Wisconsin

Jill said, "And another Christina Schwartz book for Wisconsin. I just finished So Long At The Fair, and it was an excellent story set in modern Wisconsin." Here's Jill's review.

In the summer of 1963 a plot for revenge destroys a career, a friendship, and a family. The consequences of the scandalous event continue to reverberate, touching the next generation. Thirty years later, over the course of one day, Jon struggles to decide whether to end his affair or his marriage. His wife, Ginny, moving closer to discovering his adultery, begins working for an older man who is mysteriously connected to their families’ pasts. And Jon’s mistress is being courted by a suitor who may be more menacing than he initially seems. As relationships among the characters ebb and flow on that July day, Christina Schwarz illuminates the ties that bind people together — and the surprising risks they take in the name of love.

New York

Laurie suggests: "NY: The Honey Thief by Elizabeth Graver. See my review here."

The summer that eleven-year-old Eva is caught shoplifting (for the fourth time), her mother, Miriam, decides the only solution is to move out of the city to a quiet town in upstate New York. There, she hopes, they can have the normal life she longs for. But Miriam is bound by a past she is trying to forget, and tensions escalate. It is only when Eva meets a reclusive beekeeper that she-and her mother-can find their way back to each other, and can begin life with renewed promise. A haunting novel of memory and desire, The Honey Thief reveals the healing power of friendship and the ineradicable bonds of mother and child.

California

Laurie suggests: "CA: Self-Portrait with Ghosts by Kelly Dwyer. See my review here."

Self-Portrait with Ghosts is about the pain that leads to suicide, as well as the pain that suicide leaves behind. It is about the many ways we betray the people closest to us, sometimes without even knowing it, and about the healing powers of grief, forgiveness, and love. Kate Flannigan has done pretty well for herself. After a disaster of a first marriage, she's going with a great guy who is crazy about her, she has raised a loving, if slightly rebellious, teenage daughter, and has made a name for herself as a ceramist, an accomplished sculptor of portraits. She has worked hard to meet the demands of single motherhood and, at the same time, to put her sister Colleen's betrayal behind her. Kate's brother, Luke, hasn't done so well. Haunted by the early death of his father, he has struggled with depression for most of his life, and kept it a secret from his family. Only Audrey, Kate's daughter, is able to crack through her uncle's solitude. To her, Luke isn't just a substitute for the father who left years ago -- he is the only person she believes will always tell her the truth. When Luke commits suicide, the family is forced to reexamine the deceptions that have torn it apart, and to face and forgive the past and present, the real and imagined ghosts. The story is told through three compelling voices -- Kate's, Audrey's, and Luke's.

Connecticut

Bonnie said, "Nobody has suggested a book for Connecticut, so I started looking around for one and found Sacred Cows by Karen E. Olson. I know absolutely nothing about it except what I found online. It was the winner of the first Sara Ann Freed Memorial Award and it features Annie Seymour, a police reporter for a New Haven daily who is covering the murder of a young woman who was a student at Yale. Has anyone read this book?"

"After a late night on the town, New Haven police reporter Annie Seymour is yanked from her bed by an early morning phone call from her editor. Soon she's shivering on a wet, dark city street, staring down at the once beautiful, now broken body of a Yale University coed." "Paid to observe and get just the facts before writing up her stories for the New Haven Herald, Annie finds herself drawn to the story of an Ivy League sophomore whose secret moonlighting led to her violent murder. But after Annie links the girl's death to a network of vice and fraud buried deep in the city's shadows, the cynical reporter is shocked to discover her own mother is involved." "With help from a sexy private investigator, Annie investigates but stumbles upon one obstacle after another. Her cop lover stonewalls her, her editor pulls her off the assignment to cover a surreal parade of fiberglass cows grazing throughout the city, and an overeager cub reporter nips at her heels to get the scoop for himself." Caught in the center of a treacherous scheme, Annie must take the biggest gamble of her career - outwit a dangerous con man to uncover the truth that could win her that elusive Pulitzer ... or a mention in the next day's obituary.

Utah

3M suggested: "Utah * The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (Pulitzer)."

The Executioner's Song is a 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Norman Mailer that depicts the events surrounding the execution of Gary Gilmore by the state of Utah for murder. This story of the crimes and punishment of a 20th-century murderer and thief is what the author calls a "true-life novel." It is a horrifying, sad, scrupulously detailed look at the events leading up to the moment Gary Gilmore was killed by a firing squad in Utah State Prison on January 17, 1977. Based on interviews, records of court proceedings, newspaper stories, and various other documents, it covers the nine months between Gilmore's parole from prison, his final crime, and his execution.

The blurring of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction was one of the central developments of postwar American literature, and Mailer's imaginative use of the facts is an extension of his earlier forays into the "new journalism." He re-creates Gillmore's tormented psyche, recounts his crimes, takes in the story of Mormonism and the history of Utah, introduces Uncle Vern, Aunt Ida, victims, cops, cons, guards, lovers, and lawyers. The "Western Voices" of small-town America and the "Eastern Voices" of the journalists and show-biz types who descend on the Gilmore story are fused into a remarkable chorus, amplifying the presence of Gilmore himself, a smart, funny, doomed man -- one of the most complex characters in modern letters.

Pennsylvania

3M suggested (a year ago): "There are some Pulitzers that are set in these states, but I have no idea if the setting is integral to the book." One she named was Rabbit at Rest by John Updike.

In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is sending out mixed signals; and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live.

Bonnie added: "Some may prefer to read a series of books in the order published, but I think I'd be more interested in the older Rabbit than the young Rabbit playing basketball or the young married Rabbit cheating on his wife. I think I could relate better to an older man. And this may be the best in the series because, after all, it was Rabbit at Rest that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1991."

Virginia

Teddy Rose suggested (way back in February): "VA: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver and Steven L. Hopp." Teddy's review.

Hang on for the ride: with characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table.

Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life, and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

Wisconsin

Laurie suggests: "WI: Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz. My review is here."

Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to her family's farm on Nagawaukee Lake, seeking comfort with her younger sister, Mathilda, and three-year-old niece, Ruth. But very soon, Amanda comes to see that her old home is no refuge--she has carried her troubles with her. On one terrible night almost a year later, Amanda loses nearly everything that is dearest to her when her sister mysteriously disappears and is later found drowned beneath the ice that covers the lake. When Mathilda's husband comes home from the war, wounded and troubled himself, he finds that Amanda has taken charge of Ruth and the farm, assuming her responsibility with a frightening intensity. Wry and guarded, Amanda tells the story of her family in careful doses, as anxious to hide from herself as from us the secrets of her own past and of that night.

Ruth, haunted by her own memory of that fateful night, grows up under the watchful eye of her prickly and possessive aunt and gradually becomes aware of the odd events of her childhood. As she tells her own story with increasing clarity, she reveals the mounting toll that her aunt's secrets exact from her family and everyone around her, until the heartrending truth is uncovered. Guiding us through the lives of the Starkey women, Christina Schwarz's first novel shows her compassion and a unique understanding of the American landscape and the people who live on it.

Stately Knowledge

Tricia, a teacher educator at the University of Richmond, has a blog post that may interest you. Stately Knowledge lists a number of books about ALL the states, including one about a 50-car train followed by a caboose representing Washington, D.C. In her post Tricia links to another blog:

Mrs. McGowan's 50 States Book List has children's books for the states, but be aware the list includes authors FROM the states as well as books ABOUT the states. Mrs. McGowan links to another blog:

Carol Hurst's The State We're In lists state books for older children. She lists only one book per state, but because I've read some of these books and other books by some of the authors, this looks like an excellent list. I see no reason not to include books from this list in your reading around the states, since basically the protagonists of the books are simply a bit younger than in books for adults. The decision, of course, is all yours.

Texas

R-Lo said, "Actually, one suggestion I have for Texas that I think is really great is John Phillip Santos' National Book Award finalist, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. A review of this can be found on my blog."

Part treasury of the elders, part elegy, part personal odyssey, part Book of the Dead, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation is an immigration tale and a haunting family story. John Phillip Santos brings to life a pageant of unforgettable family figures: from Madrina -- touched with epilepsy and prophecy ever since, as a girl, she saw a dying soul leave its body -- to Teofilo, who was kidnapped as an infant and raised by the Kikapu Indians of northern Mexico. And he searches for answers to the mystery surrounding his grandfather's suicide in San Antonio in 1939. Combining lyrical prose, magic realism, and haunting confession into an unforgettable voice, Santos weaves together Mexican mythology and the history of Texas to create the story of how the soul of one Mexican family was passed down, and sometimes nearly lost, across borders and decades, into the present.

Wyoming

Sharon said, "I just finished Open Season by C.J. box. It was set in Wyoming. Here's my review."

"When a high-powered bullet hits living flesh, it makes a distinctive -pow-WHOP- sound that is unmistakable even at tremendous distance." And so it begins for Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden who, with the shot of a rifle, is thrust into a race to save not only an endangered species, but also the life and family he loves. C. J. Box knows the wilderness and he knows how to create a wonderfully authentic, vividly alive sense of place. He has created a memorable new hero: a man who is full of failings, but strong and honorable.

Kentucky

Sharon said, "I just finished reading a book set in Kentucky, Icy Sparks by Gwyn Hyman Rubio. I put a review here.

Rural Kentucky in the 1950s is not an easy place to grow up in, and it's especially hard for 10-year-old Icy Sparks, a bright, curious child who is orphaned and living with her grandparents. Life becomes even more difficult for Icy when the violent tics and uncontrollable cursing begin. Try as she might, her secrets -- those croaks, jerks, and spasms -- keep slipping out. Her teachers think she's willful, her friends call her the "Frog Child." Exiled from the schoolroom, she spends time in a children's asylum where she learns about being different and teaches her doctors even more. Eventually, Icy finds solace in the company of an obese woman who knows what it's like to be an outcast in this tightly knit Appalachian community.

Louisiana

Jill said, "Here's another Louisiana book -- a fantastic look at antebellum slave-holding and marriage and its effect on the people living in this immoral system. (But I bet you already know about this book!)" No, this is new to me, but it looks good. Here's Jill's review of Property by Valerie Martin."

Set in the surreal heat of the antebellum South during a slave rebellion, Property, which won the Orange Prize, takes the form of a dramatic monologue, bringing to the page a voice rarely heard in American fiction: the voice of a woman slaveholder. Manon Gaudet is pretty and petulant, self-absorbed and bored. She has come to a sugar plantation north of New Orleans as a bride, bringing with her a prized piece of property, the young slave Sarah, only to see Sarah become her husband's mistress and bear his child. As the whispers of a slave rebellion grow louder and more threatening, Manon speaks to us of her past and her present, her longings and dreams -- an uncensored, pitch-perfect voice from the heart of moral darkness.

Missouri

Jill said, "I just finished another Tom Sawyer companion novel -- this one about Becky Thatcher. It's called Becky : The Life and Loves of Becky Thatcher by Lenore Hart (my review)."

Becky Thatcher wants to set the record straight. She was never the weeping ninny Mark Twain made her out to be in his famous novel. She knew Samuel Clemens before he was “Mark Twain,” when he was a wide-eyed dreamer who never could get his facts straight. Yes, she was Tom’s childhood sweetheart, but the true story of their love, and the dark secret that tore it apart, never made it into Twain’s novel.

Now married to Tom’s cousin Sid Hopkins, Becky has children of her own to protect while the men of Missouri are off fighting their “un-Civil” War. But when tragedy strikes at home, Becky embarks on a phenomenal quest to find her husband and save her family -- a life journey that takes her from the Mississippi River’s steamboats to Ozark rebel camps, from Nevada’s silver mines to the gilded streets of San Francisco.

Time and again, stubborn but levelheaded Becky must reconcile her independent spirit and thirst for adventure with the era’s narrow notions of marriage and motherhood. As she seeks to find a compromise between fulfillment and security, she also grapples with ghosts of her past. Can she forgive herself, or be forgiven, for the lies she’s told to the men she’s loved? Will she ever forget the maddening, sweet-talking, irresponsible Tom Sawyer, the boy who stole her heart as a little girl? And when she is old, and Huck and Tom and Twain only memories, whose shadow will still lie beside her?

Texas

Jill said, "My Texas book is The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block (review). This was a GREAT book - highly recommended."

In Stefan Merrill Block’s The Story of Forgetting, three narratives intertwine to create a story that is by turns funny, smart, introspective, and revelatory. Abel Haggard is an elderly hunchback who haunts the remnants of his family’s farm in the encroaching shadow of the Dallas suburbs, adrift in recollections of those he loved and lost long ago. As a young man, he believed himself to be “the one person too many”; now he is all that remains. Hundreds of miles to the south, in Austin, Seth Waller is a teenage “Master of Nothingness” –- a prime specimen of that gangly, pimple-rashed, too-smart breed of adolescent that vanishes in a puff of sarcasm at the slightest threat of human contact. When his mother is diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, Seth sets out on a quest to find her lost relatives and to conduct an “empirical investigation” that will uncover the truth of her genetic history. Though neither knows of the other’s existence, Abel and Seth are linked by a dual legacy: the disease that destroys the memories of those they love, and the story of a mythical place called Isidora, a fantasy world free from the sorrows of remembrance, a land without memory where nothing is ever possessed, so nothing can be lost.

South Carolina

Jill said, "I would like to add the soon-to-be-released Dorothea Benton Frank book to the SC list. It's called Bulls Island and will be in book stores in May 2008. While not my style of fiction, I did enjoy Frank's depictions of South Carolina. Here is my review."

(Since Jill doesn't really care much for this book, I think we have a problem. Are we trying to find all the books we can about a state? Or do we want to find only the BEST books about each state? More on this problem coming up.)

"Will romance triumph over the feud between the aristocratic Langleys and the slightly lower-in-social-pecking-order McGees in Frank's latest Southern charm-filled romp?" asked PW. After twenty years Betts, a top investment bank executive, must leave her comfortable life in New York City to return to the home she thought she'd left behind forever. But spearheading the most important project of her career puts her back in contact with everything she's tried so hard to forget: her estranged sister, her father, her former fiancee J. D. Langley, and her past. Once she's home, can Betts keep the secret that threatens all she holds dear? Or will her fear of the past wreck her future happiness?

Michigan

Sharon said, "For Michigan I would like to suggest A Superior Death by Nevada Barr, one of my favorite authors."

Park ranger Anna Pigeon returns, in a mystery that unfolds in and around Lake Superior, in whose chilling depths sunken treasure comes with a deadly price. In her latest mystery, Nevada Barr sends Ranger Pigeon to a new post amid the cold, deserted, and isolated beauty of Isle Royale National Park, a remote island off the coast of Michigan known for fantastic deep-water dives of wrecked sailing vessels. Leaving behind memories of the Texas high desert and the environmental scam she helped uncover, Anna is adjusting to the cool damp of Lake Superior and the spirits and lore of the northern Midwest. But when a routine application for a diving permit reveals a grisly underwater murder, Anna finds herself 260 feet below the forbidding surface of the lake, searching for the connection between a drowned man and an age-old cargo ship. Written with a naturalist's feel for the wilderness and a keen understanding of characters who thrive in extreme conditions, A Superior Death is a passionate, atmospheric page-turner.

Hawaii

Sharon said, "Hello, I have a couple of suggestions for Hawaii. The first one, Moloka'i by Alan Brennert, is on my list to be read. The second one is Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii by Lee Goldberg. Hope this is helpful."

Young Rachel Kalama, growing up in idyllic Honolulu in the 1890s, is part of a big, loving Hawaiian family, and dreams of seeing the far-off lands that her father, a merchant seaman, often visits. But at the age of seven, Rachel and her dreams are shattered by the discovery that she has leprosy. Forcibly removed from her family, she is sent to Kalaupapa, the isolated leper colony on the island of Moloka'i. In her exile she finds a family of friends to replace the family she's lost: a native healer, Haleola, who becomes her adopted "auntie" and makes Rachel aware of the rich culture and mythology of her people; Sister Mary Catherine Voorhies, one of the Franciscan sisters who care for young girls at Kalaupapa; and the beautiful, worldly Leilani, who harbors a surprising secret. At Kalaupapa she also meets the man she will one day marry. True to historical accounts, Moloka'i is the story of an extraordinary human drama, the full scope and pathos of which has never been told before in fiction. But Rachel's life, though shadowed by disease, isolation, and tragedy, is also one of joy, courage, and dignity. This is a story about life, not death; hope, not despair. It is not about the failings of flesh, but the strength of the human spirit.

UPDATE: Jill said, "I just finished Moloka'i and it was an excellent historical account of Hawaii. While I found some historical issues with the book, I walked away with a greater sense of Hawaiian history. My review."
__________

Some people think Hawaii is paradise, but Monk knows that danger, like dirt, lurks everywhere. Look at Helen Gruber, the rich tourist who took a fatal blow from a coconut. The police say it fell from a tree, but Monk suspects otherwise. His assistant Natalie isn't exactly thrilled about Monk's latest investigation. It was bad enough Monk followed her on vacation, and now it looks like the vacation is over. Smooth-talking TV psychic Dylan Swift is on the island and claims to have a message from beyond-from Helen Gruber. Monk has his doubts about Swift's credibility. But finding the killer and proving Swift a fraud-all while coping with geckos and the horror of unsynchronized ceiling fans-may prove a tough coconut to crack.

Ohio

Teddy Rose chose Sula by Toni Morrison for her Ohio read.

At its center Sula is about a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel — both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town — meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin, and dreaming of princes. Through their girlhood years they share everything — perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime — until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in headrags and soft felt hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance men, bug-ridden flour.

Sula leaps an invisible line and roams the cities of America for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it, by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after folks — where you deal with evil by surviving it. Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can't understand her any more, and the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they recall that she put her grandma in an old folks' home (the old lady who let a train take her leg for the insurance. Toni Morrison evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people, through forty years, up to the time of their bewildered realization that even more than they feared Sula, their pariah, they needed her.

Mississippi

Jill said, "Hi, Bonnie! I just finished The Year of Jubilo by Howard Bahr, which was set in Mississippi in 1865. A wonderful peek into post-Civil War Mississippi. Here is my review." Now my apology ... Jill told me about this book in November, and I just discovered it, lost as a draft among these posts. Mea culpa!

On a spring day in 1865 Gawain Harper trudges toward his home in Cumberland, Mississippi, where three years earlier he had boarded a train carrying the latest enlistees in the Mississippi Infantry. Unmoved by the cause that motivated so many others, he had joined up only when Morgan Rhea's father told Gawain that he would never wed his beloved Morgan unless he did his part in the war effort. Upon his return, he discovers post-war life is far from what he expected. Morgan has indeed waited for him, but before they can marry there are scores to be settled.

North Dakota

GretchenA said, "I don't see a recommendation for North Dakota yet. ... Not sure this is really a recommendation, but certainly it counts from location standpoint: The Endless Sky, by Kathryn Davis. Here's the link to my review."

Gretchen mentions three surprises:
(1) Endless Sky by Kathryn Lynn Davis is a romance novel, set in the Badlands of North Dakota. It's a western in that there's a subplot involving a half-breed Indian and there are plenty of scenes involving gunslingers, fires, and roping cattle, but it is also definitely a romance.

(2) It's based on truth, as there actually is a town of Medora, North Dakota. Here's a link to the historic city of Medora.

(3) It's a Banned Book. Gretchen said, "Truthfully, I fell off my chair at this one. Apparently when these two books were published [this book follows another], the town of Medora was celebrating its centennial. The publisher reached out and suggested that they factor the books into the celebration. That suited the town fathers fine until they realized that the books didn't make the Marquis into a saint. He was French, rich, and an explorer (all true) and yet the people of Medora were shocked that the Marquis could have been unfaithful to his wife. So they cancelled the celebration and banned the book from their library, thus ensuring that this little romance novel would automatically become a best seller."
__________

Bonnie's NOTE: If any of you read this, let me know and we'll post your review on my Banned Books blog. Gretchen, would you be willing to cross-post your review to the Banned Books site? It's an excellent review.

New York

Teddy Rose said, "Here are two books I came up with to cover two states and my reviews of them: NY = NEW YORK: The Crazyladies of Pearl Street by Trevanian."

The place is Albany, New York. The year is 1936. Six-year-old Jean-Luc LaPointe, his little sister, and their spirited but vulnerable young mother have been abandoned — again — by his father, a charmer and a con artist. With no money and no family willing to take them in, the LaPointes manage to create a fragile nest at 238 North Pearl Street. For the next eight years, through the Great Depression and Second World War, they live in the heart of the Irish slum, with its ward heelers, unemployment, and grinding poverty. As Jean-Luc discovers, it's a neighborhood of "crazyladies": Miss Cox, the feared and ridiculed teacher who ignites his imagination; Mrs. Kane, who runs a beauty parlor/fortune-telling salon in the back of her husband's grocery store; Mrs. Meehan, the desperate, harried matriarch of a thuggish family across the street; lonely Mrs. McGivney, who spends every day tending to her catatonic husband, a veteran of the Great War; and Jean-Luc's own unconventional, vivacious mother.

Jean-Luc is a voracious reader who never stops dreaming of a way out of the slum. He gradually takes on responsibility for the family's survival with a mix of bravery and resentment while his mom turns from spells of illness and depression to eager planning for the day when "our ship will come in." It's a heartfelt and unforgettable look back at one child's life in the 1930s and '40s, a story that will be remembered long after the last page is turned.

Iowa

Teddy Rose said, "Here are two books I came up with to cover two states and my reviews of them: IA = IOWA: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson."

Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century — 1951 — in the middle of the United States — Des Moines, Iowa — in the middle of the largest generation in American history — the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons) — in his head — as "The Thunderbolt Kid."

Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality — a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and OF his mother,whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home.

Maryland

Jill said, "I finished my Maryland read. It was a book called Two Brothers - One North, One South by David H. Jones. This book detailed Maryland's contribution, both Union and Confederate, to the American Civil War. Here is my review."

Walt Whitman feared that the real war would never get in the books: the true stories that depicted the courage and humanity of soldiers who fought, bled, and died in the American Civil War. Exceptionally researched and keenly accurate to actual events, along with the personages that forged them, David H. Jones's novel spans four years in the midst of America s costliest and most commemorated war. The journey is navigated by the poet, Walt Whitman, whose documented compassion for the wounded and dying soldiers of the war takes him to Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., and finds him at the bedside of William Prentiss, a Rebel soldier, just after fighting has ended. As fate has it, William's brother, Clifton, a Union officer, is being treated in another ward of the same hospital, and Whitman becomes the sole link not just between the two, but with the rest of their family as well.

The reader is taken seamlessly from Medfield Academy in Baltimore, where the Prentiss family makes its home, to the many battlefields where North and South collide, and even through the drawing rooms of wartime Richmond, where Hetty, Jenny, and Constance Cary are the reigning belles.

David H. Jones, author of this book, was born and raised in West Virginia. He has been a lifelong student of the Civil War. His research took him into the swamps of Dinwiddie County, Virginia, to rediscover the lost location where a pivotal event in the book took place.

Bonnie adds: "Two Brothers: One North, One South by David H. Jones won't be published until February, so you must have an advance reading copy, Jill, right? This synopsis has me interested already ... because my grandmother was born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia."

Alaska

Sharon said, "Alaska ... I'd like to suggest books by the author Sue Henry for a read from Alaska. They are mysteries about the musher Jessie Arnold." Bonnie added, "Sharon has chosen to read Deadfall by Sue Henry, so let's take a look at that one."

Iditarod musher Jessie Arnold is being stalked and terrorized by an anonymous enemy. First, one of her sled dogs is badly injured in a steel trap and an ominous note leaves no doubt that the trap was set with malicious intent. Threatening phone calls and unsigned messages follow -- pressing Alaska State Trooper Alex Jensen to urge Jessie to go into hiding while he tries to track down the source of the threats. Finally, a near fatal car crash convinces Jessie to let Alex fly her to an isolated island more than two hundred miles away.

There on desolate, windswept Kachemak Bay, Jessie hikes the island trails with her lead dog Tank, marveling at the splendor of her solitude. But in a wilderness filled with hazards and hiding places, she soon discovers she is not alone. With Alex searching for a madman hundreds of miles away, Jessie is on her own ... playing a deadly game of hide and seek with a killer.

North Carolina

Jill said, "I just finished my official NC book for this challenge: On Agate Hill by Lee Smith (review). It was a wonderful look into North Carolina's history from the plantation life after the Civil War and mountain life around the turn of the century.

A dusty box discovered in the wreckage of a once prosperous plantation on Agate Hill in Nnorth Carolina contains the remnants of an extraordinary life: diaries, letters, poems, songs, newspaper clippings, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and bones. It's through these treasured mementos that we meet Molly Petree. Raised in those ruins and orphaned by the Civil War, Molly is a refugee who has no interest in self-pity. When a mysterious benefactor appears out her father's past to rescue her, she never looks back. Spanning half a century, On Agate Hill follows Molly’s passionate, picaresque journey through love, betrayal, motherhood, a murder trial—and back home to Agate Hill under circumstances she never could have imagined.

To read an excerpt, click here.