.
The dramatic story of two families upended by an accidental police shooting comes to a full boil after two people involved discover one another's identities through their sons' baseball teams.
From the author of New York Times bestselling novels Whiter Than Snow and Prayers for Sale comes a novel about the secrets and passions of three generations of women who have all lived in the same Victorian home called the Bride’s House.
Based on historical events, this story for young adults about Noah, a 15 year old pacifist, and the Phantoms of the Tenth Mountain Division is one of courage and conviction, brotherhood, and the joy in living. It is the gripping journey of a young man who must decide what he believes as he faces the reality of World War II.
This is a wonderful children's history book and a unique fictional first-and-third-person narrative that allows readers to get to know these women through their actions and thoughts, as well as the observations and opinions of those who knew them. Sidebars link the fictional narrative to documented historical events, and a bibliography offers resources for further research on each woman.