Ask a Bookseller Minnesota Public Radio

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

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Step aside, Olive Kitteridge. There’s a new woman in town who’s difficult but loveable, complex and, in this case, fabulous. It’s Honey Fasinga.

Sheila Burns, of Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, Ore., recommended “Honey” by Victor Lodato, which came out this week.


She and her fellow booksellers couldn’t resist the 82-year-old protagonist. Honey Fasinga escaped her toxic, New Jersey mobster family as a young woman and cultivated a life full of art and fashion.

Now, she’s returning home, only to find all the bullies still exist. Honey is determined to stand up to them, both for her sake and for the sake of others in her life.

Like Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteridge,” “Honey” is a character-driven novel. Honey is smart, artsy, sexual, vain and very much her own person. She treats high fashion like armor, donning her wig, Chanel and heels even to walk to the drug store.

Burns says an advanced copy of the novel was a favorite among her colleagues at the bookstore, adding, “One of my booksellers called her an avatar of fabulousness.”

This one’s for the creatives.

Used bookstores can be a treasure trove of great reads, old and new, on a huge variety of topics.

Dickson St. Bookshop in Fayetteville, Ark., is one such spot. Bookseller Elaine Eckert says she gets particularly excited when she comes across a copy of her favorite nonfiction book, “Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking,” by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

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Eckert says she first picked up a copy two decades ago, and she still has that copy with its margin notes and underlines.

Written in straightforward, unpretentious language, the book urges people to keep doing the good and hard work of creating something new in the world.

“Whenever you’re tearing apart layers of your soul and putting them onto canvas or music notes or into words, there’s always that self-doubt,” concedes Eckert, who is also an amateur painter.


She easily located her favorite sentence in the book that reminds her to keep going: “Those who continue to make art, or those who have learned how to continue, or more precisely, have learned how not to quit.”

It’s a simple idea, Eckert says, and one worth returning to.

She recommends this book as a good companion for those moments when creating feels scary or weighted down by self-doubt, or when our progress doesn’t align with our expectations.

Just when you thought you’d seen all the possible variations on the classic story of the Three Little Pigs, a new one appears that goes farther than any pig has gone before.


Gone are the houses of hay, sticks and straw. These are tardigrades, microscopic invertebrates also known as water bears or moss pigs, and they can live pretty much anywhere.

Gavin, Colin and Doug leave their cozy drop of water and their mother (delightfully illustrated with pink hair) behind to seek their fortune, choosing to live in a volcano, the Arctic, and outer space. The Big Hairy Wolf Spider is determined to track them down, but can it survive in those climates?

Revati Kilaparti of Old Firehouse Books in Fort Collins, Colo., said “The Three Little Tardigrades: A Slightly Scientific Fairy Tale” is a delight to read, with cute, colorful pictures and more information at the end that gives you a chance to learn about these versatile creatures.

Donna Garban of Little City Books in Hoboken, N.J., recommends a memoir that’s perfect for March Madness. It’s called “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” by Hanif Abdurraqib.

The book of interconnected essays is organized into the four quarters of a basketball game, complete with half-time and time-outs that explore side stories.


It’s a love letter to growing up in Columbus, Ohio, and to basketball, whether played on the neighborhood court where the home team has the advantage of knowing every crack in the pavement, to high school courts and beyond. (And yes, of course, LeBron James is in there, as are people he played against in high school.)

The writing is gorgeous, Garban says, and filled with beautiful moments about neighborhoods, music and community.

She recalls one story about watching a local kid compete in the McDonald’s All-American High School Dunk competition.

Abdurraqib stretches the moment over several pages, starting with his shoes leaving the line and ending with the judges leaping to their feet holding up all ten fingers.

He writes, “A dunk contest is where one goes to execute some far-flung dream of what the body is capable of. It is where one goes to fail, often spectacularly. I wish all failure could be as beautiful as the failures that arrive to us in midair, a reality setting in that we are incapable and yet still in flight.”

Kara Thom of Excelsior Bay Books in Excelsior recommends a multi-generational novel, “The Bullet Swallower” by Elizabeth Gonzalez James. It’s a classic western with a dose of magical realism, and it’s drawn comparisons with works by Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.


Set along both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, the story moves back and forth between two timelines, several generations apart.

In 1895, Antonio Sonoro knows he comes from a long line of ruthless men. He feels that violence is in his blood and, lacking options, is soon swept up in a train robbery that goes terribly wrong.

He earns the nickname “The Bullet Swallower” when he receives an injury that should have killed him.

In 1964, Antonio’s grandson Jaime Sonoro lives a very different life as an actor and singer in Mexico City. Linking the two men — in addition to blood — is Remedio.

Here enters the magical realism, for Romelo is a sort of dark angel, though he is constantly questioning what he’s doing and why.

Romelo allows Antonio to live in the opening chapter, but as he follows the family, the question arises: How long should children have to pay for the sins of their fathers?

Adding to the intrigue of that question is the fact that the author based the novel loosely on her own great-grandfather.

Thom, who grew up near the Texas-Mexico border before moving to Minnesota, said she appreciates the complexity with which this book paints life at the border.

She points to a passage by the character who cares for a wounded Antonio: “It’s the strangest thing. I was born in New Spain, which then became Mexico, then the Republic of Texas, and then I wound up in the United States. And meanwhile, my house has always stood in the same place. The Texans call me Mexican. And I’ve never crossed the Rio Grande.”

How often do you settle down to read a play? Blake Worthey of Two Friends Bookstore in Bentonville, Ark., recommends the genre. Specifically, he suggests Aleshea Harris’s play “Is God Is,” which he says is so vividly written, with characters that leap off the page, that he definitely felt like he “went somewhere” in the reading.


It’s a revenge play, complete with body count, and as with the best revenge plays, the tale has a “deeply defensible” protagonist, Worthey says.

The play follows twin sisters, survivors of a fire that left one of them burnt from the neck down and the other from the neck up.

Now grown, they hear from their mother, whom they thought had died in the fire. She sends them on a mission to kill their father, whom she says is the arsonist. The girls call the mother “God.”

For Worthey, a key takeaway from the play was “Where does feminine anger go? Being angry as a man has some productive value. But given how society is set up, a woman being angry and then acting on that anger is necessarily anti-establishment, it’s necessarily anti patriarchy."

Without spoilers, he adds, “the ending creates the best possible story, even though it doesn’t maybe go in a way that it was set up to ... You don’t feel good in the way that you expect to.”