Wednesday, September 4 @ 7pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books
Scott Nadelson’s Trust Me (Forest Avenue Press) tells the story of a turbulent year in the life of Lewis Nelson and his daughter Skye, who spend their time together at the edge of a fragile wilderness in Western Oregon. As a last-ditch effort to save his marriage, Lewis — an East Coast suburban Jew who has run from his roots — buys a cabin on a wild and scenic river in the Cascade foothills; after the marriage falls apart, he moves to the woods and makes the long commute every morning to Salem, the state capital, where he works a tedious government job. Skye stays with him on weekends, leaving behind her middle-school friends, her cellular service, her cat, and her mom in exchange for ancient trees and clear water and moss-covered rocks. In 52 vignettes — one for each week of the year — that alternate between Lewis’s perspective and Skye’s, the novel traces their days foraging for mushrooms and searching for newts, arguing over jigsaw puzzles and confronting menacing neighbors, hosting skeptical visitors and taking city jaunts, finding pleasure in small moments of wonder and coping with devastating loss. By turns comic and heartbreaking, Trust Me is a study of the uneasy bond between a hapless father and his precocious daughter, of their love for a complex and changing landscape, of the necessity and precariousness of the relationships and places we cherish most.
Matt Young’s End of Active Service (Bloomsbury) is a raw and rampaging debut novel from the author of the "inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining" (NYTBR) memoir Eat the Apple — examining the last phase of war for US veterans: returning home. What was it like? It's the only thing anyone wants to know about war — and the last thing Corporal Dean Pusey wants to talk about, at least not with one of these fat and happy civilians crowding the bar. Dean is two months free from the Marine Corps, and life back in his Indiana hometown is anything but peaceful. That's when the woman next to him offers to buy him a drink. Max is nice — gorgeous, funny, easy to talk to. Dean doesn't dare tell her about the sheep he took care of on his first deployment, only to watch it get torn to shreds by a pack of wild dogs; or the naked, shivering Iraqi teenager his platoon detained after an IED blast. He needs to leave all that behind and become a new person — the kind who sticks around when Max gets pregnant. He's white-knuckling it, trying to keep calm, and it's not easy. Harder still when his friend and comrade Ruiz starts showing up all over the place like he's been invited — like he didn't die a year ago. He has Max now, he has his baby daughter, River. He doesn't have time for ghosts. With his signature black humor, hard-eyed honesty, and stylistic ingenuity, Young delivers a novel that turns the typical war story on its head — beginning not with enlistment but with retirement, and locating the life-or-death stakes not in battle, but in the domestic theaters of fatherhood, family, forgiveness, and love.
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