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"Bernadette "Bernie" Root, military brat, speaks. She has never really noticed what a peculiar bunch of nomads her eight-member Air Force family is (with the exception of her Post Princess sister, Kit), until the summer after her first year of college when she joins them at their new assignment: Kadena Air Base, Okinawa." "Just as Okinawa turns out to be a sorry version of the Japanese paradise Bernie knew in her childhood at Yokota Air Base, her family - especially her once-beautiful mother, Moe, and her former spy-pilot father, Mace - seems to have been in decline since those glory days of the American Raj. Days when her mother was happy and their best friend, Fumiko, now lost to them, was the family maid. The worst part of Okinawa for Bernie, though, is realizing how perfectly she fits with her oddball family and how badly she needs to get out." "So when a dance contest - first prize, a trip to Japan - offers a chance to escape, she takes it, playing second banana to a third-rate comedian on a tour of Japan's military bases. At their grand finale at the Yokota Officers' Club, Fumiko finally reappears, and Bernie discovers the terrible price that is paid when the secrets nations hide end up buried within families."--
From the author of the widely praised The Yokota Officers Club, a superbly alive novel about two young American women caught up in the fevered excitement of the flamenco revival sweeping the Southwest.
The place is Albuquerque. Cyndi Rae Hrncir, called Rae, seventeen and shy, is twice spellbound, first by high school bad girl Didi ("Dirty Deeds") Steinberg, already embarked on a search for stardom, then by a devastatingly handsome young flamenco guitarist, Tomás Montenegro. Soon the girls are in college, where they abandon themselves to the disciplines and demands of the university's flamenco academy and to the hypnotic storytelling of their teacher, Doña Carlota, Tomás's great-aunt. While never losing the insistent beat of the dance, Doña Carlota mesmerizes her students with the complexly embroidered story of her childhood growing up among the cave-dwelling Gypsies of Andalusia. She initiates them into the traditions, the rhythms, and the steps of flamenco puro, with its central imperative: "Dame la verdad"-Give me the truth.
Locked in a volatile triangle and driven by obsession-Didi's with stardom, Rae's with Tomás, Tomás's with his mysterious heritage-these three emerge as the brightest stars on the New World flamenco scene, while secrets and desires, longings and betrayals pulse just beneath the glittering surface of their compelling performances.
A sense of passion and danger has always surrounded flamenco. In The Flamenco Academy, Sarah Bird delivers a novel with a sense of history and character that matches the drama of the dance it so brilliantly celebrates.
This hilarious novel of the women of Alamo House versus the SUKs (Sigma Upsilon Kappa Fraternity) at the University of Texas in Austin revolves around the narrator, Mary Jo, whose acerbic comments on life and love counterpoint her confusion about both, and her friendship with fat, naive Fayrene from Waco and worldly-wise party-girl Collie, who leads the other two through the ins and outs of relationships with men. In novels like this the tables have a way of turning, however, so it's the age-old story played against the war between the eccentrics and the boozer-jock stereotypes. However, the characters raise this novel above others like it.
At thirty-eight, Trudy Herring is a dreamer, a sculptor of whimsical clay figures, and a permanent temporary worker at the San Antonio Museum of Folk Art. But all that changes when she agrees to incubate a child for Hillary Goettler (her boss) and Hillary's husband. Trudy moves into their mansion and is instantly thrust into a luxurious world she's never known before. While Hillary opines that parenthood is simply a "time-management problem," Trudy is forced to consume noxiously healthy meals in a home where the decor changes faster than a Neiman Marcus window display. As her body warms to the other life inside, Trudy begins to long for her old flame, Sinclair Coker, "a freelance mystic with a lot of enthusiasm for the carnal." The quest to satisfy her cravings leads Trudy to discover that it takes a lot more than war stories about childbirth and potty training for a woman to qualify for true membership in "the mommy club."
Stories nestle inside stories like a set of Russian dolls in Bird's (Virgin of the Rodeo) wonderful fifth novel. Set in the late 1960s, it is narrated by 18-year-old Bernie, the eldest of six children in the peripatetic Root family. After her freshman year in college, Bernie joins her nomadic kin at their current home, an Okinawan air force base. They have changed: her younger sister, Kit, is out of control and "now being played by Lolita"; her once glamorous mother, Moe, is overweight and depressed; her father, who was a heroic and swaggering fighter pilot, has become a distant, self-loathing "ground pounder." And Bernie can't stop thinking of Fumiko, the family's former maidservant, whom no one is allowed to mention. Before being sucked into the family's torpor, Bernie escapes by winning a dance contest that lands her in Tokyo as the stage partner of Bobby Moses, a third-rate borscht belt comedian. There she delves into the past to solve the mystery surrounding Fumiko's disappearance and her family's deterioration. Bernie sharp and snarky, yet severely introverted is a delightful heroine, and the large cast that swirls around her is equally endearing. Particularly fine are the wisecracking yet nurturing Moe and the oddly touching Bobby Moses, who's vulgar and mediocre, but insistent on professionalism. The dialogue is first-rate, and all the '60s brand-name dropping is amusing; the decade becomes fresh again when seen from the unusual perspective of a military family (especially this one) removed from mainland society. (June) Forecast: Bird has David Sedaris's gift for mining scathing wit from family dysfunction. Only one of her earlier novels is still in print, but hopefully her move to Knopf (and a slew of enthusiastic blurbs from the likes of Rick Bass) will help her to win the large readership she deserves.
Gretchen Griner is an underpaid, underappreciated photographer for the Austin (that's Texas) Grackle, part-time lover of Peter Overton Treadwell III (known as "Trout"), and major consumer of Cup O' Soup. That is, until she meets Lizzie Potts—otherwise known as Viveca Lamoureaux, romance writer extraordinaire. Lizzie has a plan for Gretchen's life—and it includes Lizzie's brother Gus. But Gretchen has her own plan, and it does not feature a "wispy goon" named Gus. Of course, fate also has a plan for Gretchen, and it doesn't care what Gretchen wants. So Lizzie will give Gretchen Gus, Gus will give Gretchen the man of her dreams, and among this oddball cast of marvelous misfits, someone just may discover the secret to true romance.
In this beautiful book, noted photographer Wyman Meinzer revisits the place that inspires his most creative work—the Texas sky. His photographs capture the vast dramas that occur between heaven and Texas—rainstorms that blot out mountain ranges, lightning strikes that dazzle a night-black prairie, trains of clouds that rumble for miles over wheat fields, sunsets that lave the whole wide sky in crimson, gold, and pink. Meinzer's striking images reveal that in the sky above, no less than on the land below, endless variety is commonplace in Texas.
Joining Meinzer in this celebration of the Texas sky are two fine writers, Sarah Bird and Naomi Shihab Nye. In her wonderfully personal introduction, Sarah Bird describes growing up as a dedicated cloud-watcher who, after several years among the cotton candy clouds and cool fogs of Japan, was shocked and exhilarated by the limitless hot skies of Texas. Naomi Nye has chosen poems by twenty-six Texas poets, including herself, which explore a spectrum of emotion about the sky above Texas and the weather in our lives beneath it. Together, photographs, memoir, and poems create a lasting connection with the power and presence of what Meinzer calls "that vast frontier and ocean above"—the sky between heaven and Texas.
