Terri's Book List

A Million Nightingales, by Susan Straight

Set in early-nineteenth-century Louisiana, A Million Nightingales tells the rich and savagely beautiful tale of a slave girl who makes her way from captivity to freedom. At age fourteen, Moinette is sold upriver, separated from her beloved mother, allowed no chance to say goodbye. Reduced to chattel, she must use her wits to defend herself from repeated abuse. This is a profound and poignant book whose characters, particularly the protagonist, Moinette, will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading. A masterful storyteller with a astonishing linguistic gifts, Susan writes with passion, fierce intelligence, and grace. A Million Nightingales is a terrifying, deeply human, and ultimately redemptive novel that will change the way you think about love, family, slavery and womanhood.

Susan Straight’s novel Highwire Moon was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the California Book Award. Susan is a regular commentator for NPR, and she’s received a Lannan Foundation Award as well as a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

Save Your Own, by Elisabeth Brink

Elisabeth and I belong to the same writer’s group, so I had the good fortune of reading this extraordinary novel before it was published. Save Your Own is a hilarious satire about the sexual awakening of Gillian Brandenburg, an intensely intelligent but self-conscious, narcoleptic Ph.D. student in her final year at the Harvard Divinity School. Put off by her new-age thesis, the faculty threatens to cancel her funding. In a last-ditch attempt to gather real-life evidence in support of her unconventional ideas about “secular conversion,” Gillian takes a job at a halfway house. There, she is pushed, prodded and tested by the hard-boiled inmates who don’t know what to make of this tiny, cerebral woman—and Gillian is forced to learn, for the first time, how to live in a physical world, a world outside her own head. Gillian Brandenburg is the funniest, quirkiest, most compelling character I’ve come across in ages. And Elisabeth’s superb writing sparkles with intelligence, wisdom, and wit. As People Magazine pointed out, Save Your Own is a book you must read.

Save Your Own is Elisabeth’s debut novel. She’s won fellowships in Prague and St. Petersburg, and her stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has a Ph.D. in American literature. To learn more about Elisabeth, visit her website: www.elisabethbrink.com.

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