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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Ellen Notbohm has commented on (10) products
Recognizing Autism in Women & Girls When it has been hidden well
by
Wendela Whitcomb Marsh
Ellen Notbohm
, May 18, 2022
With uncommon clarity and heart, Wendela Marsh gives us an infinitely faceted portrait of what we overlook, disregard or ignore in failing to identify autism throughout the lifespan in girls and women all around us. Through vividly detailed representational examples, dozens of gentle but incisive exploratory questions, and personal insights from autistic women themselves, we’re drawn along from the book’s wake-up call introduction and on through pages that turn themselves as the big picture becomes ever clearer. Impeccably organized and eminently readable, Recognizing Autism in Women and Girls is a call to awareness, to empathy, and to action from which we must not turn away. ~Ellen Notbohm, author of Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew and Ten Things Your Student with Autism Wishes You Knew
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Zetty
by
Debra Whiting Alexander
Ellen Notbohm
, November 12, 2020
Nine-year-old Zetty’s mother Marjorie goes out to the kitchen for more Thanksgiving potatoes, and never comes back. Found dancing in the street, she’s remanded to a psychiatric hospital, no visits from her daughter allowed. Zetty is left to navigate a motherless adolescence with a father who is loving but reeling from his own loss and fumbling through single parenthood. Challenged by what and how much to say, he opts to say nothing. In time, Zetty comes to feel she’s lost both parents. What set this story apart and above for me was the exquisitely sensitive portrayal of Marjorie’s perspective and insight to her battle with her illness as she succumbs to its regressive effect on her memory and functioning. She remembers a husband she loved, but her greatest fear is that her child won’t know how fiercely she loves her. Marjorie knows what she’s losing as it slips away. It’s unthinkable heart-twisting stuff, the motherhood version of Flowers for Algernon. There can be no sugar-coated ending for a story like this, but neither does it end in the pits of despair. Zetty is resilient and resourceful, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes by accident. She won’t make lemonade out of her lemons, but rather will find beauty and value that they exist just as they are.
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Queen of the Owls
by
Barbara Linn Probst
Ellen Notbohm
, November 12, 2020
That tingly feeling you get when you realize you’re reading a book that may have created a new subgenre. The edginess of a thriller meets lush literary prose at the threshold of the stodgy hypocrisy of academia. Queen of the Owls is the crash course in the art of Georgia O’Keefe that you either did or didn’t know you wanted, raising unsettling but quietly triumphal questions of whether there can be opportunity in catastrophe, whether art justifies overriding the boundaries of consent, and what are the limits of using intellect alone to define success and a woman’s right to self-determination.
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Little Tea
by
Claire Fullerton
Ellen Notbohm
, November 12, 2020
Meandering through back and forth through time, small towns new to most of us, and rural spaces abounding in flowers with melodically unfamiliar names and sneaky critters, the world of Little Tea comes at the reader saturated in the physical and cultural authenticity of its setting. “The thing about being a Southern girl is they let you run wild until the time comes to shape you.” Coming of age can measured in decades when complicated by the need to challenge entrenched boundaries of race, friendship, sexuality, tradition. The author herself, her protagonist, and her title character compellingly probe and test a serrated border: a girl can take herself out of the South, but can she ever fully take the South out of her? Little Tea, in Claire Fullerton’s trademark poetic but unflinching prose, confronts universal questions of how we define home, and where lies the tipping point between loyalty to self vs family fealty.
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Hard Cider
by
Barbara Stark-Nemon
Ellen Notbohm
, November 12, 2020
Abbie Rose has done everything she was supposed to do. Stuck with the good if not perfect marriage and the good teaching career, persevered through infertility, adoption, raising a perpetually challenging child. Now in retirement, she has a dream—to produce hard cider on the shores of her beloved Northern Michigan farmstead, up to now a vacation cottage. She embarks on learning the entire process, from apple growing to bottling and distribution. She has money from an inheritance. It’s her turn now, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Abbie’s family doesn’t stand in her way, but they don’t step up to support. The questions they raise carry the whiff of doubt about Abbie’s ability to be an effective entrepreneur and whether her dream is a wise use of the money. Abbie’s family’s indifference wouldn’t be enough to sustain a necessary book-length level of suspense. So it’s the subtleties just below the surface that dig in and stick. By any measure, Abbie has a good life—two homes, good health, meaningful career, decent hardworking husband, amiable children. It’s too tempting to ask, why isn’t that enough? Why the risky dream she can’t let go of? Because that’s what humans do—they dream, and take risks that don’t “make sense” to achieve their dreams. Abbie’s family’s reticence to let her do that also carries a subtle current that made me wonder if they’d object in the same way if she were an entrepreneurial man. Just sayin'.
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Girl with a Gun: An Annie Oakley Mystery
by
Kari Bovee
Ellen Notbohm
, November 12, 2020
This book was just what I wanted it to be—an engaging page turner and a chance to learn more about an iconic American woman during a transitional time in history. Most interesting to me was how the very young Annie, just 15 and already responsible for the financial support of her mother and siblings, had to quickly reconcile her Quaker sensibilities with the realities of the performing life in a traveling Wild West show. That she had little choice but to relinquish some of those strictures in the face of her living conditions set up an unavoidable juxtaposition of what happens when a “God-given” gift of extraordinary talent requires the gifted one to put aside some of those same God’s teachings in order to share that gift with the world. The book also intriguingly foreshadows Annie’s later life as an advocate for women’s causes. Although the body count went a little too high for me call the story “fun” (I have a low quease threshold), it’s definitely a romp ’em-stomp ’em read and made me want to learn a lot more about Little Miss Sureshot.
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After Kilimanjaro
by
Gayle Woodson
Ellen Notbohm
, November 12, 2020
A richly depicted homage to the grandeur, the people, and the dangers of Tanzania, told through the eyes of an American surgeon whose scholarship to conduct research on maternal mortality quickly takes on a much deeper, hands-on urgency. You will feel the shadow of the mountains, fall in love with the villagers, tremble at the wildness, relish the unpronounceable foods—and know that young mothers everywhere matter to all of us.
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Answer Creek
by
Ashley E. Sweeney
Ellen Notbohm
, November 12, 2020
With faultlessly authentic period detail and relentless, riveting twists of fate, Answer Creek puts the reader right on the Oregon-California Trail with the Donner Party in every sensory and emotional aspect imaginable. This compassionate but utterly realistic telling of the story gently crushes the sensationalized versions and releases something that feels much closer to truth. Ada Weeks is hope personified—it takes wing, soars, crashes—and survives.
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Year of Living Kindly Choices That Will Change Your Life & the World Around You
by
Cameron
Ellen Notbohm
, November 12, 2020
If ever there was a book that needs no introduction beyond its title. If ever there was a book that arrived on the planet at exactly the moment in time it is most needed. If ever there was a book that defies in the kindest possible way the resistance of “I don’t have time to read.” You have time for this. Structured in 52 bite-size chapters with gentle action/reflection items at the end of each, it is a book designed to be assimilated slowly (although devouring it won’t cause indigestion). I took a generous number of months to make my way through, the opposite of my usual reading pace and discipline. The opening salvo that being nice isn’t the same as being kind grabs the reader’s attention (nice = no action required; kind = requires extension into deed). And for some, the greatest head-slap may come toward the end of the book with a chapter entitled When My Kindness is Your “Yuck!” Here we confront the hoary old golden rule “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself” and acknowledge that it’s selfish and lacking in empathy, that treating others *as they wish to be treated* is the higher rule. Read this book with a highlighter pen in hand only if you like large, solid blocks of yellow.
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Copy Boy: A Jane Benjamin Novel
by
Shelley Blanton-Stroud
Ellen Notbohm
, November 12, 2020
I haven’t slightest hesitation talking about this book in the same breath as The Grapes of Wrath. Seldom have I read a historical novel that weaves so many timeless tropes so artfully, sketching in sharp relief how the human condition and societal mores haven’t changed all that much over the last century. We can tut-tut over the 1930s ills on which Copy Boy shines its klieg light, but teenage Jane/Benny’s authentically dreadful situation is no bad-old-days-gone-by noir tale; it demands we turn that klieg back on a society that still offers no adequate safety net for abused and/or traumatized children and women, offers few opportunities and doesn’t value undereducated, unskilled workers, leaves doors to upward mobility firmly shut to many. And in a scene particularly piercing in today’s America, newsroom staff debates the difference between truth and fact: a gossip columnist doesn’t “give a sulfur egg for facts! I prefer truth to fact,” while a colleague argues there is no truth without facts, and Jane likens facts to the dirt needed to grow a crop of truth, a comment for which she’s called a nincompoop. The page fairly crackles, and there are many more. “Bashful dogs get no scraps,” Jane avers, summing up what is ultimately a roiling story of survival against stiff odds.
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