Book Teaches Kids About Alpacas, Abcs
Here’s what I know about alpacas:
Alpacas are cousins to the llama, guanaco and vicuna, members of the camelid family. Baby alpacas weigh 15 pounds at birth. Cria is the name for baby alpacas. Diets for alpacas consist of pasture grasses.
And so on, through the letter Z (zoologists study the alpaca).
I know all of this because of a small, self-published children’s book called “An Alpaca Alphabet” ($9.95 paperback) by a Medical Lake alpaca breeder named Carmen Sonnenborn.
Not yet available in stores, “An Alpaca Alphabet” is an alphabet and zoology lesson in one. Written last winter, the book is Sonnenborn’s effort to give children some basic knowledge about the animals she and her family raises.
“There really wasn’t anything on the market for children regarding alpacas,” Sonnenborn says, save a coloring book put out by the alpaca breeders’ association.
“But it really isn’t adequate for small children,” she says. “And since I used to have a pre-school, I decided I could write on that level.”
Sonnenborn had 2,000 copies of her book printed (by Hearn Bros. Printing of Spokane), and she is selling them over the Internet, through the alpaca industry and at her own farm (Denemrac Farms).
If all goes well, she might try to place the books in local retail book outlets.
“I was just waiting to see what happens, to see if anybody was interested,” she says.
For order information, call (509) 299-4938.
Horror from the West Side
Horror lives among us. Or so Terry Brooks and John Saul would have us believe.
Brooks and Saul are among those fortunate types, full-time writers whose job allows them to split time between Seattle and Hawaii.
Saul, the better known of the two, has a book coming out in September. “The Presence” (Fawcett/Ballantine, 400 pages, $25) involves strange undersea rocks, extraterrestrials and DNA coding, and lungs that can’t handle oxygen, and features exotic Hawaiian locales.
A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews called the book “a suspenseful thriller from the prolific and craftsmanlike Saul that moves like a dream through its paradisiacal Hawaiian landscape.”
Brooks, a former lawyer, already has a book on the shelves. “Running With Demons” (Ballantine, 420 pages, $25.95) plays out a good-vs.-evil struggle between a demon and a “Knight of the Word” over a particularly important Fourth of July weekend.
How good is it? Well, John Saul liked it.
“Darker, starker, classically written and with a brand-new mythos to fuel its contemporary plot,” Saul wrote in classic book-blurbism. “I couldn’t put it down. Welcome to my world, Terry!”
Making the short list
Speaking of Seattle, that city’s Fjord Press has printed the new collection of short stories by English writer Penelope Lively. “The Five Thousand and One Nights” (149 pages, $12 paperback) is, in the words of New York Times reviewer Michael Upchurch, a “spry collection of 14 stories.”
Upchurch, who praises Lively’s ability to say a lot in just a few pages, goes on to ask an important question: “Why is a high-profile British author like Lively appearing in such an unlikely publishing venue? Fjord Press is a small and enterprising Seattle publisher that specializes mostly in translations of Scandinavian literature. It’s an estimable outfit - but surely something ominous is happening in American publishing when New York houses… pass up worthy works by a name author and let the small guys do it instead.”
No doubt. Still, New York’s loss clearly is Seattle’s gain.
Finley featured
Mitch Finley, a prolific writer of books on Catholic and assorted spiritual issues, was featured in an story printed Aug. 9 in the Tacoma News Tribune.
Written by Steve Maynard, the article led off a series designed to study “books about the church attempts to dispel common misconceptions.”
Throughout the article, Finley, who coordinates the literary reading series at Auntie’s Bookstore, sounds his ongoing theme about “the joy and all-embracing approach of being a Catholic.”
“A narrow-minded Catholic is an oxymoron,” Finley told Maynard. “You don’t have to be a perfect Catholic to be a good Catholic.”
The reader board
Susan Cowger, poet and artist, will read from her poems at the opening of her art exhibit at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Lorinda Knight Gallery, 523 W. Sprague.
Alen Thein Durning, co-author with Christopher D. Crowther of “Misplaced Blame,” will sign copies of his book from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. Thursday at Auntie’s Bookstore. The Seattle-based Durning also wrote “This Place On Earth,” published last fall by Sasquatch.
, DataTimes