Friday Finds

More unread books that I came across recently. Did you find any new ones for your list and mine?

Confessions of a Catnip Junkie; Allan  Goldstein

(quit the eye rolling....you cat lovers know you want to red this)

(amazon)
Doo Doo wasn’t trying to run away from home. Doc and Fern were great humans, cat people to the core. But Doo Doo has a feral streak, and a sudden impulse sends him into the wilds of the city’s Glen Canyon, and then far beyond. Now he is very lost, but not so lost that he doesn’t know what he wants more than anything. It’s the same thing we all want—love and home—but Doo Doo needs to get there on four paws. And having his new best friend, a subway cat named Rass, tagging along doesn’t make it any easier. Doo Doo’s 6,000 mile odyssey across America —by jet, bus, big rig, ferry, Caddy, Cessna and paw—takes a full year. The lost cat attracts lost souls. He helps a homeless drunk find a home, a minor league pitcher find his fastball, a small town newscaster find the big time, a goth girl find her peace, and a widowed Air Force pilot find the last runway. Doo Doo tells his story in his own voice, we see what he sees, feel what he feels. And he promises to take you so deep inside his soul you’ll feel yourself purr.

 Elizabeth Street; Laurie Fabiano

(amazon)

First novelist Fabiano is dead-on in her portrait of the Italian-American immigrant experience. This engrossing cross-generational saga centers on the experiences of Giovanna Costa, from the small Italian fishing village where she is born to the bustling streets of New York's Lower East Side where she struggles to raise her family and make a living as a midwife after the death of her first husband. In America, the resourceful Giovanna and her second husband eventually open a fruit and vegetable stand, attracting the unwanted attentions of the notorious “Black Hand” crime organization. When Giovanni refuses to meet their demands, her daughter is kidnapped and held for ransom. Basing this story—including the kidnapping—on her own family's immigrant experiences, Fabiano provides a wealth of period detail, infusing the compulsively readable narrative with an authentic sense of time, place, and community.

 Asta in the Wings; Jan Watson

(amazon)

Asta in the Wings is the moving and often darkly funny story of Asta Hewitt, a resourceful seven-year-old and intrepid narrator growing up in an isolated house in Bond Brook, Maine. Shut off from the outside world and restricted to the company of a delusional mother and a bookish older brother, Asta is content to be part of a "society of three" constructing dramatic and fanciful worlds of their own. When circumstances push her into a strange outside world — with all of its discontents — Asta must find a way to assimilate while remaining true to herself and her fractured family. Jan Elizabeth Watson's debut novel puts her among the most promising new writers in the realm of imaginative literary fiction.