Colorado State Library Book Club Project
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Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him, he is doomed to worship...
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"Told entirely through the transcripts of the narrator's psychiatric sessions, this intimate portrait of grief and longing follows twenty-year-old Alicia Western as she, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, contemplates the nature of madness, her hallucinations and her own existence in 1972 Black River Falls, Wisconsin"--
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"Stacie Shannon Denetsosie confronts long-reaching effects of settler-colonialism on Native lives in a series of gritty, wildly imaginative stories. A young Navajo man catches a ride home alongside a casket he's sure contains his dead grandfather. A gas station clerk witnesses the kidnapping of the newly crowned Miss Northwestern Arizona. A young couple's search for a sperm donor raises questions of blood quantum. This debut collection grapples with...
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"Anna Koob was born into a middle-class German family in 1566. A bright and spirited girl, she became a favorite of her village of Kleinostheim. As an eight-year-old, she is summoned to the home of a prominent baron. The baron's daughter has asked for her as she lies dying. What happens in the baron's home sets off a chain of events that dictates the flow of Anna's future."--Amazon
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As The Surrounded opens, Archilde León has just returned from the big city to his father's ranch on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. The story that unfolds captures the intense and varied conflict that already characterized reservation life in 1936, when this remarkable novel was first published. Educated at a federal Indian boarding school, Archilde is torn not only between white and Indian cultures but also between love for his Spanish...
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"In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that...
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Adrienne Cahill cares about three things: getting into a great college; becoming a revered journalist like her idol, Sydney Declay; and making her late father proud of her. So when Adrienne is offered the chance to write an article that will get her into her dream school and debunk her foolish stepfather's belief that a legendary family of hermits is living in the Siberian wilderness, there's no question that she's going to fly across the world. But...
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When Arden Arrowood was four years old, her two-year-old twin sisters were stolen from the front yard of their hometown of Keokuk, Iowa, on the Mississippi River while Arden watched. Twenty years later, she returns home to confront the darkest part of her past. As the mystery unravels, the novel explores the reliability of memory, the stories we tell ourselves, and the power of love.
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"Natalie Diaz’s debut collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, foregrounds the particularities of family dynamics and individual passion against the backdrop of the mythological intensity of tribal life and a deeply rooted cultural history. In these distinctively voiced poems, a sister struggles with a brother’s addiction to meth, while everyone, from Antigone and Houdini to Huitzilopochtli and Jesus, is invited to hash it out. By turns darkly...
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"A suspenseful and entertaining debut thriller-and love letter to vintage horror movies-in which a teenager must overcome her own anxiety to protect the two children she's babysitting when strangers come knocking at the door. October 1993. One night. One house. One dead body. When single mom Eleanor Mazinski goes out a for a much-needed date night, she leaves her two young children-sweet, innocent six-year-old Ben and precocious, defiant twelve-year-old...
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"On the muddy banks of the Calumet River, a body has been found posed next to a series of mysterious glyphs and bearing wounds from a ritualistic slaying. Chicago detective Addie Bisset knows only one man who can decipher the message left by the killer: her friend Dr. Evan Wilding. A brilliant forensic semiotician, Evan decodes the etchings as Viking Age runes. They suggest either human sacrifice or righteous punishment. But to what god? And for what...