At 11:30 am, Saturday, March 17th at Dobson Ranch Library in Mesa, “Counting Coup” will be out in the world.
Dobson Ranch Library is my childhood library. I spent most of my elementary school summers on the bean bags, collecting stickers from the summer reading program. I remember finding an entire shelf of Sue Grafton’s mysteries, and meticulously reading them in alphabetic order. There was the arduous conversation I had with a saintly librarian about “War and Peace,” after I’d hauled it home on my Huffy only to find out it was way, way too complicated. Why hadn’t she warned me. (She had.) And what did it all mean anyway? (She tried her best to explain.)
And it was the place where I spent hours on the floor in the children’s section on my belly, resting on my elbows, trying to learn sign language out of a book full of diagrams. (That didn’t go so well either.) It was also the place where I felt my curiosities celebrated and encouraged at every turn.
“Counting Coup” is my third book.
Happily consumed with her academic career, Professor Avery Wainwright never planned on becoming sole guardian of her octogenarian Aunt Birdie. Forced to move Birdie—and her failing memory—into her tiny apartment, Avery’s precariously balanced life loses its footing.
Unearthed in the chaos is a stack of sixty-year-old letters. Written in 1951, the letters tell of a year Avery’s grandmother, Alma Jean, spent teaching in the Indian school system, in the high desert town of Winslow, Arizona. The letters are addressed to Birdie, who was teaching at the Phoenix Indian School. The ghostly yet familiar voices in the letters tell of a dark time in her grandmother’s life, a time no one has ever spoken of.
Torn between caring for the old woman who cannot remember, and her very different memories of a grandmother no longer alive to explain, Avery searches for answers. But the scandal and loss she finds, the revelations about abuses, atrocities, and cover-ups at the Indian schools, threaten far more than she’s bargained for.
I’ll have books available for sale, a reading, and will talk shop about writing and publishing.
I hope to see you there!
~K