Bat Hat and Book

This week, I received two packages: a bat hat in Monday's mail and a review copy of a book from UPS on Thursday.

I won the bat hat in a drawing on Diane Cayton-Hakey's Blue Ridge Gal blog. I love the hat! It's so me. Plus I wear a ball-cap most days anyway. This one is a bit more elegant than my usual headware.

Thanks, Di! I'm gonna get so much use out of this hat.

As for the book, I signed up on the Bay Forest Books site to receive a review copy of Ninie Hammon's The Memory Closet, published on September 1. While I usually review Appalachian or southern lit on this blog, the book's summary on Amazon.com intrigued me.

In a rare lucid moment, Anne Mitchell's eighty-four-year-old grandmother warns her to give up her quest to find her missing childhood. Something happened to Anne when she was eleven years old that was so horrible that her mind erased the whole first decade of her life. Twenty years later she has come home to a dried-up Texas prairie town to find her past and to live with her crazy grandmother in the rambling old house where she grew up in a final desperate effort to remember.

I figured I might like the book. I'd recently read—and liked—Gigi Amateau's A Certain Strain of Peculiar, in which a young girl goes south to live with her grandmother, etc. Plus I wasn't familiar with the publisher and was curious.

Here's the opening:

I'm puzzled why the dedication is centered, not justified. Also, the text looks darker than normal—almost bold, so it isn't easy on the eyes. (The cover doesn't indicate that this is an advanced reader copy. ARCs—sent out for reviews before the book is actually available to the public—sometimes look different than the finished book.) Anyhow, it's obvious that this copy was digitally printed and not off-set press printed.

Despite the look of the text (You can't judge a book by its printing process?), I read enough of the book to get me hooked. If the whole book is as good as its beginning, I'm sure I'll like it. I'll post a review in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, I'm really enjoying my bat hat!

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