University of Akron professor offers timely tale in ‘Glimpse’
University of Akron English professor Julie Drew’s first novel Daughter of Providence was beautifully set in Depression-era Rhode Island. In Glimpse, her cracking new young adult novel, time isn’t firmly fixed.
Tesla Abbott, daughter of physicists, lives with her younger brother Max — named for Max Planck — and her father in a college town that resembles Kent. Tesla is discontented: her relationship with her father is fractious since her mother died, and she hasn’t been able to enjoy sports as she used to, since the discovery of a heart arrhythmia.
A few odd things start to happen, like when Tesla and a friend go to a campus party and a hulking guy tries to drag her outside to “talk,” and he isn’t looking for romance. A gift arrives for Tesla’s dad’s birthday, ostensibly from her, but she didn’t send it: it’s an album of family photos nobody remembers seeing. She also has a fuzzy recollection of wandering around the hospital after she collapsed while playing basketball, leading to her diagnosis, but she concludes that was a delusion caused by the medication.
Those things are disconcerting, but when an explosion rocks the physics building and Tesla’s father disappears, she learns that the nice people she met at the party were either graduate students posing as secret agents, or secret agents posing as graduate students, and know more about her father’s research than they had been prepared to let on. Now the cat is out of the box: he’s been working on time travel, and an old colleague-turned-adversary has resurfaced.
Two cute guys, one from the present and one from the past, work with Tesla and the on-campus spy group, and as they sort out the heroes from the villains, Tesla jumps backward and forward to her future past.
Glimpse (362 pages, softcover), the first installment in a trilogy, costs $13.99 from Ring of Fire Publishing. Run, Book Two in the series, is scheduled for a November release. Julie Drew will launch Glimpse at a reception from 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday at Wise Guys Lounge & Grill, 1008 N. Main St., Akron.
‘Season of Saturdays’
Former Beacon Journal sports writer Michael Weinreb won acclaim for his 2007 book The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs and Geniuses Who Make Up America’s Top High-School Chess Team — it even won an award as the best sports book of that year, broadening some interpretations of “sports.”
No one could deny that Weinreb’s new book, Season of Saturdays: A History of College Football in 14 Games, is a sports book, but it truly encompasses so much of American history and culture that at times football almost seems an afterthought. Choosing games that represent turning points, Weinreb makes a few observations about the actual games and then spins off into tangents that connect college football with race relations, national politics, religion, The Big Chill and Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies.
Weinreb begins with a Rutgers 6-4 win over Princeton in November 1869, to illustrate the chaos and violence in a game that would in 1905 kill 18 players, and continues with a 1913 Notre Dame victory over Army, deconstructing the mythology of Knute Rockne; here, his digressions include an uneasy personal history with Notre Dame (Weinreb’s father worked for Penn State, and he “learned to hate” the Fighting Irish). Later, a 1969 memo to Richard Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman suggests a presidential visit to “one of the big football rivalry games” as a campaign tool, which opened up a whole can of political worms.
Season of Saturdays (260 pages, hardcover) costs $25 from Scribner. Michael Weinreb lives in San Francisco and writes about college football for the online magazine Sports on Earth.
Autism Society award
Leah’s Voice, a storybook by former Cuyahoga Falls resident Lori DeMonia, received the Dr. Temple Grandin Outstanding Literary Work of the Year Award at the Autism Society’s annual conference in July. The book tells of Abby, who comes for a play date at the home of a friend whose younger sister, Leah, has autism; she believes Leah is being rude when she is not communicative. Abby later learns that Leah is a gifted artist, and learns about autism.
Events
Mac’s Backs (1820 Coventry Road, Cleveland Heights) — Poets Mary Weems, John Swain, Steven B. Smith, Lady, Shelley Chernin, Steve Brightman and John Burroughs launch their anthology Oct-Tongue-1, 7 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Cuyahoga County Public Library (Beachwood branch, 25501 Shaker Blvd.) — Massachusetts journalist Ed Rice talks about his book Baseball’s First Indian: Louis Sockalexis: Penobscot Legend, Cleveland Indian, about the Maine athlete who came to represent the Cleveland Indians, 7 to 8:45 p.m. Wednesday.
Visible Voice (1023 Kenilworth Ave., Cleveland) — Cleveland native Tatiana Ryckman reads from her story collection Twenty-Something, 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday; Sutton Avery reads from and signs his novel Out of Ashes, about a black Ohio woman who finds intrigue and discrimination when she moves to 1963 Birmingham, 6 to 8 p.m. Friday (a $10 beer and wine tasting is optional).
Learned Owl Book Shop (204 N. Main St., Hudson) — Laura Peskin talks about and signs Deep Cover Cleveland: 99 Little Known Things about Northeast Ohio, 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday.
Barnes & Noble (28801 Chagrin Blvd., Woodmere) — Josie Bell Lindsay and J. Goosby Smith, authors of Beyond Inclusion: Worklife Interconnectedness, Energy, and Resilience in Organizations, talk about their book at 1 p.m. Saturday.
Loganberry Books (13015 Larchmere Blvd., Shaker Heights) — Michelle Krankowski of Lakewood launches her inspirational novel If I Had to Say Good-bye, noon to 2 p.m. Saturday.
— Barbara McIntyre
Special to the Beacon Journal
Send information about books of local interest to Lynne Sherwin, Features Department, Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309 or lsherwin@thebeaconjournal.com. Event notices should be sent at least two weeks in advance.