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Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Jul 28

\ \ Hello nerds,\ \ I wanted to send over one more reminder about our author event this Thursday, July 30th at Sunny's at 6:00 PM.\ \ Join us for an author event with L.L. Madrid, a Tucson novelist, to discuss her book My Lips, Her Voice. My Lips, Her Voice is a possession murder mystery with a haunted sapphic love triangle at its heart. L.L. will be reading from her novel, discussing her work with CJ, and books will be for sale to be signed by the author. This is a FREE event to attend, but we ask that you RSVP hereso we have a good headcount and can prepare the space.\ \ L.L. is coming all the way from Tucson to be here and every seat that's filled tells visiting authors that Yuma shows up for book culture. That's the reputation we're building, one event at a time, and it happens because of who's in the room. Come be part of it, and bring someone who'd love it too! Feel free to send this to anyone you think would be interested in attending.\ \ About the book:\ \ Copper City’s bloody history is steeped in ghost stories and whispers of serial killers, but three girls have caught the attention of something far more sinister.\ \ A grandmother tormented by visions tried to warn the town, but no one listened. Now, a haunted inheritance has passed to her granddaughters, Audrey and Mara. When Mara’s body is discovered in the old mine, Audrey fears her grandmother’s premonition is manifesting.\ \ The nightmare begins as Mara’s spirit returns—lurking under Audrey’s skin, hellbent on vengeance and desperate to rekindle things with her former girlfriend, Zadie. Willing to hijack Audrey’s body to get what she wants, Mara drags them both into a deadly pursuit.\ \ When another girl in town goes missing, Audrey, Mara, and Zadie know the killer has struck again. In a fight to solve Mara’s death and uncover the mystery of disappearances in Copper City, the girls soon find themselves at war with each other. How do you survive long enough to hunt a murderer on the loose if the person inside you might kill you first?\ \ About the author:\ \ L.L. Madrid lives in Tucson, where she writes dark, moody stories about misfits. L.L. is the 2021 recipient of the HWA’s Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship. She is a member of the Bi+ Book Gang, a Pitch Wars alum, and an Odyssey grad. Her short stories are scattered across the internet. My Lips, Her Voice is her debut novel.](https://sunnysbooktruck.binderybooks.com/item/Nz03bptkrlHgbWv1QByA/)

Event reminder: L.L. Madrid at Sunny's this Thursday!

Ghosts! Serial killers! Sapphics!

1 book

2

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Jul 26

Sunny's Book Club: Sourland by Ariel Delgado Dixon

Cows! Burnouts! Weed!

1 book

2

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Jul 5

EARLY ACCESS: June Reading Recap + Bookstore Profits

4 books

2

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Jul 2

[Poll:\ \ July Book Club\ \ \ \ Friends! Enemies! Everyone in between!\ \ I hope you're all doing as best as you can be and taking care of yourselves. It's time to vote for the August book club!\ \

Sunny’s Book Club is a monthly book club highlighting both new releases and backlist titles we love. A virtual discussion is hosted over Zoom on the last Sunday of the month.\ \ A new physical book will be shipped to you (or available for in store pickup) the month prior to when this month’s book club will take place. The August pick will ship the last week of July to ensure you have the entire month to read the book.\ \ The link for sign up is not a subscription service, you opt in on a monthly basis dependent on your interest in that months chosen title. We do however have a recurring book club subscription if you are interested here.\ \ \ \ A gripping blend of historical fiction and Southern gothic psychological horror, Our Sister's Keeper is a fierce exploration of Black sisterhood, rage, and resistance.\ \ Mississippi, 1927. The groanings are coming.\ \ No town is perfect, but East Cobb comes close. It's a wealthy all-Black Free Town--untouched by white oppression--where ambitious Thea Elliot and her husband plan to make good on their big dreams. Little do they know that the idyllic town teems with ghoulish, walking nightmares . . . that only the women can see.\ \ Marah knows the groanings well. She is one of the carriers--women with the ability to pull traumatic memories from men. Populated by men entirely freed of their pain, East Cobb has flourished, even as the remnants of their memories haunt the town's women. When an unexpected death drives Marah to discover more about her own power, Thea's and Marah's worlds collide. The sisters must confront the rotten core at the heart of East Cobb's prosperity and choose what--and who--will survive the reckoning.\ \ \ \ A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind—a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods and one of America’s greatest living writers.\ \ Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.\ \ But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, a great capacity “to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.\ \ The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.\ \ Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.\ \ \ \ A complex mother-daughter relationship is taken to a new level in this fresh and propulsive novel of family curses, blood-thirsty ghouls, and budding romance set against the Mojave Desert and Las Vegas.\ \ Ellis Karsten spends nights working triage in the ER and days having the same conversation with her mom. The early onset dementia is exhausting, but the real challenge is their curse—Ellis’s family must feed daily on blood, or risk becoming mindless, skinless killing machines. When Ellis’s uncle, who supplies their blood, vanishes, she takes it upon herself to find a new source, aided by a prickly paramedic who’s equal parts unpredictable and intoxicating. But as Ellis fights to balance her bloodthirsty nature with a new relationship, her mom’s impossible demands transform into panicked warnings that a fabled monster, “The Flayed Man,” is stalking them.\ \ As she traverses the desert in search of blood, Ellis risks her safety and her family’s secret, until it becomes clear that her mom is right: something ancient and hungry is hunting them, and it has come for her mom. Blood hunger begins to overtake Ellis, transforming her body into something ghoulish and frightening—exactly what The Flayed Man wants. In the end, she must decide who to trust, what she’s willing to sacrifice, and whether she is worthy of a life, and love, beyond her curse—or if she’s going to succumb to instinct and ravage the world.\ \ \ \ From the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic and Velvet Was the Night comes a sizzling noir about desire, danger, and greed, in which seduction is the ultimate con.\ \ Handsome con artist Ulises has long charmed lonely women via letters in order to steal their money, but money is hard to come by in 1940s Mexico. Ulises knows his looks won’t last forever, and he’s desperate to get his hands on a real fortune.\ \ He thinks he’s found it when he captivates his newest correspondent, Perla, the owner of a small-town boardinghouse in picturesque Veracruz. But when he meets her, he finds something he didn’t expect. The woman has a niece, Inés, who is as observant as she is desperate to escape her aunt’s household.\ \ When Inés discovers Ulises’s true intentions, she wants in on the scheme. They’ll convince her aunt that Ulises is a great catch, Perla will marry him, and her money will vanish. Easy, fast, and clean. But Perla is not the desperate, silly spinster Ulises imagines. She harbors secrets. And although Ulises does not believe in true romance, Inés is more alluring than he bargained for. Suddenly, a simple plan may become perilously complicated.\ \ Venture into the streets of a small town where a patina of convention and good manners conceals a cauldron of avarice and lust.\ \ Four very compelling choices! Happy voting and remember we are reading Sourland by Ariel Delgado Dixon in July. You never have to buy the book from Sunny's to pariticpate in book club, we just love it when you do.\ \ Love what we do? Become a paid subscriberfor less than a cup of coffee a month. Your ongoing support helps us plan ahead, fund causes we care about, and create meaningful programming for our community.](https://sunnysbooktruck.binderybooks.com/item/MiRxVeAth2VX5T07vcOk/)

Vote for the August book club!

Ghosts! Vampires! Con artists! Oh my.

4 books

5

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Jun 30

[Hello nerds,\ \ Coming in hot with a busy July!\ \ In Person Events Thursday, July 2nd at 6:00 PM \ \ Join us at Sunny's for Yuma County Abolition's monthly book club. This month they are meeting to discuss the last half of Let This Radicalize You. RSVP HERE.\ \

July events at Sunny's!

Bookish trivia! Sapphic murder mystery!

3 books

3

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Jun 28

Sunny's Book Club: Canon by Paige Lewis

WTF was the point of this book?

1 book

3

2

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Jun 21

[Hi nerds,\ \ Last night we held our recurring event, Sunny's Salon. This month the prompt was to come prepared to talk about your favorite queer read for Pride month. Below you will find 20ish book recommendations gathered from the Yuma community.\ \ \ \

What our community is reading for Pride

🌈🌈🌈

22 books

3

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Jun 7

Sunny's Book Club: The Hill by Harriet Clark

1 book

2

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Jun 3

[Hello nerds,\ \ Coming in hot with a busy June!\ \ In Person Events Thursday, June 4th at 6:00 PM \ \ Join us at Sunny's for Yuma County Abolition's monthly book club. This month they are meeting to discuss the second half of Let This Radicalize You. RSVP HERE.\ \

June events at Sunny's

3 books

2

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Jun 1

EARLY ACCESS: April/May Reading Recap + Bookstore Profits

5 books

3

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • May 31

[Poll:\ \ July Book Club\ \ \ \ Friends! Enemies! Everyone in between!\ \ I hope you're all doing as best as you can be and taking care of yourselves. It's time to vote for the July book club!\ \

Sunny’s Book Club is a monthly book club highlighting both new releases and backlist titles we love. A virtual discussion is hosted over Zoom on the last Sunday of the month.\ \ A new physical book will be shipped to you (or available for in store pickup) the month prior to when this month’s book club will take place. The July pick will ship the last week of June to ensure you have the entire month to read the book.\ \ The link for sign up is not a subscription service, you opt in on a monthly basis dependent on your interest in that months chosen title. We do however have a recurring book club subscription if you are interested here.\ \ \ \ A gripping, propulsive novel about succession, sex, and revenge on a California marijuana farm\ \ “Deliciously written and compulsively readable . . . As the ex-lovers of a missing weed farmer grapple for control of her land and harvest, they contend with the force of her presence and the complexities of their own pasts.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties\ \ Sapphire and her farm, Sourland, are fixtures of Northern California’s rugged wilderness, offering refuge to rejects, rebels, and outcasts—anyone willing to work and learn. But the haven Sapphire has built is fractured when she suddenly goes missing, her scorched truck abandoned on a mountain road.\ \ Frankie, a disgraced ballerina and Sapphire’s former girlfriend and right-hand woman, returns to Sourland, claiming ownership of the farm. When she arrives, Frankie finds that Fizz—Sapphire’s most recent lover, an ex–baseball player with a preternatural green thumb—has already begun prepping Sourland for its biggest harvest yet.\ \ As the two grapple for power, the farm’s fate hangs in the balance, and with it, the future Fizz and Frankie each covet for themselves. Past demons and scorned admirers remain hauntingly close, while the specter of Sapphire looms over the farm: in cryptic notes, in bud-tender gossip, in every blade of grass and whorl of smoke.\ \ A brilliantly constructed novel of desire and betrayal, Sourland sparkles with the beauty and grime of the California woods. Dixon’s novel warns that our true nature catches up to us all—no matter how far we run.\ \ \ \ “An extraordinary book. It’s a page-turner, full of mystery, but that’s the least of it. The language is dusted with magic. The Children reminded me of Ray Bradbury at his best.” —Stephen King\ \ The haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, must contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic.\ \ Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.\ \ In one, she and her brother, Ennis, live in the wooded shadow of their family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of their mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where their magical adventures have made them household names. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and Ennis are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the wild woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.\ \ Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled, simply, Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother’s fantasy world?\ \ The Children is wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, and the way our most beloved stories grow up with us. It's for anyone who's ever revisited an old favorite and found its pages cast in a darker light, the line separating magic from reality blurring as we discover the books that once comforted us carry shadows of their own.\ \ \ \ The acclaimed, prize-winning #1 New York Times bestselling writer returns with a moving, luminous novel that reminds us of the sweetness and impermanence of life and the power of connection to defy time.\ \ When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.\ \ Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. It’s a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.\ \ \ \ A vivid, surreal Gothic about a queer, Latine, working class witch who sets out to rescue a bespelled heiress and loses control of her powers and her heart in the process.\ \ It is 1968 Oakland, and Natalia Fuentes has been hearing rumors about the beautiful Violeta Miramontes. The young heiress to Spanish colonial wealth has been left paralyzed by a mysterious illness. But Nati knows a thing or two about witchcraft, and she is certain that this is the work of dark magic.\ \ Armed with a plan to break the spell and earn a handsome reward, Nati works her way into the house as Violeta’s caretaker, and immediately discovers her suspicions are true. But who cursed Violeta? And why?\ \ As feelings between the two women bloom into romance, Nati grows more and more reckless, and is forced to face her own ghosts— ones she hoped would stay gone forever. \ \ Riveting and richly layered, Muñeca explores how far one will go to save the person they love—even if that means damning themselves. Cynthia Gómez fills her debut novel with moments that chill your bones and warm your heart, a razor-sharp examination of deep-rooted issues that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.\ \ Four very compelling choices! Happy voting and remember we are reading Canon by Paige Lewis in June, today is your last day to sign up.\ \ Love what we do? Become a paid subscriberfor less than a cup of coffee a month. Your ongoing support helps us plan ahead, fund causes we care about, and create meaningful programming for our community.](https://sunnysbooktruck.binderybooks.com/item/lYYdBvqXgR5S0ayf8k8X/)

Vote for the July book club! 🦀

Witches, weed, and weirdos

4 books

6

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • May 26

Poll:\ \ What shirt color?\ \ \ \ Hi nerds,\ \ One of my "fun facts" about myself is that I am red/green colorblind. According to AI-pilled Google, only 0.5% of the colorblind population are women. This is because it is an X-linked recessive trait, which women are highly unlikely to inherit it as they must inherit a mutated gene from both parents, rather than just one. Yeahhhhh not brag but I'm mutated!\ \ I actually can see shades of red and green (what I see as red and green at least lol), but have trouble with pinks usually or muted sage-y greens. Fun! All of that to say Harrison Gerard and I have schemed on a new shirt (inspired by our mural) and we need YOU to pick the color way for us. \ \ I love all of our children equally and color as much as the next guy but know from looking at our sales records that white/cream shirts sell the best so if you vote for the green ones you better buy one okkkkayyyyy!\ \ \ \ #1, Match with rusty red type\ \ \ \ #2, Cream with taupe type\ \ \ \ #3, Pine with slate type\ \ Happy voting and sorry for spoiling the new merch surprise :-). \ \ Love,\ \ CJ

I'm red/green color blind and need you to vote

A new shirt is born

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Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • May 11

[Hello nerds,\ \ Apologies for sending this when the month is almost over, but I wanted to put you on to all of the fun events we will be having in store each month moving forward. Seeing events on social media is hit or miss, I'm glad I have this newsletter to reach you all directly. Here is what we have for the rest of May!\ \ In Person Events Thursday, May 14th at 6:00 PM \ \ Join us at Sunny's for Yuma County Abolition's monthly book club. This month they are reading Let This Radicalize You. RSVP HERE.\ \

May Events at Sunny's

Poetry! Abolition! Book swaps!

3 books

4

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • May 10

Sunny's Book Club: Whidbey by T Kira Madden

1 book

2

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Apr 30

Poll:\ \ June Book Club\ \ Friends! Enemies! Everyone in between!\ \ I hope you're all doing as best as you can be and taking care of yourselves. It's time to vote for the June book club!\ \ \ \ \ \ Two unlikely heroes embark on quests to win God’s favor in this outrageously entertaining, profoundly heartfelt novel that announces an ingenious new voice in the tradition of Chain-Gang All-Stars, No One Is Talking About This, and Martyr!\ \ Yara can’t comprehend why God has chosen them to slay Dominic, the ruthless leader of the army of Bad Guys. Cast out by their family and reeling from a destructive relationship, Yara has never felt weaker—but with nothing left to lose, they strike a deal. Abandoning their solitary days of embroidery and obsessive cleaning, Yara reluctantly embarks on a perilous odyssey designed to prepare them for the daunting mission ahead.\ \ Meanwhile, Adrena, a disillusioned prophet with a terrifying secret power, is determined to become the hero of this story. Desperately seeking the glory of God’s approval and the promise of heaven, where she hopes to reunite with her beloved mother, Adrena must first persuade Harpo, the leader of the Good Guys, that her plan is God’s will.\ \ As their journeys unfold in a series of unforgettable adventures, Yara and Adrena are propelled toward each other and transformative revelations about life, death, and destiny in this intensely captivating, irreverent epic from a singularly brilliant new voice in fiction.\ \ \ \ Dog Days unfolds in the long shadow of freak violence--where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can't.\ \ "An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original."--Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City\ \ In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and "Agnus Dei" played on repeat.\ \ In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, "just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out"--otherwise it will never leave. She tries to find "the good story" neat, polite, reassuring. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out?\ \ A high-voltage synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory--drawing upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It's a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Janet Malcolm-- Dog Days writes into this question. How do language and institutions constrain and distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How might we write otherwise, telling a story, and its aftermath, on our own terms? The result is not only a prose work but also a practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement, a search for the place where writing becomes a way of surviving.\ \ \ \ "Obscenely good and very funny."\ \ —Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book\ \ In Avigayl Sharp’s brilliant and bold debut novel, Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she consorts and canoodles with the town’s locals—including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she’s taken over—implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong.\ \ Though she's vowed never to return to her hometown in the middle of the country, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing, maladjusted family. Drunk at a bar on the frigid afternoon of the seventh night of Chanukah, she encounters the figure from her adolescence who may or may not be responsible for violating her, bringing her down, and ruining her life. The past collides with the present—but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Not at the bar. Not in her childhood home. And certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind.\ \ Serious yet irreverent with a delirious velocity, Offseason reimagines the conversation around trauma while reckoning with the doomed project of “speaking your truth,” the compulsion to repeat, and whether we can be transformed by art and love.\ \ \ \ National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda returns with a blazing, psychedelic novel about girlhood, violence, and the loss of innocence.\ \ "Mónica Ojeda is a dazzling black sun in the astral chart of contemporary horror." --Fernanda Melchor, author of Paradais\ \ In the near future, best friends Noa and Nicole flee their home in Guayaquil, Ecuador to attend the Solar Noise Festival, a week-long, retro-futuristic gathering at the foot of an active volcano. While Noa fully embraces the haze of narcotics and hedonism in an effort to obscure her true reason for attending, Nicole senses something darker at play behind the festival's so-called "celebration of life." Amid technoshamanic poetry, collective hallucinations, and ritualistic dances, each girl navigates her own path in an effort to escape her past and reclaim her right to a future.\ \ Vivid, terrifying, and celebratory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun blends the primal with the supernatural, solidifying Mónica Ojeda as one of the most singular and exciting voices in Latin American and world literature today.\ \ Four very compelling choices! Happy voting and remember we are reading The Hill by Harriet Clark in May, today is your last day to sign up.\ \ Love what we do? Become a paid subscriberfor less than a cup of coffee a month. Your ongoing support helps us plan ahead, fund causes we care about, and create meaningful programming for our community.

Vote for the June book club! 🏖️

4 books

6

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Apr 20

\ \ Hi nerds,\ \ It’s six days before Independent Bookstore Day, our third one at Sunny’s. I’m writing this from an airport, on my way back from a very chaotic four days in New York. I was there for my day job, bookselling at our publisher booth and helping produce our presence at a reader event (BookCon!) that brought in something like 25,000 people. Which means, naturally, it all lined up to happen the same week as IBD! \ \ Somewhere in the middle of the event—on the floor, behind the booth, watching people move through this huge, loud, living system of books and readers and publishers, holding the very books I have spent years of my professional life on—I kept having this very simple thought:\ \ This is what it looks like when all of this works.\ \ Publishers making the books. Readers showing up for them. And in between, this constant, necessary act of connection: putting the right thing in the right hands.\ \ I kept thinking about how rare it is to see the whole chain in one place like that, and how much of it actually depends on smaller, quieter spaces to hold things together day to day.\ \ Independent bookstores are one of those spaces.\ \ Not the scale of a convention floor. Just smaller. Closer. One book at a time, one conversation at the counter, someone coming in unsure of what they want to read and leaving with something they didn’t expect to find. That’s what Sunny’s is trying to be part of. Community!!!\ \ And that’s what Independent Bookstore Day is, for me. Not just a celebration of bookstores, but a reminder that this whole ecosystem only exists because people keep CHOOSING it. \ \ Sunny’s only exists because of you. The people who stop in once while they’re downtown. The people who come in every week and have a stack going at home. The people who bring their out of town friends in when they visit. The people who DM us photos of what they’re reading after they leave. \ \ We see it all. We feel it every day. But especially this one. So this is just a thank you. For reading with us. For choosing a small bookstore when you could buy books anywhere else. For telling people about us. For coming back. For letting this place be part of your reading life. We wouldn’t be here without that.\ \ If you’re around, come by on Saturday. Say hi. Browse. Let us put something in your hands.\ \ We’ll be here.\ \ Love you! Mean it!\ \ CJ\ \ Love what we do? Become a paid subscriberfor less than a cup of coffee a month. Your ongoing support helps us plan ahead, fund causes we care about, and create meaningful programming for our community.](https://sunnysbooktruck.binderybooks.com/item/EjsptBG4vOYylze8Xhqw/)

What it looks like when it works

On books, people, and indie bookstores

9

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Apr 12

EARLY ACCESS: Reading Update & Bookstore Profits for March

3 books

5

Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Apr 4

Sunny's Book Club: Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue

1 book

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Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Apr 3

Poll:\ \ May Book Club\ \ Friends! Enemies! Everyone in between!\ \ I hope you're all doing as best as you can be and taking care of yourselves. It's time to vote for the May book club!\ \ \ \ \ \ After her mother is sentenced to life in a hilltop prison, Suzanna vows to return to the hill forever. An unexpectedly funny and deeply moving novel about the many ways we punish and return to each other.\ \ Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards and distractable nuns; there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna’s mother, who will never be released.\ \ At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughter’s crime and refuses to visit the prison. Surrounding Suzanna are her grandmother’s friends, who know one another from their years in the Communist Party and still spend extended cocktail hours debating the Hitler-Stalin pact. Though these women once insisted on changing the world, they are torn between teaching Suzanna how the world works and shielding her from it.\ \ Suzanna vows to return to the prison forever but her mother wants her to be free. Harriet Clark’s The Hill is an incandescent novel of a child growing up between worlds, the last of three generations whose fates have been tied to punishment. It is the tale of a family broken apart by the desire for change, told with irreverent wisdom and visionary force. The Hill brings new music to American fiction.\ \ \ \ For readers of Elizabeth Strout and Sigrid Nunez, a darkly funny and moving debut novel about the unforgettable Agatha, whose devotion to a widow with dementia (and an inconvenient attachment to her daughter’s grave) sparks a radical reckoning with life, loss, and love’s aftermath.\ \ Agatha, a bristly painter fleeing her own darkness, decamps to rural New Mexico to live the reclusive life of a small-town curmudgeon. It is there she meets Alice, a mild widow with a deepening case of dementia who keeps steady vigil at her daughter’s backyard grave. Despite Agatha’s rough edges and fierce aversion to sentimentality, she surprises herself by falling in love, and her well-worn convictions begin to upend.\ \ As Alice’s condition worsens, Agatha hatches a plan for them to live together at her remote residence at Mesa Portales. But when Alice’s wayward son comes along with different ideas—and Alice suddenly goes missing—Agatha takes matters into her own hands with the help of a faithful thirteen-year-old-neighbor, a pair of shovels, and her trusty pickup, embarking on an unusual mission that calls into question whether some secrets are better kept buried.\ \ Sharp, watchful, at once thrillingly perceptive and hidden from herself, Agatha is as imposing as the vast landscape her rustic adobe home overlooks. Loosely inspired by the life of Agnes Martin, I Am Agatha introduces us to this irascible, indelible character who learns—over a stretch of strange, singular days—new ways to fathom life, death, and her own heart.\ \ \ \ A polyphonic debut following an aging French bulldog and the parasitic worms that send her toward death — a singular, sly novel about form, freedom, interiors, and the matter by which we are composed and consumed.\ \ Gelsomina is a French Bulldog who leads a routine life in a glass house. One day, she ingests an orb of parasitic worms who make an imperfect home inside her. Approaching death, yet filled with new life, she begins to see everything differently: her attachment to the designer-architect couple with whom she lives; the naive preoccupations of their younger French Bulldog, Zampanò; her feelings for an elusive fox; and the voids within and beyond her. The worms propel Gelsomina to plumb the meaning of her domestic existence and ask if her rebirth lies in the wild unknown outside the panes.\ \ The Oldest Bitch Alive is a polyphonic story of containment refracting across scales. Revolving perspectives meditate on consciousness, theories of everything, multispecies narratives, philosophies of form and the immaterial, and other ways in which matter is composed and consumed. Gelsomina’s introspections culminate in an ecstatic sprint through a natural world she’s never seen, awakening the French Bulldog to the depths of love, reverence, death, and the bound self in dichromatic color.\ \ \ \ “If Philip K. Dick had written The Bell Jar” (Camille Bordas) it would resemble Albertine Clarke's mesmerizing debut about the frayed borders between our bodies and minds.\ \ Ada lives a solitary life. She spends her days in her London apartment building's swimming pool, occasionally visiting with her cousin Francesca and meeting her friends, each of them chatting, drinking, posing invitations Ada ignores. Ada's parents are recently divorced after her father became a bodybuilder: he spends his days at the gym, which is crowded and bright, warm with human proximity, infrequently calling to express minor concerns around his daughter's well-being.\ \ When she meets a man named Atticus by the pool, Ada immediately feels an intimate connection between them: they share a life, in a way she can't explain. Little by little, Ada's estrangement from her familiar surroundings and from reality widens, as though seeing her reflection through a mirror, pieces of it falling away. After her mother entreats Ada to join her on a remote Greek holiday, Ada is jolted out of the physical world and into a new, artificial environment, one that a mysterious and potentially otherworldly force has created and designed for her. As this brilliant first novel pivots with masterful effect into the surreal and speculative, we move through Ada's experiences of life like spokes on a wheel, profoundly surprised by the enduring mystery of our existence, and of our relationships with ourselves and others. When a person's life, in the odd space between mind and body, is inherently one of isolation, are our connections with those around us merely projections of ourselves? And if not, where do they come from?\ \ Albertine Clarke transforms the speculative into an entirely singular experience of deep interiority. The precision, subtlety, and confidence of her writing is nothing short of astonishing. THE BODY BUILDERS is new classic of the speculative fiction genre, landing like a blow, widening a crack that allows us to perceive the world wholly differently than we ever imagined.\ \ Four very compelling choices! Happy voting and remember we are reading Whidbey by T Kira Madden in April, today is your last day to sign up.\ \ Love what we do? Become a paid subscriberfor less than a cup of coffee a month. Your ongoing support helps us plan ahead, fund causes we care about, and create meaningful programming for our community.

Vote for the May book club! 🌧️

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Sunny's Book Truck\ \ CJ\ \ • Mar 17

EARLY ACCESS: Reading Update & Bookstore Profits for January + February

Recent reads from January and February, store news/probability, and more!

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