In the summer of 2016, Coeur d’Alene native Justin Wilder Doering set out to fulfill a long-sought-after personal goal: “To capture the collective face of homelessness” in America. The journey resulting from this hope fills the pages of his recently released book, “Fifty Sandwiches.”
S.M. Hulse was raised and educated in Spokane. The author of “Eden Mind” took art classes to better help understand her main character, a painter named Jo Faber.
Romance fiction authors Asa Bradley, Katee Robert, Rebecca Zanetti, and Lucy Gilmore discussed everything from odd fan interactions and the biggest misconceptions about the genre to their individual inspirations and nailing down how to write the perfect romance scene at last night’s Northwest Passages Galentine’s Day event.
Romance isn’t dead. Not by a long shot. There’s a universe of love stories out there, and this area is home to four authors who are well-known writers in the romance genre.
After studying, working in and teaching physics for her entire career, it wasn’t until author Asa Maria Bradley moved to Washington and joined a local writer’s group that she considered writing a full-length novel. After experimenting with writing in different genres, Bradley finally turned to her Swedish roots and began work on her Viking Warriors series.
At a bank in the border town of Nogales, a Mexican woman named Lydia attempts to withdraw cash from her dead mother’s account. She needs $11,000 to pay a smuggler to lead her and her 9-year-old son into the United States. But when the bank manager asks for documentation, Lydia can’t supply any. Less than two weeks earlier, her mother, her husband and the rest of her family were murdered at an afternoon barbecue. Lydia and her son, Luca, have since then been on the run. Up to this point, two-thirds of the way through Jeanine Cummins’ thrilling and devastating “American Dirt,” I’d devoured the novel in a dry-eyed adrenalin rush. Lydia, Luca and the teenage Honduran sisters they’re traveling with – who are fleeing gang violence – leap on top of freight trains. They endure kidnapping, rape and the constant threat of death. “If there’s one good thing about terror,” Lydia thinks wryly, “it’s that it’s more immediate than grief.”
“Circe” – a book that explores the perspective of a witch-goddess who appears in Homer’s “Odyssey” – was the area’s most circulated library book in 2019, with 961 checkouts in the Spokane Public Library and 563 in the Spokane County Library District.
