Kerri's pick
 
 
Book of the week

Every now and then, the perfect novel converges with just the right narrator and a wonderful audiobook experience is born.

John Larison’s 2018 debut novel, “Whiskey When We’re Dry” is the Civil War-era tale of Jesse Harney, a sharpshooting, cross-dressing, intrepid girl in pursuit of her brother, Noah, a legendary Wild West Robin Hood.

As Jesse and her horse Ingrid travel through Utah and beyond, word of her prodigious skills with pistols and rifles precede her and eventually turn her into a legend of her own.

Her adventures are captivating and suspenseful, but it’s the voice Larison created for Jesse that is so compelling.

At 14, she’s both brave and frightened, introspective and foolish, philosophical and young, so young,  the way teenagers are!

And I can’t imagine any narrator more pitch-perfect than Sophie Amoss.

She imbues Jesse’s voice with bravado and tenderness and she’s a perfect argument for why some novels just resonate more deeply in the ear.

Mystery character of the month: Lassie

— Kerri Miller | MPR News
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This week on The Thread
Talking Volumes: Leif Enger

Join Kerri Miller at a special on-the-road edition of Talking Volumes. She’ll be at the Sheldon Theatre in Red Wing on June 4 to talk with Minnesotan Leif Enger about his new book, “I Cheerfully Refuse.” Tickets are limited. Learn more at mprevents.org.
Lydia Millet writes a devotion to the species disappearing from our planet

Lydia Millet’s “We Loved It All” is a lush lament to the natural world slipping through our fingers and a call to save what we still can.

Millet joins host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about how she carries hope, even as she mourns the destruction in the natural world.
Ask a Bookseller: ‘Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea’ by Rebecca Thorne

Charlotte Klimek of Hearthside Books in Watertown, Minn., recommends “Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea” by Rebecca Thorne.
‘Brotherless Night,’ an ambitious novel by a University of Minnesota professor, wins $150K prize

The writer V. V. Ganeshananthan has won this year’s Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, for her novel “Brotherless Night.” This is the second year of the prize, which awards English-language writing by women and nonbinary authors.

Winners of the award receive $150,000. Alongside her work as a writer, Ganeshananthan is an associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota.
Minnesota lawmakers OK school policy changes on cell phones, book bans, literacy

Many of the bill changes are focused on the Read Act, legislation passed last year that sought to overhaul the way Minnesota schools teach students to read by requiring districts to retrain teachers and purchase new curriculums in line with what’s known as “structured literacy.”
Two new novels investigate what makes magic, what is real and imagined
In an enchanted world, where does mystery begin? Two authors pose this question in new novels out this spring, “Pages of Mourning” and “The Cemetery of Untold Stories."
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