The Other Side of Dark

The Other Side of Dark by Sarah Smith

Katie Mullen has had too much death in her life--her dad, her mom, the neighbor boy who died in the 1800s... Ghosts haunt her every step--so much that sometimes it is hard to pick out what is real and what is a hallucination. While others would likely cry or scream under the circumstances, Katie draws. Everyone thinks she’s crazy, even she thinks she’s crazy. But she never lets anyone close enough to find out why… at least she didn’t before Law asked her out for coffee one fateful day. Although Katie is too afraid to ask these ghosts questions or hear their secrets, Law is not. In fact, Katie is just what he was searching for--a road into the past. Together they will begin to uncover the truth about themselves, their ancestry and a secret from Boston’s history that is buried so deep is it difficult to see Katie escaping from that which she fears--death.

Recommended enthusiastically by YA authors such as Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, this eclectic novel will have you on the edge of your seat! It is a great teen mystery based on real people and a true Boston secret.

The Company of the Dead

One hundred years ago early on the morning of April 14, 1912 the Titanic sank. In The Company of the Dead, the first novel by David Kowalski, Jonathan Wells comes from the future to try to spare the lives of the 1200 people who went down with the ship. It is from Wells’s attempt to decrease the chance of changing the future that he only interacts with passengers he knows died in the original voyage, thus the title.

The reader soon sees that the outcome of Wells’s actions are dramatic. America never enters World War I. By April 2012, Germany and Japan control the west and east coasts of the US. America is divided into a union and confederacy.

In April 2012 Joseph R. Kennedy, a grand-nephew of John F. Kennedy lives in a New York occupied by Imperial Japan. Kennedy is a well known figure from the war between Mexico and the second confederacy. As the world teeters on the edge of war, escendants of Astors, Kennedy and Lighthollers discover the time machine Wells used to alter the past. They make the decision to go back and restore the original time line.

The Company of the Dead is an espionage, time travel, alternate history novel. The characters have interesting lives. Read and see what might have been.

Some other new novels featuring the titanic are The Dressmaker by Kate Alcott, House of Velvet and Glass by Katherine Howe and The Distant Waves by Suzanne Weyn.

Mystery Book Club

The Prairie du Sac Library's Mystery Book Club will meet Thursday, April 12 at 6:45 p.m. to discuss mysteries by Tom Franklin. His Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter was the 2011 CWA Gold Dagger award winner. Copies are on display in the library. New members are always welcome!

Driftless

In Driftless, author David Rhodes shows us that simple rural living holds in it all the complexities of human nature and the cycle of life. The story takes place in the beautiful, geologically significant southwest corner of Wisconsin from which the book gets its title. The fictional town of Words, Wisconsin has not escaped the effects of the fast moving twenty-first century. Many residents have left, and some who remain lament the loss of the past.

We come to know July Montgomery twenty years after he randomly accepted a ride with a Wisconsin farmer and settled in to become one himself. Has he found the human connections and sense of being alive he realized he needed when he rode along to Wisconsin all those years ago? July’s friends and neighbors are introduced with deep intimacy and acceptance. Beautifully detailed descriptions bring their connections to their natural environment alive.

Adding to the depth and timeliness of this story are religion, government, and agribusiness. The characters’ struggles to deal with these both enhance and diminish their lives. The reader is gripped by their struggles and wants all to turn out well. It is difficult to leave Words when the book ends.

Driftless was published by Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit book publisher dedicated to publishing quality literature. Check out their website, http://www.milkweed.org/, for other books they have published.