Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns

I think I may have attended more J. California Cooper book readings than any other author. I believe she lives someplace in Northern California so I she frequented Marcus Books in Oakland. I used to make treks there at least once a month. In addition to being a wonderful story teller, she also is a delightful treat to see in person. Her energetic and animated personality lets me see how she can create some of her characters. Now she has a new book that I have to add to my stack!

You’re probably dying to know what the J stands for, right? Well, J. California Cooper isn’t saying. She hasn’t used her first name since the early eighties, when complete strangers in the Bay Area theater scene took to chatting up the playwright as if they knew her personally. So she kept her last name, adopted her home state for her middle one, and dropped every letter in her birth name but the first initial.

A quarter century later, people still talk to Cooper, and a good many of those voices are characters in her head. Her latest menagerie has plenty to say in Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns (Doubleday, $23.95), Cooper’s first story collection in five years. Leafing through the nine stories is like propping open a screen door and peering into the homes of family and friends. As you may have guessed from the title, Cooper’s characters are looking for something: a soul mate, justice or the strength to persevere in a difficult world. The master storyteller sweeps us into their lives and makes us care deeply about them. We find ourselves surprised and moved by their complexities: They’re world-weary yet optimistic, cautious yet giving, virtuous yet nonjudgmental, shy yet bold, and they are the brainchildren of a woman who’s a complete original. Her works cause us to smile while making us think.

What distinguishes Wild Stars—Cooper’s eleventh book—from previous titles like In Search of Satisfaction (Anchor), A Piece of Mine (Anchor), The Matter Is Life (Anchor) and Some People, Some Other Place (Anchor) is that her latest work displays less urgency to arrive at answers to life’s Big Questions. Instead it relishes in the search itself.

I think the thing that I like about Ms. Cooper's books are that no matter how tragic or sad some of her stories are, goodness and happiness always seem to prevail in the end.

Ramona Author Turns 90

I've always been a book lover so you know that as a kid, I loved all of the Ramona books. Well, Happy Birthday to the author. Beverly Cleary turns 90 this week.

Oh, Ramona Quimby! I didn't think you were a pest. I thought you were a girl just like me. You envied your classmate Susan's reddish brown curls that bounced because you had ordinary brown hair. You were scared of big dogs. And you hated that everyone made fun of you when you named your doll Chevrolet because you thought it was the most beautiful name in the world. How did you know you weren't supposed to name a doll after a car? And when your dad lost his job, you came up with a scheme to star in a television commercial so you could earn your family a million dollars. My dad lost his job, too. And I sure felt a whole lot better knowing there was another little girl out there like me.

Your creator Beverly Cleary introduced you, your big sister Beezus, your neighor Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy to us in the 1950s, according to NPR’s All Things Considered. She tells Debbie Elliott that she decided to write books about you and everyone else on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon when she worked as a children's librarian and some boys asked her where they could find the books about "kids like us." Well, we're sure glad she wrote them -- and others like "The Mouse and the Motorcycle," "Ellen Tebbits," "Otis Spofford" and "Socks."

Here's what she wrote about you once when you wanted your mom to take you to your first day of kindergarten: "Nobody but a genuine grownup was going to take her to school. If she had to, she would make a great big noisy fuss, and when Ramona made a great big noisy fuss, she usually got her own way. Great big noisy fusses were often necessary when a girl was the youngest member of her family and the youngest person on her block."

Well, Ms. Cleary turns 90 this week. So we just wanted to thank you for all your stories and wish her a happy birthday!

Nichelle D. Tramble

Here's a link to an author that I've never read ... and she lives in the Bay Area. How did I miss this?