Park Hill Community Bookstore suggests titles from mystery to memoir

Each week as part of SunLit — The Sun’s literature section — we feature staff recommendations from book stores across Colorado. This week, the staff from Park Hill Community Bookstore recommends a small-town mystery, a novel built on ice cream and a South African success story.

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From the publisher: The year 1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Muhammad Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the small town of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing. When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges — Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake.

Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another. A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession and the blinding light of hope.

From Linda Baie, volunteer coordinator: After several weeks and nearly 600 pages, I finished this amazing story, filled with love, heartbreak, trauma, life saving and life breaking. Only some of those “colors of the dark” feel revealed. It’s hard to let go when there is a story conceived of both main and perhaps lesser, but also memorable, characters. I admire Chris Whitaker for knitting the story with innovation and empathy for the people who never stopped living as good people and revealing the horror that also lives in some. This is a book I will ponder and remember for a long while. 

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From the publisher: In 1913, little Malka Treynovsky flees Russia with her family. Bedazzled by tales of gold and movie stardom, she tricks them into buying tickets for America. Yet no sooner do they land on the squalid Lower East Side of Manhattan, than Malka is crippled and abandoned in the street.

Taken in by a tough-loving Italian ice peddler, she manages to survive through cunning and inventiveness. As she learns the secrets of his trade, she begins to shape her own destiny. She falls in love with a gorgeous, illiterate radical named Albert, and they set off across America in an ice cream truck. Slowly, she transforms herself into Lillian Dunkle, “The Ice Cream Queen” — doyenne of an empire of ice cream franchises and a celebrated television personality.

Lillian’s rise to fame and fortune spans 70 years and is inextricably linked to the course of American history itself, from Prohibition to the disco days of Studio 54. Yet Lillian Dunkle is nothing like the whimsical motherly persona she crafts for herself in the media. Conniving, profane, and irreverent, she is a supremely complex woman who prefers a good stiff drink to an ice cream cone. And when her past begins to catch up with her, everything she has spent her life building is at stake.

From Sheryl Hartmann, membership coordinator: This book is over 500 pages but I read it in just a few days — it was that absorbing. Lillian (Malka) is a prickly porcupine of a woman especially as she gets older and develops her ice cream business. This is an immigrant’s story that covers assimilation, world wars, government overreach, the 1960s radical youth movement, and more well into the 1980s. Abundant humor and surprise in addition to being a great, great, story make this book one you won’t want to miss.

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From the publisher: Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa’s most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered “Kaffir” from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do — he escaped to tell about it.

From Sheryl Hartmann, membership coordinator: “Kaffir” in Arabic means “infidel.” This book has been banned in some schools for a scene about child prostitution, which seems short-sighted because one of the major themes of the book is the transformative power of education. Another theme in the book that kept me interested was the conflict between tribal beliefs and Christianity in the author’s family, with his father being strictly tribalist and his mother eventually adopting Christianity. As I read the book I kept asking myself: Why did this boy succeed in overcoming his dire circumstances while so many other of his fellows didn’t make it? Joannes (Mathabane’s name in the book) was perseverant, of course, but I think there was something deeper. Perhaps the tension between tribal values and traditional Christianity? All I know for sure is that I had to stay with Joannes no matter how brutal his circumstances were.

Type of Story: Review

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