Winter Reading Roundup 2022

The short days and cold nights of Nebraska winters create a season of reading for book lovers statewide. From a fictional thriller set in the Sandhills to Omaha history, from poignant poetry to medical mystery, we hope these new titles, along with the Nebraska One Book selection, feed your inner bookworm.

Pickard County Atlas

Sandhills thriller with incendiary secrets

The fictional Sandhills county in seventh-generation Nebraskan Chris Harding Thornton’s debut novel, Pickard County Atlas, embodies a character as fully formed yet fragile as its human inhabitants. Soapweed, yucca and bunchgrass hold the thin topsoil, but great gray skies threaten to blow it all away.

“Pickard County’s dirt was as erratic as the weather,” Thornton writes. “The place was a cusp, and it’d once drawn people accustomed to life on cusps.”

Residents in the late-1970s fictional town of Madson live on the verge of poverty – and of sanity. The place’s very existence, dogged by droughts and dust, is also tenuous. “All that kept the whole county from going up were a few spindly arcs of center-pivot irrigation lines.”

Against this menacing background, sheriff’s deputy Harley Jensen cruises the country roads at night trying to banish a haunting childhood memory. When a curious crime spree erupts, Jensen’s path collides with Paul and Rick Reddick, a pair of brothers who are still reeling from the fallout of their brother’s murder two decades earlier. One brother is hopped up on pills and the other is a suspected arsonist. The sheriff’s deputy has crossed lines, too. Embers nurtured long ago may burn it all down.

Sara Adkisson-Joyner, manager of Jackson Street Bookseller in Omaha’s Old Market, calls Pickard County Atlas a “nod to rural noir,” saying Harding evokes the “stark landscape of small-town Nebraska with the intimacy of a skilled craftsperson.”

Deer Season

Unsolved crime tests rural Nebraska town

Alma Costagan doesn’t want to spend her Saturday afternoon giving shots to pigs with her husband Clyle. But their farmhand Hal Bullard has taken the weekend off for the opening of deer hunting season. Alma has become a surrogate mother to Hal, who has an intellectual disability as the result of a childhood accident.

These characters inhabit the fictional rural Nebraska town of Gunthrum in Deer Season by Erin Flanagan. The story unfolds in 1985, so there’s no social media, but the town’s barstools, church pews and grocery checkout provide rich channels for gossip. Rumors seize Gunthrum when Hal returns home early from his hunting trip with a smear of blood in his truck on the same night a teenage girl goes missing.

Alma knows Hal isn’t telling the entire truth – his story feels shaky – but she also doesn’t want to believe he’s capable of hurting someone, despite violence in his past. She must consider how far she’s willing to go to protect him. In this farming community, everyone has their own secrets and their own loyalties.

The characters in Deer Season, a Flyover Fiction book from the University of
Nebraska Press, are funny and flawed. The author grew up on a farm in Iowa, which is why her depictions of farm chores and routines feel so authentic.

Moments of humor or wry observation in the farming sections offer relief from the book’s driving tension. Flanagan illustrates that family and community bonds may be frangible, but they are also mendable with enough care.

My Omaha Obsession

History buff reveals the city’s long-held secrets

Written by an author known only by the pen name Miss Cassette, My Omaha Obsession explores the city’s unknown history through some of its most mysterious buildings and personal histories.

One chapter recalls how, as a child, Miss Cassette was in the middle of enjoying an ice cream sundae at an old-school joint in downtown Omaha, when her grandmother confessed a secret. As a teenager, Grandma had enjoyed another forbidden treat on the same block. In the early 1930s, behind a “judas hole” and a password, a speakeasy once served drinks like the Sloe Gin Fizz that grandma had become so fond of.

As an adult, the author set out to uncover more secrets of the past. To do this, she consulted the book Omaha: A Guide to the City and its Environs, written in the 1930s by members of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration. Among other discoveries, she learned about the Clover Leaf Club, a drinking and dancing establishment that was once a happening spot in Omaha. The Union Pacific Center stands there today, but by using photos, old books and archived newspaper articles, the author rewinds decades of history and urban
development.

The Clover Leaf Club offered an airconditioned environment decorated like a “forest glen,” with drinks, food and evening entertainment. Liquor and gambling violations plagued the place. One evening outside the club, a drunken lady hit a police officer in the head with her shoe. Later, under different management, members of a burlesque show were charged with indecent conduct and “wearing clothes of the opposite sex.”

Imagine, the author implores: Imagine the life below the city, with its live orchestra and its hidden card rooms and its beautiful performers. Imagine Omaha with the life it once held and the secrets it has kept.

Shelly Mutum, owner, The Next Chapter Bookstore in Omaha, says Miss Cassette’s “excitement, curiosity and passion for every new story, every new mystery is palpable and captivating for any reader.”

How to Love the World

Nebraska poets share words of hope

Nebraska poets feature prominently in How to Love the World, an anthology
edited by University of Nebraska Ph.D. graduate James Crews.

“This small poetry collection overflows with reminders that we need to savor the people, experiences and things that bring us joy, hope and love,” said Carla Ketner, owner of Chapters Books & Gifts in Seward.

In the poem “Perceptive Prayer,” Grace Bauer encourages appreciation of “what is both ordinary and extra.” Marjorie Saiser’s “When Life Seems a To-Do List” describes a moment of slipping away to appreciate the nighttime skies. Ted Kooser celebrates the common dandelion as a marker on a thawing spring path. Reflective pauses throughout the book invite readers to journal or meditate on the presented themes in each section.

“How to Love the World is an island of beauty and peaceful reflection amidst the tension of daily life,” Ketner said. “Especially in these stressful times, we all need books like this one.”

The Track the Whales Make

Willa Literary Award winner charms with new collection

New poems by Nebraska poet Marjorie Saiser explore themes of love and letting go, of what holds the center and what falls away. In The Track Whales Make, she uses familiar Nebraska landscapes as metaphors.

In “I Had a Marriage in Those Days,” she writes: “Each row of corn was snug up against/ a neighboring row, took its shape/ from it, gave its shape to the next row./ When I drove the roads, the corn/ ticked by, agreeing on everything.”

In another poem, “Charmed by the Dirt Road,” Saiser recalls visiting her significant other’s mother on the farm. She watches the woman kill, clean and cook a chicken for dinner: “I saw the array; plates plain and shiny, the cups/ waiting for their coffee, all the song of this,/ the chorus, the riffs, and I thought/ with some minor changes I could do it.”

Poems from earlier anthologies appear, too, and lovingly refer to Nebraska places. In “I Save My Love,” a Nebraska coffeehouse gets a shout out: “I save my love/ for the smell of coffee at the Mill,/ the roasted near-burn of it, especially/ the remnant that stays later/ in the fibers of my coat.”

Carla Ketner, owner of Chapters Books & Gifts, who is from Seward County, particularly loves the work republished from Lost in Seward County. Ketner’s favorite lines are: “This was the time between,/ this was the mortar,/ and we struck it lightly, gave it shape.”

“Saiser doesn’t always strike lightly,” Ketner said. “But she gives shape to the things we’re feeling and makes us feel less alone.”

Patient Zero

Nebraska doctor weaves tales of medical mysteries

Lydia Kang is an author of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She’s also a doctor of internal medicine at University of Nebraska Medical Center. Kang combines skills from both professions in her latest nonfiction book, Patient Zero.

Co-written with writer Nate Pedersen, Kang examines 21 of history’s worst
diseases – including measles, Ebola, cholera and more – through stories of each illness’ “patient zero,” or first known carrier. Presented in a series of vignettes, Kang and Pedersen unpack scientific missteps and breakthroughs. Fascinating sidebars, public health posters and historical photos keep the layout lively and fun.

One story from the book might make Beef State residents think it’s actually a work of horror. Ever heard of alpha-gal syndrome?

Caused by the bite of the lone star tick, which lives in Nebraska, alpha-gal syndrome causes people to become allergic to certain kinds of meat. First, the tick bites a cow, deer or sheep, getting a certain kind of sugar from the mammals’ blood into its saliva. When the tick bites a human and exposes them to the sugar, it makes the human immune system say, “bye-bye forever, beef.”

Carl Erickson of The Bookworm in Omaha calls Patient Zero a “deeply informative” and “absorbing companion” to Kang and Pedersen’s earlier work, Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything.

The Bones of Paradise
Nebraska One Book selection for 2022

One morning, two people are murdered at different times in the same remote meadow of a Sandhills ranch. Star was a young Native American woman; J.B. Bennett was a white rancher.

Set a decade after the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, The Bones of Paradise by Jonis Agee centers on two women. Rose is Star’s sister, who has witnessed her people dislocated from their land and decimated. She vows to avenge Star’s death. Dulcinea is J.B. Bennett’s estranged wife, who returns to reclaim her family and ranch from a
tyrannical father-in-law. A rich cast of characters navigates the turn-of-the-century in this beautiful and terrible landscape.

Exploring themes of family, history, vengeance, race and love of the land, The Bones of Paradise is the One Book One Nebraska selection for 2022. Libraries across the state – along with literary and cultural institutions – will hold talks and events about the book. This is the 18th year of the One Book One Nebraska reading program sponsored by the Nebraska Center for the Book, Humanities Nebraska and Nebraska Library Commission.