Magnolia Table - Joanna Gaines

The Magnolia Story - Chip Gaines and Joanna Gaines

Getting Life: an Innocent Man's 25-year Journey from Prison to Peace - Michael Morton

Billy Lynn's long half-time walk - Ben Fountain

Train to Crystal City- Jan Russell

The train to Crystal City: FDR's secret prisoner exchange program and America's only family internment camp during World War II

Summary: "Focusing on a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, a dramatic account exposes a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II where hundreds of prisoners were exchanged for other Americans behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany."--Publisher's description.

Booklist Reviews
The internment of Japanese Americans in camps along the Pacific Coast during WWII is well known. With the benefit of hindsight, the action has been roundly condemned as a racially motivated overreaction and gross violation of constitutional and human rights. Less well-known but equally reprehensible was the roundup of thousands of Germans, Italians, and other so-called enemy aliens. These included entire families composed of both noncitizens and citizens and even some ethnic Germans and Italians deported from Latin American nations to the U.S. Most were sent to a camp in Crystal City, Texas, in a rather desolate area in the south of the state. Few, if any, could be considered as security threats. According to Russell, the Roosevelt administration viewed their internment as useful bargaining chips in efforts to negotiate the release of American citizens stuck in occupied Europe. Much of Russell's account is viewed through the experiences of two young American-born girls. Of course, the camp was nothing like the work camps and death camps of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, the barbed wire, armed guards, and watch towers made clear to the residents that they were held in prison-like conditions. This is an informative, disturbing, and necessary reminder of the dangers produced by wartime hysteria. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

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Midnight Crossroad - Charlaine Harris

Midnight Crossroad - Harris, Charlaine

Summary: The first book in a new trilogy describes what happens in Midnight, Texas, a dried-up, one traffic light town, when a mysterious new resident, Manfred Bernardo, moves in.




Publishers Weekly Reviews
Bestseller Harris (the Southern Vampire Mysteries, which spawned the HBO series True Blood) introduces the small town of Midnight, Tex., where the locals can all take a day off for a picnic by the river—and discover a corpse. Residents of Midnight include a practicing witch, a telephone "psychic" who has true visions, a minister who tends a pet cemetery, and a vampire who works the night shift at the pawn shop. Even the witch's house cat has his secrets. With polished ease, Harris brings her cast on stage, pairs them off to reveal character through conversation, and ambles the mystery along, as the residents of Midnight tend to their chores and run errands to the big towns of Marthasville and Davy. While not ignoring the downsides of smalltown life, with too-knowing neighbors and teens desperate to get out, Harris also works in its joys and comforts. This is a solid entry in Harris's catalogue and will do very well with her fans.

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The last picture show - Larry McMurtry

The last picture show - McMurtry, Larry

Summary: The youth of a small town in mid-twentieth-century Texas search for ways to escape boredom and experience life and love.



Kirkus Review
Thalia, Texas is the sort of God foresaken small town where, "...you can't sneeze without somebody offerin' you a handkerchief." As one of the inhabitants remarks, "Kids nowadays fornicate like frogs," and in patches the reading becomes that slippery. The kids are Sonny and his sidekick, Duane, and they have their senior year in high school to get through. It's made uneasy for them by Jacy, Duane's girl and the image for Sonny's masturbation. She specializes in paroxysmal public kisses with Duane and all her sexual efforts, from a dull nude swimming orgy in Witchita to her eventual elopement with Sonny, are made with audience satisfaction in mind. Their marriage was annulled, but Sonny slept with her mother that night. (He wasn't quite up to Mother's expertise although he'd put in daily practice with the coach's wife.) Sonny is the sympathetic character shown on the verge of manhood, or humanity, depending on your point of view. Hear him thinking after bowing out of the gang rape of a blind heifer: "Before, it had always seemed like fun, whether it was getting drunk or screwing heifers..." Sex is the groin level blind eye that directs all the characters and the basis for any philosophic comment and the end result, normal or subhuman, of all their encounters. It's a commercial book guaranteed to the talented author's audience won with Horsemen Pass By (filmed as Hud) but chockablock with all the devices for teaching fictional heroes the facts of life one meets in print, with monotonous regularity. (Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1966)

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Billy Lynn's long half time walk - Ben Fountain

Billy Lynn's long half time walk - Fountain, Ben

Summary: A satire set in Texas during America's war in Iraq that explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad. Follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive "Victory Tour" at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Written in a voice that is at once hopeful, cautious, naive, profoundly wise, and completely lost yet utterly knowing, Fountain's most recent work of fiction delivers a brilliant, powerful examination of how modern warfare affects soldiers back at home. Billy Lynn is 19 and already a war hero after footage of a fierce battle between his squad and Iraqi insurgents went viral. Briefly back from Iraq on a "victory tour" through the states, the young Silver Star winner lives an entire lifetime over the course of one day, Thanksgiving, while he and his more worldly Bravo Squad members are feted by a deliriously grateful and mostly misunderstanding public. Attending a Dallas Cowboys game, Billy Lynn and Bravo Squad must juggle the possibility of endless love with cheerleaders, Hollywood producers seeking to make a movie about them, football players morbidly curious about what it's like to kill another human being, and all the conflicting emotions, thoughts, and actions each of them experiences while back in the land of sports mania, mass consumerism, and coveted yet fleeting fame before they return to the war itself. Billy's journey carries the reader along with its richly detailed, pitch-perfect language and characterizations, leaving an indelible impression. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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