Bobbye's Recommended Reads

Time for some mystery Southern-style. It goes down much smoother with our mojitos. First we go to the small town of Last Chance, South Carolina:
Welcome to Last Chance will be released by Hatchette Books on March 1, 2011

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Ramsay's delicious contemporary debut introduces the town of Last Chance, S.C., and its warmhearted inhabitants. Down to her last five bucks, beautiful runaway Wanda Jane Coblentz heads to the town watering hole and picks up local fiddler Clay Rhodes, figuring that a night at the local no-tell motel beats sleeping on a park bench. When Clay catches her going through his wallet, he dumps her purse out and discovers ID for somebody named Mary Smith. Talk about getting off on the wrong foot! Jane, aka Mary, reveals that she's on the run from a shady, possibly dangerous past. Despite her sketchy behavior, Clay falls in love with her, and soon he and his mother are scheming in fine style to give Jane a last chance of her own. Ramsay strikes an excellent balance between tension and humor as she spins a fine yarn. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

From there, we travel South to Atlanta to highlight a fellow Mojito sister's book. No, Tina didn't put me up to this.

The Dangerous Edge of Things is available now.

From Booklist
The week after Teresa Ann (Tai) Randolph moves from Savannah to Atlanta—to run a gun shop she and her brother, Eric, just inherited—she finds the body of a young woman, Eliza Compton, shot in a car across the street from Eric’s house. The exclusive and secretive corporate security firm Phoenix, for which industrial psychologist Eric consults, attempts to take Tai in hand, offering the protective services of Trey Seaver, a crackerjack agent whose brain trauma suffered in a car accident left him emotionally insensitive but with an uncanny ability to detect lying. But Tai will not be restrained; with both herself and Eric of interest to police, she’s in full investigative mode looking for Eliza’s murderer. The convoluted plot involves money (of course), politics, and some of Atlanta’s movers and shakers. Whittle’s debut novel, clearly intended to be the first in a series, boasts a feisty if somewhat foolhardy protagonist whose relationship with the intriguing Trey bodes well for further installments. An overcomplicated story gets in the way a bit, but this has all the makings of a promising series. --Michele Leber

Finally but certainly not last, we wind back up to eastern North Carolina:

Sin Creek is available now.

A gruesome murder leads Agent Hunter into wicked waters.

Some call Gator Creek “Sin Creek”—where the Cape Fear River snakes through eastern North Carolina, past the stunning port city of Wilmington. A sliver of water where wickedness and decadence take precedence over decency.
When SBI Agent Logan Hunter discovers a dead UNC-Wilmington coed used porn to pay tuition, she tracks down and questions other coeds. Far too many of them have been coerced into the raunchy business and have the scars to prove it. Hunter battles dens of iniquity, zeroing in on a brazen but somehow elusive ferry to find a deranged killer and bring down the porn operations, while trying to keep her marriage to Agent Chase Railey from falling apart.

Even though she succeeds in finding the killer, the investigation changes her life in ways she never could have imagined.

Storytelling and Telling Stories by Tina

My grandmother always told me, “Now don’t you be telling no stories.”

But I always did. I couldn’t resist a story, even if it meant making one up for no reason but the making.

My grandmother said these were lies. My husband would agree. He’s an engineer, suspicious of the frayed edge that all stories have, the place where facts start unraveling. He says that fact and truth are the same thing. He says that if he started writing equations based on my ideas of truth, planes would fall from the sky.

It’s a point.

And yet my brain can’t make sense of all the facts around me; it’s an impossibility. Information overload. My brain has to leave out certain things for me to make sense of the rest. It edits my reality into something I can comprehend, leaving out this, focusing on that. It connects my present experience to the other experiences folded and tucked in my gray matter, and by doing so, creates a chronology, a sense of past and future, effect and consequence. The human brain is wired for stories, and it programs our consciousness accordingly.

Not facts. Stories.

Memory is useful not for what it records, but for what it erases. It takes out the extraneous -- however factual -- and leaves us with essence -- however slanted. And it is slanted; it must be. No true and perfectly accurate memory exists. Certain details, by necessity, weren’t captured in the first place, and every subsequent time your consciousness touches the memory, it further alters it, even as it carves it deeper into your brain. Jonah Lehrer explains it more eloquently than I can in his SEED magazine article "The Neuroscience of Proust":

Every time we remember, the neuronal structure of the memory, no matter how constant it may feel, is delicately transformed. If you prevent the memory from changing, it ceases to exist. So the purely objective memory . . . is the one memory lost to you forever.

Our memory is a fallacy. All we have are our stories. All we are are our stories.

Which is why I write fiction -- because it's the only way I know to find something real. And there isn't an equation in the world that can do that for me.

Tina's Review of CAPTIVE SPIRIT by Liz Fichera

We make it a practice here at the Mojito Literary Society to appreciate good drinks, good food, good friends and good writing. And by “good,” I don’t mean “okay.“ I mean good in its heartiest sense — honest, pleasing, well-crafted and authentic.

Hopefully, our book reviews reflect this ideal. I have been lucky enough in my life to have been blessed with librarians and bookstore owners and voracious reader friends, and as a member of the Society, I want to continue this tradition of sharing the treasures that come my way.

Therefore, I am very very excited to tell you about Captive Spirit, a debut romance from Liz Fichera, published this summer by Carina Press. You may have had the pleasure of reading an interview with the author a few weeks ago in which she told us a little about the history that sparked this novel — the story of a Native American tribe known as the Hohokam, which translates as “the ones who left.” From this factual framework, Captive Spirit was created.

It’s the story of Aiyana, a teenager living in the Sonoran Desert at the dawn of the sixteenth century. When her father arranges her marriage to a man she hardly knows, she flees, only to be captured by mercenary Spanish raiders who consider her just another trade good. Her village — and her best friend Honovi — far behind, Aiyana must find a way to return home, to the people she loves, but also to a culture that has no neat category for her. But first, she must survive.

Fichera’s attention to craft is obvious and exemplary; she deftly pulls off the intricate balance of setting, action and characterization needed to move this narrative forward. Aiyana’s story is achingly familiar to anyone who has ever stretched against the confines of their culture, and yet it is utterly foreign at the same time. The Hohokam no longer exist; they are a footnote in history. And yet we as readers must identify with this young woman even though the choices and obstacles in her path may seem alien to us. Her people are quite literally ghosts now, walking and talking on the page, but otherwise vanished. And yet we must care about them, and Aiyana, as if they were our own people.

This is where Captive Spirit shines, with this deft interplay of explication and action. The narrative keeps the reader engrossed by presenting situations that still resonate even today — familial obligations, cultural demands, necessary capitulations — and it pulls off this trick by evoking the emotions that all humans share — faith, hope, grief, and love. In this book, the universal is personal, deeply felt and honestly rendered.

The characters are complicated. No one is a caricature, not even the fierce Apache chieftain or the calculating Spaniard who each holds her life in his hands. Each character, no matter how treacherous, no matter how decent, is a complex identity. Villains act with compassion and tenderness in certain contexts, while good people erupt in brutal violence in others.

But at its heart, Captive Spirit is a romance, a surprisingly delicate love story playing out against the hardscrabble landscapes of desert and mountain. Aiyana is no delicate maiden — she gets blood on her hands, literally, as she hunts and fishes and endures hardships beyond her previous experience. Her love is no adolescent crush, and she is no hothouse flower.

Some books tell one person’s story with such precise detail and honest attention that the story can be read again and again, for as the reader changes, so do the understandings that unfold with the narrative. Captive Spirit is that kind of book. I am grateful it came my way.

Suggested beverage pairing — I’d choose a unfiltered wheat beer for this story. Nothing heavy, but something honest and unpretentious, something rich with the land and the sun and the rain that produced it.

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You can read an excerpt of Captive Spirit at Liz's website: http://www.lizfichera.com or buy it at Carina Press and other booksellers.

About Liz:

Liz is an author from the American Southwest by way of Chicago. She likes to write stories about ordinary people who do extraordinary things, oftentimes against the backdrop of Native American legends. Her debut historical romance novel was published in June 2010 by Carina Press. Don’t hesitate to connect with her around the web and especially at her web site because it can get real lonely in the desert.