Sarah Stonich got me good. I had no idea her book Vacationland was a collection of linked short stories rather than a conventional novel. So there I was, enjoying the plight of a visual artist living in an old cabin in Northern Minnesota. Her dog has just brought a severed human hand in from the cold.

The usual suspense-y first chapter questions whirred in my noggin. But the story wasn’t about whose hand it was or how it fell off or whether it could be reattached through the magic of ice and modern medicine. At the end of the chapter it was over and onto the next thing, although set in the same region with an overlapping character or two.

So it went 15 times. And about 13 times I wished I wasn’t reading a short story, that I was actually reading a novel with this short story as its frame. I haven’t decided yet whether this means Stonich is a) cool; b) a tease; c) a horrible person who should pay penance by one-by-one turning each of those short stories into a novel, even if it takes the rest of her life. Full disclosure, she does return to the hand. But I stand strong behind my “Aw, man” because it takes her until the end of the book.

The stories are all set at a lodge near the Canadian border where Vaclav has raised (or in some stories is raising) Meg, orphaned young, sent to boarding schools, artistically-inclined. The stories are told willy nilly, moving backward and forward in time and delaying the reveal on characters’ relationships. It is some feat of control, that’s for sure.

In “Reparation,” an elderly man remembers the summer he was at the lodge and turned his daily jog into sexy-time with a young woman who claimed to be in her 20s, but undoubtedly was not. In “Assimilation,” a man is brought to America and sponsored by two Northern Minnesota churches. He spends his days wandering around the house of the woman who died before she had a chance to be his host and prepares to show the townspeople his own area of expertise. Except it’s not really their jam.

“Moderation” is the story of a man who got clean with the help of Vaclav and is now telling his elderly father the story in the guise of a tell-all tale from his current vantage point as a councilor at a fancy schmancy rehab clinic known for its celeb clients.

“Omission” is the story of sturdy Ursa, a handy woman who is about to forfeit her home to her daughter and get carted off to assisted living. When she gets word that her daughter has big plans to give the home the sort of big bucks makeover the 612-ers are famous for, she sets about dismantling it on her own — all while remembering the long ago stoic romance she had with Vaclav. In “Orientation,” a gay urban man is surprised to find this cabin-rich area more forward thinking than he had assumed.

Vacationland is a good collection and an interesting twist on the traditional Minnesota novel. Stonich is a solid writer with a wealth of characters and ideas.

When I met briefly met Pete Hautman last year, I enthusiastically gushed over how much I loved The Obsidian Blade. Looking back, it was one of those embarrassing moments where I talked too fast, too much, and probably came off stalkerish, but trust me, I don’t have the dedication needed to stalk someone. I just thought The Obsidian Blade was one of the most unique things I read last year with great characters, strong world building, and a completely wacky plot. Wacky in the best way possible.

In The Obsidian Blade, we followed Tucker Feye as he jumped through diskos searching for his father. Diskos are disk-shaped holes in the sky that lead to different places in time, but all the places are either sad or dangerous, like New York on 9/11. At the end Tucker finds his father, but his dad is completely different and Tucker has to flee. I won’t say more because I don’t want to ruin it, but my god, what a psycho dad.

Another person we met in The Obsidian Blade was Lahlia, a girl Tucker’s father brought back when he jumped through a diskos. Lahlia was mysterious, quiet, and observing all that happened around her. We didn’t get to know her well, but I had a feeling more was to come with her.

Book two is all about Lahlia, or Lah Lia. The Cydonian Pyramid basically tells the same story, but from Lah Lia’s perspective. I always worry about books that have stories retold by someone else because they can sometimes be stale. After all, we already heard the story. But Tucker and Lah Lia didn’t spend that much time together in the first book, so this story isn’t stale at all. We see what Lah Lia saw and felt, and we actually learn a lot of new things that we didn’t know in The Obsidian Blade.

In The Obsidian Blade, Tucker is pretty much clueless to what is happening around him. He is taken on a wild diskos ride throughout time, but it’s so confusing to him, making it confusing to us. In The Cydonian Pyramid, we learn new things that explain so much more about what happened to Tucker and why. We learn more about the diskos, who made them, and how different people have used them. We learn more about the Lah Sept (where Lah Lia came from) and the politics and ritual sacrifices in that culture. And so many things that seemed small and mundane in The Obsidian Blade are all of a sudden extremely meaningful and enlightening in The Cydonian Pyramid. Putting these pieces together was so exciting and satisfying, like I was finally let in on a secret.

I also really love that we learned more about Lah Lia. I really liked her in The Obsidian Blade, but here I have fallen in love with her. She’s strong, ballsy, and has been through a lot. A lot. Way more than Tucker. She was raised to be a ritual sacrifice, one that she’s supposed to be happy about. It now makes complete sense that she was so quiet in the first book. Who wouldn’t be? Would she just be a sacrifice in this world, too?

One thing I did miss in book two is Uncle Kosh. I had a crush on the motorcycle driving, leather jacket wearing, bad boy but can cook a good meal Uncle Kosh. We do see him slightly in this book, but I wanted more. This is probably because I’m an old lady reading a teen book. If the book were written for adults, Uncle Kosh would be front and center. Maybe if I meet Pete Hautman again I’ll beg him to write a book with all Kosh all the time.

But even without dreamy Uncle Kosh, this book was awesome. I love Lah Lia so much more, and I’m even more fascinated by her society, the diskos, the connection between her and Tucker, and how this will all play out in the final book.

Hautman has created a deranged world, with even more deranged people, and it is still one of the most unique series I’ve read in a long time. It is so different and daring and I have no clue where it’s going, so I can’t wait for the third book in this trilogy.

Here’s the thing with Sarah Vowell. While I’m in the midst of her books, I’m loving them. She’s wry and smart, and the topics she chooses to write about are interesting. They’re things I only had cursory knowledge about — presidential assassinations, Hawaii, and Puritans. In the thick of her books whether I’m listening or reading, I’m all in. I love listening to her read her books. She’s a great reader & she always gets a host of co-readers which is awesome. But the thing is the moment I’m done, I have forgotten most everything she has written about.

So it goes with Unfamiliar Fishes, Vowell’s take on the colonization, eventual annexation, and statehood of Hawaii.

The story of Hawaii isn’t really that unfamiliar at all, it’s a tale as old as America. Christian God-loving white people come place populated by brown-people who worship in a different way. Whitey decides the people who have lived in this place for centuries must be civilized and converted to Christianity. Business people get involved. Brown people lose their religion, land, and way of life. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Vowell does a good job of drawing parallels between what happens in Hawaii with what happened to the Native Americans and, frankly, it’s kind of depressing. However, lest you think this a big downer, Vowell injects the history lesson with a great deal of humor which makes it a little more palatable. Along the way you learn all kinds of interesting facts about Hawaii, the people and their culture. It’s interesting, and if you have a brain that grabs onto facts better than mine does, you’ll learn a lot. There are worse ways you could spend your time.

You may have seen commercials for “Under the Dome,” a miniseries starting in June based upon Stephen King’s novel of the same name. The premise got my attention right away: a dome suddenly, and without warning, encompasses a small town and mass chaos ensues.

This series is pretty much designed for me, so for the past two weeks I’ve been making my way through Stephen King’s 1072-page behemoth. You should be very impressed that I finished it in two weeks, not only because it’s 1072 pages, but because this isn’t a small book with large print. I feel like these 1072 pages are really 1500 pages of a normal book, so I’m pretty proud of my two-week readathon.

It didn’t hurt that this was actually a quick read. Stephen King knows how to create suspense, curiosity, and disturbingly bad, but completely satisfying, characters. And he really likes to kill people.

Under the Dome begins on October 21, the day a clear dome suddenly surrounds the small town of Chester’s Mill, Maine. No one can get in or out, and no one can actually see the dome, which makes for some disastrous airplane and car crashes. But the dome is the least of the town’s worries. In true Stephen King fashion, the people in Chester’s Mill are way more frightening than a stupid, mysterious barrier. This is pretty much Lord of the Flies but with adults.

It doesn’t take long for the town to break down after the dome appears. Power-hungry James “Big Jim” Rennie, the town’s second selectman, sees this as an opportunity to gain even more control over the townspeople, while his son Junior starts cracking and causing a lot of trouble. Dale “Barbie” Barbara, a former Army captain turned fry cook, is put in charge of the town through an edict issued by the President of the United States, but that doesn’t sit well with Big Jim. Trying not to lose his power, he turns the town against Barbie and conspiracy theories, criminal behavior, and vigilante justice are rampant. The clashes between Big Jim and Barbie, and townspeople on both sides, make up this tale of a town gone crazy.

Stephen King does a great job turning Chester’s Mill into an awful, totalitarian town. Panic is widespread and supplies are dwindling, including the propane that runs generators. All of this is terrifying in and of itself, because there seems to be no end in sight for when the dome will go away, but King takes it one step further and creates abominable characters.

Actually, when it comes to the characters, either people are really evil, with their evil quadrupled because of the dome, or they’re really nice and can’t comprehend the evil doers. There aren’t that many in-between characters, and it’s shocking how many evil ones there are, like the newly appointed police deputies. Big Jim thinks they need more police, so he scrounges up twenty somethings and teenagers, which is just what we need in a crisis – armed, untrained teenagers. These deputies really highlight the mob mentality, and, sadly, even though some of their actions made me cringe, I believed them. I don’t know if that’s because of King’s writing or because there are awful people in the world, but I believed the mob mentality.

I think the pacing in the book also should be praised, because even though this is a long book, full of many characters (there are three pages of characters listed at the beginning of the book), this moves at a breakneck speed. The whole thing takes place over a week, which probably helps with its speed, but nothing here is expendable. Not one thing should be left out because it all works so well. It jumps between characters in different parts of town, sometimes seeing or hearing the same events from multiple perspectives, and I loved it.

The thing I didn’t like as much is the ending. It was just kind of…boring. Everything leading up to it is fabulous. I was nervous, gasping, and scared, but then it just ends. We find out about the dome and why it’s there, but I found it rather simplistic. I wanted it to be more grand and ominous like the rest of the book, especially because the death toll is so large. With that many goners, I want something more.

I still really liked this book and I can’t wait for the miniseries. I’m curious to see the changes they make, because watching the commercial I see younger, prettier people than I saw in my head. Let’s hope not much changes, because this was a fantastic ride.

This is huge: Lucy Knisley made me mushroom curious. Me. A lifelong hater of all things fungal. I always imagine them as something slick and slug-like, tasting of moldy earth. My mom would take a can, open the lid, pluck fingerfuls of mushrooms the way I do now with black olives. She would give me contradictory messages: So good, she would say. I’d grimace. You can’t even taste them, she would then say. She would dump them into the pasta sauce, ensuring that I would stick to plain noodles with butter and parmesan.

Devotees of mushrooms are, I’m sure you’ve learned, assholes. They can’t order a pizza without them. When a mushroom hater objects, she might be granted a half pizza without mushrooms. Sure as shit, at the end of the night it’s the mushroom-y pieces that remain. Even the mushroom fans have dipped into the plain old cheese piece just to mix it up. Still hungry? Eat one with mushrooms.

“Just pick them off,” someone will say.

Impossible. That wet insole taste lingers, man, well after the mushrooms have been flung far from the plate.

In an effort to be 100 percent legit, I’ll admit this: Twice I have not hated mushrooms. Episode One: My mom filled a crockpot with mushrooms, like a pound of butter and Hidden Valley Ranch dried seasoning. This has everything to do with butter and nothing to do with mushrooms. Episode Two: I have enjoyed raw, sliced mushrooms from a veggie tray. But they cannot be even slightly damp or have the appearance of having once been damp.

So what does Knisley have to do with this? Everything. The artist’s comic book >Relish: My Life in the Kitchen is a love letter-memoir to all things food, especially her mother’s culinary influences. In between chapters there are recipes for hueves rancheros or tutorials on cheese done in her whimsical and charming style. One of these is a simple recipe that actually made me salivate … over mushrooms. If a book can inspire that kind of mushroom curiosity, I have to give the creator props.

Lucy’s parents were foodies — her mother the cooking kind, her father the enjoying kind — and she grew up tasting the mix of fare in New York City. When her parents divorced, Lucy went to upstate New York with her mother, where they gardened and worked at the farmer’s market and learned to appreciate farm-to-table. During a trip to Japan, Lucy samples sushi and struggles with soy. During another trip, she goes nutso on Pixie Sticks. She ends up in Chicago and has the chance to discover a food scene the way her parents had in New York City.

This is a quick-hit book and a fun read. I spend a lot of time with memoirs considering why I should want to read this person’s story. I mean, this is just one woman’s food memoir. We’ve all got one: My mom rotated through the same five dishes every week and then after I went to college got creative and started making awesome foods. I learned to cook by honing vegan recipes. That’s mine. Done. But Knisley doesn’t have to sell anyone. She’s so descriptive and earnest that it makes for a completely charming story.

On his About Me page, Khary Jackson writes: “I am a poet, teaching artist, playwright, actor, dancer and sometime musician. I am a Detroit native, currently representing the Twin Cities. I aim to be a quality ambassador of poets, as well as artists in general. The artistic self is experiencing serious neglect in today’s society and economy, which necessitates an elevation of our work and focus.”

His first book of poetry, Any Psalm You Want comes out this week. Twin Cities Daily Planet said this about the collection, “Jackson’s poems are often high-concept, with titles that frame and telegraph their contents (“George Gershwin Writes Janis Joplin After Hearing Her Version of ‘Summertime,’” “From Leadbelly to Kurt Cobain”). Even within such tight frameworks, though, Jackson consistently surprises and engages.”

Here’s Khary’s answers to our six questions. Oh, also be sure to visit his site to see him in action.

What book(s) are you currently reading?

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain, and Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah by Patricia Smith.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? Who?

Psylocke from X-men, and (of course) Carmen Sandiego

If your favorite author came to Minnesota, who would it be and what bar would you take him/her to?

If Edward Albee came to town, I’d take him to Shooter’s Pool Hall and we could play pool while ordering food and non-alcoholic (for me) liquids.

What was your first favorite book?
Hmmmm…….either The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice, or Bunnicula.

Let’s say Fahrenheit 451 comes to life, which book would you become in order to save it from annihilation?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. There comes a time when one must be elegant, badass, and hilarious.

What is one book you haven’t read but want to read before you die?

Any book written in Hebrew. Because that means I was finally proficient at reading it.

If you are smart enough not to follow me on Twitter you really have no idea how annoying I was while listening to the audio version of Heart’s memoir Kicking & Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock & Roll, lucky for you I will recreate that annoyingness right here for you in more than 140 characters.

Let’s go.

So yeah, Heart. If you’re of a certain age you probably think of the feather-y haired sister behind songs like “Barracuda” or “Magic Man.” If you’re of a slightly younger certain age, the name Heart conjures up images of corsets, improbably big hair, and smokey videos. This is the Heart I remember and until I started listening to the memoir, had totally forgotten I loved with all my ninth-grade heart in like 1986.

Now, I love them with my whole entire heart for an entirely different reason, mostly because these two women are totally charming badasses who survived four decades in the rock and roll industry and tell a story about it that is so enthralling, I kind of binged on it.

Holy Buckets this was so good and fun and eye-opening and awesome and all the things that you want in a rock and roll story — sex, drugs, music, someone famous being kind of an asshole, and someone famous being totally awesome. Also, there’s a healthy dose of the misogyny inherent in rock & roll and the Wilson sisters not being afraid to call out that total bullshit.

Where to begin? It’s hard to begin because there is just so much and it is all good.

So you want an origin story about how Ann took off to Vancouver to follow love and work in a Led Zepplin cover band? You got it. You also get how the band was on their very last bag of rice and their van broke down and they were just at the end when they got a call to open for Rod Stewart in Montreal. Hot damn.

You want a tale of two sisters who were super close because they grew up as military brats and had to move all the time and how they fell in love with The Beatles and were puzzled by their friends who wanted to marry a Beatle when the Wilsons wanted to be The Beatles? It’s there.

How about we ponder the song “Barracuda” which Ann wrote about a predatory radio station asshole and Sarah Palin tried to co-opt for her campaign as John McCain’s VP much to their chagrin.

Shall we talk about how when they might have seemed on the verge of irrelevance as grunge broke all over their hometown Seattle scene instead of being bitchy diva queens they, instead, fostered the young’uns in the scene? They were there the night Andrew Wood died. Ann’s story of watching Chris Cornell comfort Jeff Ament that night gave me goosebumps.

Let’s not forget the coke-fueled slumber party with Stevie Nicks.

Oh, and how the 80s music that soundtracked my junior-high years always felt a little false to them, except for “These Dreams” (my personal favorite). Plus, they had to deal with the managers and business people who wanted more cleavage and bigger hair. Also, Ann & Nancy’s take on the ridiculousness of All I Wanna Do is Make Love to You is worth the price of admission.

There’s also Cameron Crowe and John Cougar Mellencamp and Def Leppard and talk of selling out and the Wilson’s total fandom of other musicians.

And there’s all kinds of issues around being woman. From Nancy’s struggles with infertility to Ann’s weight, which is heartbreaking. She tells how one asshole reviewer over the years choose his adjectives based on how much Ann weighed. At one point she busts out this bit of wisdom:

“I am a feminist & a proud one, but this country’s obsession with weight is the biggest problem women have ever had,” Ann Wilson.

A bit hyperbolic, perhaps. I don’t know if weight is the biggest problem, but our whole beauty-myth/rape culture is a disaster.

Shall I go on? Because I totally can. This is the kind of rock and roll memoir I’ve been waiting for exactly my whole entire life. While I loved Kristin Hersh’s Rat Girl because she wrote about music unlike anyone else on this planet, and Patti Smith’s Just Kids because of the rose-colored romanticism, I love Kicking & Dreaming because it feels like rock & roll without ever getting boring (I’m talking to you Pete Townshend & Keith Richards, whom I can’t even link to because I quit your book).

This book is just everything I love about being alive and human: music, feminism, politics, sex, love, family, and it’s all so wonderfully told that I cannot even being to find all the wonderful adjectives for it.

When you crack open Fiona Maazel’s Woke Up Lonely, strap in and just go with it. The more you give yourself over to Maazel’s dark satire the more you will enjoy your ride. Here’s where I exhort yourself to give in and don’t think about it too much. Because if you start the “but, really, is that even plausible?” you’ll just ruin everything and the ending of this book is so touching and sweet that it’s worth all the “hrmmm. . . .”

Oh, and before I forget, if you dig Vonnegut you will dig this one. Maazel’s got some Vonnegut about her and the fact that she drops his name early on in this novel means she gets it.

What we have here is Thurlow Dan the leader of a Scientologyesque sort of religious cult called The Helix. The thing that’s got the people all hyped up about The Helix is that it alleged to cure loneliness. Such a sweet idea. Dan’s got the US government all hyped up because he’s been hanging out in North Korea, and is allegedly fomenting some sort of armed revolution. Dan himself is all hyped up because he’s lonely, missing his ex-wife, Esme, and their ten-year-old daughter.

Esme, for her part, is some sort of covert US agent given the task of keeping tabs on her ex, the cult leader. She does this to varying degrees of success, often while in elaborate disguise. She’s also had to return to parenting their daughter after the untimely demise of her parents.

Wacky hijinks ensue when Esme cobbles together a team of four not-entirely-qualified or skilled agents to infiltrate The Helix compound in Cincinnati where they are taken hostage. The book spends a lot of time on the backgrounds of these agents: one has a wannabe documentarian with a gambling problem and a pregnant wife, another is a young cancer and sex abuse survivor looking for love, another is a nerdy guy who recently discovered he was not only adopted but has a twin, and the last is an older dude who is losing his long-time wife to The Helix. Through their stories we learn the myriad ways people can be lonely.

In fact, every single character in Woke Up Lonely is a lonely old mess and none of them can seem to figure out how to make a connection with another human being, which for me was the great, big beating heart of the book and really the parts I enjoyed the most.

Fiona Maazel has a bevy of linguistic pyrotechnics in her bag of tricks and there were times where I was truly mystified by what the hell was going on, like on a sentence level. I’d read a line and think, “what the hell does that even mean?” I also found my mind wandering whenever the story wandered into North Korea, which I blame on post-traumatic Orphan Master’s Son disorder than Maazel’s storytelling.

Eventually I let it all go because I could tell I was in sure capable hands. I’m glad I did. The ending, like I said, is so sweet and tender that it brought tears to my eyes. In a story so thick with dark satire it was quite satisfying to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

I had never read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, or, actually, Harry Potter and the Anything Anything. I was too old and not old enough when the books were becoming part of the collective consciousness. The first book was released my junior year of college, which gave me distance from the optimal YA years, but not years enough to comfortably double back to it for recreational purposes. I wasn’t an elementary education major, a nanny, or otherwise interested in things that were hot with fourth graders.

My mom was into Harry Potter before Harry Potter even hit the United States. She taught fifth grade at the kind of school where a kid might summer in London and return with something especially mind-blowing, still holding that new book smell. She damn-near donned a cloak and took to a pulpit over the the thing. She was hooked at Book 1, swore by the gateway drug to the series, and from then on when students went abroad they knew to bring home a copy of the latest. I guess you would call this booklegging.

My mom sized up my niece soon after she was born and mentally began a countdown to when she could introduce her to Harry Potter. She had a plan: They would read them together, dished out one a year in time with Harry, Ron, and Hermione as they aged. This plan was severely flawed from the start. Romantic, yes. Completely oblivious to what it is like to live in the 2010s, though. By the time my mom went to unveil this wizardly find, my niece was already at least three books deep and thought they were just okay.

Unrelated, my mom refuses to read The Hunger Games. It’s almost like she is holding Suzanne Collins personally responsible for the way this plan backfired.

None of this has anything to do with me.

My Harry Potter knowledge has been limited to this: I think the kid who played him in the movies dropped trou in a London theater production. One time, at an opening for a Harry Potter movie, I asked a preteen about the cape he was wearing and he turned to me sharply and said: “It’s not a cape, it’s a cloak.” This ranks as one of my favorite life moments. Alan Richman. Round eyeglasses. That girl who plays Hermione Granger is impressive when she isn’t playing Hermione Granger, and maybe when she is. Harry either does or does not die, probably doesn’t if I know books with young heroes. But I bet he comes close.

So why now. Goood question. I’m not sure other than this: I’m going through a period of my life where my dreams are SUPER INTERESTING. Like last night my car was dangling by two wheels from a bridge and I escaped easily. I was part of a wedding party and showed up in XL sweatpants and a ponytail, realized the wedding had started and also realized the bridesmaid dress I bought was denim — but that my hair didn’t actually look too bad.

Since the last thing I do every night is read, I want to be reading things that are imaginative. Where people fly on broomsticks and are tricked into illegally owning a dragon. Where owls deliver the mail and if a sniveling classmate won’t back down, you cast a binding spell. This can only coax along more freaky-deaky dreams. To this end I’m also reading Stephen King’s The Stand. I’m also reading something that isn’t all who-do voodoo, but I save that for lunchtime.

Also: Harry Potter is a pretty quick read and I get a bit panicked if I don’t finish a book a week.

Anyway, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by JK Rowling: HP’s parents have been offed by a mysterious bad guy who was unable to get-get the baby wizard and just left him scarred. HP is taken to live with his terrible aunt, uncle and cousin. Then, on his birthday, he’s visited by a giant troll-ish dude who tells him he’s been accepted at wizard school and gives him the 411 on his origin. Then life totally changes for HP who makes some friends, learns he is good at a sport and embarks on mini adventures that all lead toward the major adventure: Discovering what the three-headed dog is guarding and who wants to steal it.

Okay, yeah. This book is good. It’s extra clever. It’s also a textbook on How to Write YA Fiction: each chapter has it’s own nail biting moment and the end is an extra dose of climax. The characters are pretty ying-yang and highly likeable. I admit to a bit of boredom before this one finally wrapped, but I blame my advanced age.

In the late 1800s, the Tiffany name was not only associated with jewelry, but was also beginning to get a bit of a reputation for its stained-glass designs — the whim of the elder Mr. Tiffany’s artistically-inclined son, Louis. He had the wherewithal to build an entire department of people making intricate and creative glass creations — windows, lampshades, mosaics. And some of these creations, in fact the cleverest of the clever, were made by women. Specifically, one Clara Driscolll — that’s Mrs. Driscoll to you — who re-imagined what she saw in nature to create original designs for her money-is-no-object boss.

In Clara and Mr. Tiffany, Susan Vreeland returns to her niche — the imagined life of art sorts — and considers the right-hand woman behind some of the company’s award-winning designs. Truth is: Neither the men, nor women, who worked for Louis Tiffany necessarily got credit for their work. Clara Driscoll’s roll in all of this has only come to light in the past decade-ish, which gives Vreeland a very fresh area for well-researched fan fiction about this woman.

Clara had been working for Mr. Tiffany before she married Francis Driscoll, a much-older and impotent dude who died and left everything to a nun, rather than his wife. While Tiffany was cool with employing women, if the woman on his payroll had plans to get married she was done-zo. So, newly widowed, Clara returned to the shop to start up again. She also takes a room in a co-ed boarding house filled with eccentric art-types and throws herself into her work. She and Mr. Tiffany develop a chaste, albeit symbiotic relationship and really dig an artistic brain jam and the expensive ideas they produce. Meanwhile, Clara has between 20-30 women working for her and she takes a maternal interest in their growth and well-being. There is also a side story of an ill-fated romance with the brother of one of the boarders.

At the same time, New York City is just bursting with new stuff like the statue of liberty, explosive ways to celebrate New Year’s Eve, the subway system, and, in the most charming moments of the story, Clara learning to ride a bicycle. This doesn’t mean it’s an easy time to be a woman. There is unrest with Tiffany’s male employees, who are threatening to strike if something isn’t done about the confounded woman who keep showing them up. Clara’s department isn’t getting any help from the company’s accountants, either. Turns out it’s spendy to create these bursts of inspiration and that there isn’t necessarily a market teeming with rich folks who want to buy them.

Clara and Mr. Tiffany is a super fun look at an interesting era. Clara is surrounded by a great cast of characters: Immigrants, gays, loose women, an unstable romantic partner and brutes. She manages to balance an archaic sense of what it means to be a polite woman while also being a crusader for women’s rights. But the story gets a big bogged down by huge descriptive sections about the process of creating these artistic pieces. And this process is repeated over and over every time Clara becomes smitten with a new idea. It’s too much inside baseball about such a specific topic.