Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by The Purple Booker.
Today’s feature is a recent download: Sycamore, by Bryn Chancellor. Evocative and atmospheric, Sycamore is a coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a moving exploration of the elemental forces that drive human nature—desire, loneliness, grief, love, forgiveness, and hope—as witnessed through the inhabitants of one small Arizona town.
Intro: (You Are Here – January 1991)
Her first night in Sycamore, the girl snuck out of the house. Wearing frayed purple canvas shoes and a new puffy vinyl winter coat the red-orange of an ocotillo bloom, the girl paused on her tiptoes on the threshold when the front door hinges creaked. Her mother, deaf in her left ear, didn’t stir, and the girl shut the door with a click. This wasn’t the girl’s first time to slip out the door late at night, and it wouldn’t be her last. (There would be a last time, but not tonight.) For now she had this night, her first in a small northern Arizona town where her mother had dragged her. She shoved her notebook inside her coat and hurried down the driveway. Her breath smoked in the desert winter air.
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Teaser: Paul blinked. He saw her standing over the sink with the clippers, buzzing her head, the clouds of hair falling to the basin. She’d said, “Who needs it?” She’d never grown it out again, kept it cropped short. (49%).
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Synopsis: Out for a hike one scorching afternoon in Sycamore, Arizona, a newcomer to town stumbles across what appear to be human remains embedded in the wall of a dry desert ravine. As news of the discovery makes its way around town, Sycamore’s longtime residents fear the bones may belong to Jess Winters, the teenage girl who disappeared suddenly some eighteen years earlier, an unsolved mystery that has soaked into the porous rock of the town and haunted it ever since. In the days it takes the authorities to make an identification, the residents rekindle stories, rumors, and recollections both painful and poignant as they revisit Jess’s troubled history. In resurrecting the past, the people of Sycamore will find clarity, unexpected possibility, and a way forward for their lives.
Skillfully interweaving multiple points of view, Bryn Chancellor knowingly maps the bloodlines of a community and the indelible characters at its heart—most notably Jess Winters, a thoughtful, promising adolescent poised on the threshold of adulthood.
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What do you think? Do the excerpts grab you? Do you want to keep reading?
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I’m definitely interested I want to know when the last time was, and of course what happened. Great choice that I’ve not come across before this week Laurel.
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Thanks, Cleo, and I found this one on a blog, too, and I am eager to find the answers. Thanks for visiting, and enjoy your pick.
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I would. It sounds interesting.
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Thanks, Colline, I am intrigued, too. Can’t wait to find out more. Thanks for visiting.
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Loved the opening and the teaser. And I like the setting too. I’ll have to see if my library has this one.
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Thanks, Candace, glad you could stop by! Enjoy your read.
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I’d definitely read on. It sounds like a good book. Hope you enjoy it! My Teaser is from a humorous essay book this week. Not a new book, but still entertaining I think.
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Thanks, Laura, I am excited and intrigued by what I’ve read so far. Glad you could stop by.
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Oh yes! This cold case mystery certainly has caught my interest – I wait to see what you make of it once you’ve completed it. Interestingly, it very much chimes with my own cold case mystery that I’m reading just now and featured as this week’s TT – many thanks for visiting:)).
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Thanks, Sarah, I think many of us love these cold case mysteries….glad you could visit…and share your own.
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Particularly when the magic of fiction means you can travel back in time and see slices of what really happened, as opposed to the conclusions everyone draws later down the line – I love it when that happens.
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I do enjoy reading cold case mysteries and I’m curious what led up to her cutting all of her hair off. Great cover too.
My TT from Of Beast And Beauty
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I’m curious about that, too, Laura….eager to find out. Thanks for visiting.
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This sounds interesting, Laurel. I like mysteries and I haven’t heard of this book Thanks for telling us about it!
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Thanks for stopping by, Jan…I am always up for a good mystery.
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