FAIRY DUST AND THE QUEST FOR THE EGG by Gail Carson Levine is a Peter Pan sequel/spin-off focusing on the Neverland fairyfolk, particularly Tinkerbelle and a new fairy whose powers are a mystery, and the quest they undertake when the magic that keeps Neverland timeless gets broken. Much more of a kid’s book than Levine’s Fairest, but by keeping Peter in the background this works better than many sequels to the classics do.
THE WORST HARD TIME: The Untold Story of those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan is the grim account of how the government’s visionary plan to lure farmers to the Great Pains and plow under all that useless buffalo grass created communities literally built on shifting sands, enjoying fabulous boom times during the twenties only to have the winds scour away the topsoil in the decade that followed. A very good account of the individuals who unlike the Joads, struggled to stay and brave it out (like a newspaper editor who saw the documentary THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS as a personal affront to sodbusters), the powerhouse storms that made that near-impossible and the New Deal efforts to resurrect the Great Plains as a functioning ecology and community.
BRIDGE OF SIGHS by Richard Russo has a small-town convenience store owner look back on the story of life in the small town he’s almost never left, while the guy he thinks of as his best and truest friend does likewise, with a somewhat different perception. Given this kind of slow-paced fictional memoir isn’t at all to my taste, it says a lot for Russo that it held my interest, though it flags badly at the end when he switches to the wife’s point of view (a kind of exposition ex machina to give us a necessary third perspective)
ALHAMBRA is Washington Irving’s recounting of travels around the eponymous Spanish fortress, his encounters with the colorful residents and recounting some of its history; while well written, the travel stories were too generic to hold me (though at a time when so few people took trips like this, i can see it having much more of a punch).
