Obsidian Blade
YA novel by Pete Hautman. April 10, 2012. Hardcover $16.99. Candlewick Press. ISBN: 9780763654030.
“This might be Hautman’s most daring book yet. Throughout, Hautman raises significant issues concerning family, faith, and destiny. Well-developed and complex characters, a fascinating time travel framework (including dispatches from the far future), and a heart-stopping conclusion will leave readers looking forward to the next book.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Vivid imagination and deft storytelling make for refreshing speculative fiction in this time-travel tale… Part science fiction, part adventure, part mystery, but every bit engrossing; be sure to start the hold list for the sequel.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Kicking off a riveting sci-fi trilogy, National Book Award winner Pete Hautman plunges us into a world where time is a tool-and the question is, who will control it?
The first time his father disappeared, Tucker Feye had just turned thirteen. The Reverend Feye simply climbed on the roof to fix a shingle, let out a scream, and vanished–only to walk up the driveway an hour later, looking older and worn, with a strange girl named Lahlia in tow. In the months that followed, Tucker watched his father grow distant and his once loving mother slide into madness. But then both of his parents disappear.
Now in the care of his wild Uncle Kosh, Tucker begins to suspect that the disks of shimmering air he keeps seeing-one right on top of the roof-hold the answer to restoring his family. And when he dares to step into one, he’s launched on a time-twisting journey-from a small Midwestern town to a futuristic hospital run by digitally augmented healers, from the death of an ancient prophet to a forest at the end of time. Inevitably, Tucker’s actions alter the past and future, changing his world forever.
Publicity contact: Heather Wilks-Jones at Heather.Wilks-Jones@candlewick.com.
Pete Hautman is the author of many books, including the National Book Award-winning Godless and the time-travel adventure Mr. Was. He splits his time between Wisconsin and Minnesota.
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Return to Wake Robin: One Cabin in the Heyday of Northwoods Resorts
A memoir by Marnie O. Mamminga. May 21, 2012. Hardcover $22.95. Wisconsin Historical Society Press. ISBN: 9780870204913.
“With liberal doses of gratitude, humor, and charming period details, Mamminga recounts her family’s more than 60-year history vacationing on Big Spider Lake in Wisconsin’s Northwoods region…. Wake Robin’s old-fashioned routines continue to bring joy to a fifth generation.”—Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“Wonderful, outsized, loving, adventurous people fill Return to Wake Robin.” —Jim Peck, Host of Milwaukee Public Television’s I Remember
Five generations of Marnie O. Mamminga’s family have been rejuvenated by times together in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. In a series of evocative remembrances accompanied by a treasure trove of vintage family photos, Mamminga takes us to Wake Robin, the cabin her grandparents built in 1929 on Big Spider Lake near Hayward, on land adjacent to Moody’s Camp. Along the way she preserves the spirit and cultural heritage of a vanishing era, conveying the heart of a place and the community that gathered there.
Publicity contact: Kristin Gilpatrick, kristin.gilpatrick@
Marnie O. Mamminga has vacationed every summer on Big Spider Lake near Hayward, Wisconsin. Born and raised in the Chicago area, she attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where she earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in English. Over the years she raised three sons, taught junior high and high school English, and worked as a freelance writer and columnist. Her publishing credits include the Chicago Tribune, Reader’s Digest, the Christian Science Monitor, Lake Superior Magazine, and several Chicken Soup for the Soul books. She is available for interviews and appearances when feasible geographically and for her schedule.
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The Chaperone
A novel by Laura Moriarty. June 5, 2012. Hardcover $26.95. Riverhead/Penguin. ISBN: 9781594487019.
A captivating novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922, and the summer that would change them both.
Only a few years before becoming a famous actress and an icon for her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle is a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip. She has no idea what she’s in for: Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous blunt bangs and black bob, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will change their lives forever.
Over the course of the summer, Cora’s eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive.
Laura Moriarty received her master’s degree from the University of Kansas and was awarded the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy. The author of The Center of Everything, The Rest of Her Life, and While I’m Falling, she lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
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The Color of War
Nonfiction by James Campbell. May 15. 2012. Hardcover $30.00. Crown/Random House. ISBN: 9780307461216.
“James Campbell’s powerful account of what happened instead is a[n]…important chapter of American history, too little known until now.” –Harry Belafonte
“The author writes with feeling and authority about an often neglected chapter of World War II history.” –Charles D. Melson, Chief Historian, U.S. Marine Corps
From the acclaimed World War II writer and author of The Ghost Mountain Boys, The Color of War is an incisive retelling of the key month, July 1944, that won the war in the Pacific and ignited a whole new struggle on the home front.
In the pantheon of great World War II conflicts, the battle for Saipan is often forgotten. Yet historian Donald Miller calls it “as important to victory over Japan as the Normandy invasion was to victory over Germany.” For the Americans, defeating the Japanese came at a high price. In the words of a Time magazine correspondent, Saipan was “war at its grimmest.”
On the night of July 17, 1944, as Admirals Ernest King and Chester Nimitz were celebrating the battle’s end, the Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot, just thirty-five miles northeast of San Francisco, exploded with a force nearly that of an atomic bomb. The men who died in the blast were predominantly black sailors. They toiled in obscurity loading munitions ships with ordnance essential to the US victory in Saipan. Yet instead of honoring the sacrifice these men made for their country, the Navy blamed them for the accident, and when the men refused to handle ammunition again, launched the largest mutiny trial in US naval history.
The Color of War is the story of two battles: the one overseas and the one on America’s home turf. By weaving together these two narratives for the first time, Campbell paints a more accurate picture of the cataclysmic events that occurred in July 1944–the month that won the war and changed America.
James Campbell is the author of The Final Frontiersman and The Ghost Mountain Boys. He has written for Outside magazine and many other publications.
Publicity contact: Mary Coyne, mcoyne@randomhouse.com.
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