Little Details

Sometimes, it's little details that make me feel like the author really wants me, the reader, to get it--and make me feel like I've gotten ahold of a great little secret.

In Selling Hope by Kristin O'Donnell Tubb (Macmillan - Feiwel & Friends), the detail that got me was the setting of a party on the roof of the Palmer House hotel. Hope and her father are traveling vaudeville performers, but Hope really just wants to stop in her home town of Chicago and stay there, so she starts selling anti-comet pills to unsuspecting folks who fear Halley's Comet. I had a very old ARC of this, passed on by a friend, and it's interesting to see the iterations the cover went through--my copy looks very old-fashioned, and this might be an easier sell, if a less evocative one. Pair this with A Drowned Maiden's Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz, which I was sure I'd reviewed here, but I guess not!

The other recent stop-and-pay-attention moment came in Girl, Stolen by April Henry (Macmillan - Henry Holt BFYR). I haven't finished the book; it's a new rotation into a spot in my house where I sometimes need something to do for just a minute, so I only read a few pages at a time (there are a lot of spots like this in my house, car, purse...). Anyway, Cheyenne has been kidnapped by Griffin, who just stole his very first car, and when the radio reports on Cheyenne's disappearance, there's an ad for Burgerville. Burgerville is a real thing in southwestern Washington and northwestern Oregon, and while I know most readers won't realize that, won't know how that chain is part of the landscape, I was really tickled.