Here is where you will find what's new at St. Thomas' well-known, well-read Dockside Bookshop at Havensight Mall. Every week you will find new titles to peruse. Look for updates of our "picks" for fiction and nonfiction and, at the end of the reviews, a list of new paperback fiction.
"With Billie" by Julia Blackburn, Pantheon Books, Biography, 368 pp. $25.
]From Julia Blackburn, an author whose ability to conjure lives from other times and places is so vivid that one suspects she sees ghosts, here is a portrait of a woman whose voice continues to haunt anyone who hears it.
Billie Holiday's life is inseparable from an account of her troubles, her addictions, her arrests, and the scandals that would repeatedly put her name in the tabloid headlines of the 1940s and 1950s. Those who knew her learned never to be surprised by what she might do. Her moods and faces were so various that she could seem to be a different woman from one moment to the next. Volatile, unpredictable, Billie Holiday remained, even to her friends, an elusive and perplexing figure.
In "With Billie, we hear the voices of those people-piano players and dancers, pimps and junkies, lovers and narcs, producers and critics, each recalling intimate stories of the Billie they knew. What emerges is a portrait of a complex, contradictory, enthralling woman, a woman who knew what really mattered to her. Reading "With Billie, one is convinced that she has only just left the room but will return shortly.
"Zorro" by Isabel Allende, HarperCollins Publishers, fiction hardcover, 400 pp. $25.95.
A swashbuckling adventure story that reveals for the first time how Diego de la Vega became the masked man we all know so well.
Born in southern California late in the eighteenth century, he is a child of two worlds. Diego de la Vega's father is an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner; his mother, a Shoshone warrior. Diego learns from his maternal grandmother, White Owl, the ways of her tribe while receiving from his father lessons in the art of fencing and in cattle branding. It is here, during Diego's childhood, filled with mischief and adventure, that he witnesses the brutal injustices dealt Native Americans by European settlers and first feels the inner conflict of his heritage.
At the age of sixteen, Diego is sent to Barcelona for a European education. In a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule, Diego follows the example of his celebrated fencing master and joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor. With this tumultuous period as a backdrop, Diego falls in love, saves the persecuted, and confronts for the first time a great rival who emerges from the world of privilege.
Between California and Barcelona, the New World and the Old, the persona of Zorro is formed, a great hero is born, and the legend begins. After many adventures — duels at dawn, fierce battles with pirates at sea, and impossible rescues — Diego de la Vega, a.k.a. Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.
"Genevieve" by Eric Jerome Dickey, Dutton Books, fiction hardcover, 304 pp. $24.95.
In "Genevieve," Eric Jerome Dickey has crafted a masterfully twisted tale of intrigue, hidden identities, and self-discovery. It’s the tale of a man torn between the love of his beautiful wife and the sudden arrival of his wife’s sister—a mysterious and provocative woman who offers him the passion he craves, but at a steep price.
Both Women harbor secrets, the answers to which appear to lie in a small Southern town filled with darkness, danger, and the promise of pain. Soon nothing is as it seems and no one is who he claimed to be, including the man caught in the middle. As the truth bubbles closer to the surface, everyone’s world threatens to fall apart.
In a story packed with revelations at every turn, Eric Jerome Dickey takes us on a journey filled with deception, careening down a highway bound for destiny…and disaster.
We will gladly order any books you want. E-mail us at dockside@islands.vi, or call 340-774-4937.
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