Contributing Editor
HISTORY / MUSIC
Donna Marie Miller
Foreword by Charles R. Townsend
The Broken Spoke: Austin’s Legendary Honky-Tonk
Hardcover, 256 pages, 978-1-62349-519-0, $24.95; also available in ebook formats; 2017
Reviewed by Si Dunn
In the early 1960s, James White was far from Austin and longing to hear country music. He was an American soldier stationed in Okinawa, serving on a launch and maintenance crew for Nike Hercules missiles. The nearest dirt-floor bar had a jukebox but only two country-western songs. White and his buddies played them over and over.
Meanwhile, White wondered what he would do once his enlistment ended, and an image inspired by Western movies began forming in his mind. He would have “a place” of his own — something grander than a dirt-floor bar.
In her entertaining and engaging new book, The Broken Spoke: Austin’s Legendary Honky-Tonk, Austin writer Donna Marie Miller describes what happened next: the humble birth of a honky-tonk now known around the world. >>READ MORE
Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole
>> archive
Author cooks up new endings to fairy tales
Abilene children’s author Penny Parker Klostermann has teamed up with illustrator Ben Mantle for another delightful children’s picture book, A Cooked-Up Fairy Tale (Random House, $17.99 hardcover). Two years ago Klostermann and Mantle produced a hit with There Was an Old Dragon Who Swallowed a Knight.
The new story features a young chef named William, who has read a lot of cookbooks but not fairy tales. So when he comes across some apples, some beans, and a pumpkin in a box intended for Fairy Tale Headquarters, he produces baked apples, bean soup, and pumpkin pie and proudly takes them to the Fairy Tale Chief.
But the fairy tales call for shiny apples (Snow White), raw beans (Jack and the Beanstalk) and a whole pumpkin (Cinderella). Without those items, can these tales live up to their happily-ever-after intentions?
A Cooked-Up Fairy Tale goes on sale nationally Tuesday (Sept. 5). Klostermann will sign books that day from 4–6 p.m. at Texas Star Trading Company, 174 Cypress Street in downtown Abilene. To reserve copies, call (325) 672-9696. Read more on the author’s web site, pennyklostermann.com.
For all ages: A new children’s book, This Is Texas, Y’all! The Lone Star State from A to Z by Misha Maynerick Blaise (Lone Star Books, $14.95 hardcover), is informative and entertaining for Texans of all ages. With clever illustrations and brief tidbits of text and pithy quotations, Blaise covers a wide range of Texas topics, going beyond the usual armadillo-barbecue-cowboy entries found in most Texas alphabet books.
Even native Texans, old or young, will probably find something in this book they did not know about the Lone Star State, such as Midland Minnie (the oldest human skeleton in the Western Hemisphere), or the official state hashtag, or some long-forgotten Dr Pepper slogans, or the location of the world’s smallest active Catholic church.
And there’s the story of a Texas farmer named Uncle Oscar and why his name is celebrated throughout the movie world every year. Fun reading for the whole family.
Check out Blaise’s other book, This Phenomenal Life, on her web site, mishablaise.com.
Butterfly story: Cora Lynn: A Butterfly’s Secret Tale by Fort Worth teacher and author Jessica Caceres-Davis (TCU Press, $14.99 paperback) tells how a butterfly evolves from a tiny egg to caterpillar, chrysalis, and finally a beautiful butterfly soaring into the sky. It’s wonderfully illustrated by Caitlyn Jameson, also of Fort Worth.
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Glenn Dromgoole’s latest book is West Texas StoriesContact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.
>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life
Mulholland Books
Hardcover, 978-0-3163-6329-4, (also available as an e-book and on Audible), 320 pgs., $26.00
September 12, 2017
The tiny town of Lark, deep into East Texas on Highway 59, has had two murders in the last week. That’s two more than the last six years. The first body is that of a black man from Chicago, a stranger in town. The second is a white woman, a local, whose body turns up in the bayou behind Geneva Sweet’s Sweets. Geneva Sweet has spent her entire sixty-nine years in Lark, the last several decades running her small diner. Geneva keeps her secrets and minds her own business, but other people are terrified of those secrets and minding her business, too.
Darren Matthews is descended from a line of lawyers and lawmen, most recently working a task force focused on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, and one of the few black Texas Rangers. He’s got wife troubles, career troubles, bourbon troubles, and legal troubles; now he’s got Lark troubles. Assigned to investigate the murders in Lark, Darren finds himself stymied by his superiors who maybe don’t want to know what happened in those East Texas woods. >>READ MORE
Forge Books
Hardcover, 978-0-7653-9018-9 (also available as an e-book, on Audible, and on audio CD), 304 pgs., $25.99; May 9, 2017
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams.”
“Saint” Bonnelyn Parker grew up poor and ambitious in Cement City, a company town in West Dallas created for the employees of the area’s cement plants, in the early twentieth century. In 1927, Bonnelyn is seventeen years old, attending high school, singing in the church choir, escaping into books at the local library, and dreaming of becoming a teacher. When her widowed mother becomes ill, her brother is hurt on the job, and Bonnelyn is laid off from her waitressing job, she follows her best friend, Blanche, to a bartending job in an illegal speakeasy (its walls papered with pro-Prohibition posters) in the basement of a physician’s office in what is now the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas, so she can keep the electricity on.
Becoming Bonnie is the debut novel by Jenni L. Walsh. Historical fiction set in Dallas during the latter years of Prohibition, Becoming Bonnie is the story of how prim and proper Bonnelyn Parker became half of the infamous, bootlegging and bank-robbing couple Bonnie and Clyde. >>READ MORE
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