As part of The Colorado Sun’s literature section – SunLit – we’re featuring staff picks from bookstores across the state. >> Click here for more SunLit
This book of the week: Out West Books, 533 Main St., Grand Junction
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Deep stream
By Pam Houston
WW Norton & Co.
$15.95
January 2022
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From the publisher: On her 120-acre property in Colorado, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the change of seasons, winter temperatures drop to minus 35 degrees, and lightning ignites a 110,000-acre fire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what connects her to the land, the farm above all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolves and a troop of Icelandic horses, donkeys and sheep, the farm becomes Houston’s refuge, a place where she discovers how the natural world has birthed and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect. .
By Mary at Out West Books: Pam Houston acquired her rights to Cowboys are My Weakness, a favorite book from my early years as a bookseller, and bought herself a ranch in southwest Colorado. Her book Deep Creek is part exploration of 25 years as a single rancher and part her life; of writing, of unspeakable trauma, of teaching, lecturing and travel.
Pam’s writing is so easy to read and so relatable for women, for Coloradoans. It’s like you’re sitting on the couch with a damn eloquent and entertaining speaker. Although I’ve never seen her place, I know exactly what it looks like, and although I’ve only seen the South Fork Fire from afar, I know exactly what it was like to be in the middle of it. For all of Pam’s travels (she had to pay for the farm somehow, and lectures and seminars were key), she always remained determined when she returned to her farm. Doesn’t that happen to all of us? We can go and we can do, but coming home and looking out the kitchen window and just saying “Ahhh” makes all right with the world.
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Tallbars
By Sandra Dallas
Saint Martins Griffin
$17.99
February 2008
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From the publisher: During World War II, a family finds their lives turned upside down when the government opens a Japanese internment camp in their small Colorado town. After a young girl is killed, all eyes (and suspicions) turn to newcomers, intruders, strangers. This is her town as Rennie Stroud has never seen it before.
She’s just turned thirteen and, up until this point, life has been pretty much what her father told her it should be: predictable and fair. But now the winds of change are coming, and with them, a change in her perspective. And Rennie will uncover secrets that can destroy even the most sacred things. Part thriller, part historical novel, Tallgrass is a riveting exploration of the darkest and best parts of the human heart.
By Mary at Out West Books: This is one of my favorite books by Denver author Sandra Dallas. Although she never mentions it, I think this book is based on Camp Amache, near Granada, which has been in the news a lot for becoming a National Historic Site in March of this year. The Amache “Internment” camp (why not do as Daniel James Brown, author of “In Front of the Mountain” says and call them “concentration” camps?) housed about 10,000 people on the Eastern Plateau of Colorado during World War II.
Some of those people were teenagers. Some of those teenagers were bound to mix with the townspeople and that would surely be a recipe for disaster. This story has murder, star-crossed love, inhumanity and…humanity. To this day, I have not read a book that deals with the relationship between the townspeople and the prisoners the way Tallgrass does. I read this years ago and still remember every part of the story.
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Don’t say anything about the dog
By Connie Willis
Random penguin house
$8.99
December 1998
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From the publisher: Ned Henry badly needs a break. He has been traveling between the 21st century and the 1940s in search of a Victorian atrocity called the Bishop’s Bird Trunk. It is part of a project to restore the famous Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years ago. But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, unwittingly brings something from the past. Now Ned must return to the Victorian era to help Verity set things right – not only to save the project, but to prevent history itself from changing.
From Didi Herald, bookseller at Out West Books: Colorado author Connie Willis’s wonderfully humorous take on a future where Lady Schrapnell, a filthy rich American, is funding time travel so she can rebuild Coventry Cathedral as it was when her great-grandmother experienced an epiphany there before the Bishop. Bird stump. When a late historian from the future is sent to the Victorian era to rescue Lady Schrapnell, he finds love and a problem that could tear the fabric of time apart. This multiple award-winning game is hilarious and ripe for rediscovery.
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