Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.

 Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.

Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.

307 pages (March 2013)

Check availability

 

Book Page at BookBrowse.

Lit Guide from LitLovers. 

Reading Guide from BookMovement.

Reading Guide from ReadingGroupChoices.

Reading Guide from Reading Group Guides. 

 

To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

Ordinary Grace at goodreads

 

Review at book reporter

Review at Huffpost

Review from Kirkus Reviews

Review from Minneapolis Star Tribune

Review from Publishers Weekly

 

Author Website

Ordinary Grace was our "One County, One Book Choice" for 2014 (thecountylibrary):

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: Montana 1948 by Larry Watson; Nothing More Dangerous by Allen Eskens; A Painted House by John Grisham; Unspeakable Things by Jess Lourey; Dodging and Burning by John Copenhaver; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield; Setting Free the Kites by Alex George; The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt; The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall; and The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley; News of the World by Paulette Jiles; and The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Angle of Repose tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need, Ward is nonetheless embarking on a search of monumental proportions—to rediscover his grandmother, now long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier. Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward's investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life.

 

Wallace Stegner has said of his epic novel, "It's perfectly clear that if every writer is born to write one story, that's my story." It is a testament to the power of Stegner's prose and vision that Angle of Repose, winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, can be appreciated as America's story as well. Based on the correspondence of the little-known 19th century writer, Mary Hallock Foote, the novel's heroes represent opposing but equally strong strains of the American ideal. 

557 pages. (January 1971)

Check availability

 

Lit Guide from LitLovers.

Reading Guide from BookMovement.

Reading Guide from Reading Group Guides.

 

To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

Angle of Repose at goodreads

 

Review from Kirkus Reviews

Review from NewsBlaze

AudioBook Review at salon

"A Perspective on Wallace Stegner" from VQR
"Tangle of Repose" from The LA Times

 

Wallace Stegner Collection at the University of Utah (C-SPAN Cities Tour): 

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri; Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff; Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout; The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides; The Only Story by Julian Barnes; 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster; A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul; The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich; Three Junes by Julia Glass; The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather; Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich; Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi; and All the Wild That Remains by David Gessner.

A Girl Named Zippy: growing up small in Mooreland by Haven Kimmel

When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965 in Mooreland, Indiana, it was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period--people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards.

To three-year-old Zippy, it made perfect sense to strike a bargain with her father to keep her baby bottle--never mind that when she did, it was the first time she'd ever spoken. In her nonplussed family, Zippy has the perfect supporting cast: her beautiful yet dour brother, Danny, a seeker of the true faith; her sweetly sensible sister, Lindy, who wins the local beauty pageant; her mother, Delonda, who dispenses wisdom from the corner of the couch; and her father, Bob Jarvis, who never met a bet he didn't like.

Whether describing a serious case of chicken love, another episode with the evil Edythe across the street, or the night Zippy's dad borrowed thirty-six coon dogs and a raccoon to prove to the complaining neighbors just how quiet his two dogs were, Kimmel treats readers to a heroine who is wonderfully sweet and shy as she navigates the quirky adult world surrounding Zippy.

282 pages (March 2001)

Check availability

Book Page at BookBrowse.

Reading Guide from BookMovement.

Reading Guide from ReadingGroupGuides.

 

To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

A Girl Named Zippy at goodreads

 

Excerpt at book reporter

Review from Entertainment Weekly

Review from Kirkus Reviews

Review from Publishers Weekly

 

"A Worldview, Direct From Rural Indiana" at The Los Angeles Times

 

Haven Kimmel Page at Simon & Schuster

A Conversation with Haven Kimmel from Old Blue's Chapter and Verse:

This title is available for download as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson; Born a Crime by Trevor Noah; Lake of the Ozarks by William Geist; If You Lived Here, You'd be Home by Now by Christopher Ingraham; Under Magnolia by Frances Mayes; The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls; Tales from a Free-range Childhood by Donald Davis; My Animals and Other Family by Clare Balding; The Undertaker's Daughter by Katherine Mayfield; Riverine by Anela Palm; Hands of My Father by Myron Uhlberg; The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio by Terry Ryan; fathermothergod by Lucia Greenhouse; and As the Poppies Bloomed by Maral Boyadjian.