Monday, December 11, 2006

Mendocino LitFest is shaping up!

Over the past several months, Dot Brovarney and I have been working on a project to bring a number of quality writers to the Ukiah Valley via Mendocino College and the Friends of the Mendocino College Library, an associate group of the Mendocino College Foundation. With seed money from the The Community Foundation of Mendocino County, we have been able to get organized for a two-day event in June 2007.

On Friday, June 1st, we will host Gary Soto for an evening reading/Q&A at the Little Theater. He will follow that with a morning activity on Saturday, June 2nd. That is when there will be a whole line-up of writers doing readings, workshops, and panel discussions. The other writers included are: Sarah Andrews, Ianthe Brautigan-Swensen, Armandt Brint, Armando Garcia-Davila, Jody Gehrman, Gerald Haslam, Jean Hegland, Hal Zina Bennett, David Smith-Ferri, Valerie Miner, Linda Noel, Jordan Rosenfeld, Rebecca Lawton, Dylan Schaffer, Dan Imhoff, and Mark Bittner.

Keep watching this blog and the Mendocino College and Mendocino College Library sites for more news and updates about the event: http://www.mendocino.edu and http://www.mendocino.edu/mendocinocollegelibrary .

J.K.

Monday, December 04, 2006

California Girl by T. Jefferson Parker


California Girl
by T. Jefferson Parker
HarperTorch

Having grown up in Southern California as a teenager, and during the time that T. Jefferson Parker visits in California Girl, I found it to be a fun read. In fact, this novel is better than many in the mystery genre, and Parker collected an Edgar Award for this outing.

It involves a family of brothers, the Beckers, who move into different fields as adults, but who are thrown into the midst of a mystery--who killed Janelle Vonn, a young woman that they knew as a small girl growing up. What Parker does best is give his characters enough personality and background that we come to like them and care about their situations. Andy is a reporter trying to follow the story, Nick is the cop trying to solve the crime, and David, who is a minister, becomes a bit of a suspect as he has had connections to Janelle as an adult and just prior to her death.

While Parker describes the Southern California milieu well, he does an even better job of creating a sense of menace from bad guys, a sense of the 1960s counterculture and drug dropouts, the racist undertones of America, and even a bit of the history of the times. He even tosses in a fight with a budding musician named Charlie Manson.

This book sent me to other titles by Parker, and I will write another commentary on one in the near future. California Girl is worth checking out.