Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary / David Sedaris

Funny man David Sedaris tries something new with this collection of tales populated by a cast of trailer-trash animals. Ian Falconer (of Olivia fame to children's librarians) provides the whimsical illustrations for these cautionary tales inspired by Aesop.

I heard David Sedaris present a couple selections from this collection at a recent performance and I think it works better as a readaloud (preferably in his voice), or maybe try the audio version read by him and some other celebrities. The tales were just so dark (it is a dog-eat-dog world in the animal kingdom after all)-- a couple stories featuring animals getting their eyes pecked out, others getting brained, and snakes swallowing mice as cute as Stuart Little. The subtitle of the British edition is "a wicked bestiary," which I think is a more accurate reflection of the content.

I was waiting for big laughs, and while Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk was clever and amusing, the belly laughs that usually accompany Sedaris's essays were missing here.

Click here for David Sedaris introducing Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

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Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

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