What is Valerie Geary reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Valerie Geary, author of Crooked River.

Her entry begins:

I first learned about Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel Station Eleven during one of my favorite podcasts. Both hosts of Books on the Nightstand were raving about Mandel’s book months before its scheduled release, and once I heard the description, I knew it was one I had to read as soon as it came out. I love stories set in some end-of-the-world landscape, and Station Eleven takes place several years after a deadly flu decimates the population. Through this bleak future roams a Traveling Symphony, a motley and optimistic group bringing music and theater to pockets of survivors scattered throughout the region. They run into their fair share of troubles, sure, but this book is about so much more than just surviving a post-apocalyptic nightmare. It is about...[read on]

About Crooked River, from the publisher:

With the inventiveness and emotional power of Promise Not to Tell, The Death of Bees, and After Her, a powerful literary debut about family and friendship, good and evil, grief and forgiveness.

He is not evil. I am not good.

We are the same: broken and put back together again.

Still grieving the sudden death of their mother, Sam and her younger sister Ollie McAlister move from the comforts of Eugene to rural Oregon to live in a meadow in a teepee under the stars with Bear, their beekeeper father. But soon after they arrive, a young woman is found dead floating in Crooked River, and the police arrest their eccentric father for the murder.

Fifteen-year-old Sam knows that Bear is not a killer, even though the evidence points to his guilt. Unwilling to accept that her father could have hurt anyone, Sam embarks on a desperate hunt to save him and keep her damaged family together.

I see things no one else does.

I see them there and wish I didn’t. I want to tell and can’t.

Ollie, too, knows that Bear is innocent. The Shimmering have told her so. One followed her home from her mom’s funeral and refuses to leave. Now, another is following Sam. Both spirits warn Ollie: the real killer is out there, closer and more dangerous than either girl can imagine.

Told in Sam and Ollie’s vibrant voices, Crooked River is a family story, a coming of age story, a ghost story, and a psychological mystery that will touch reader’s hearts and keep them gripped until the final thrilling page.

Learn more about the book and author at Valerie Geary's website.

Writers Read: Valerie Geary.

--Marshal Zeringue