Charlotte Nightingale, the central character in Pamela Ferderbar’s charming debut novel Feng Shui and Charlotte Nightingale, has serious shar chi (“poison luck”) in the realm of feng shui. From her dead-end job as a cashier at a shady auto repair shop to her mendacious boyfriend and run-down L.A. apartment sans working plumbing, Charlotte thinks her luck can’t get any worse. But it can, and it does after she attends a family dinner in honor of her younger sister’s recent engagement to a successful plastic surgeon, only to have the evening go horribly and unexpectedly awry. Providentially, however, she has Kwan, a Chinese take-out deliveryman, in her corner, surreptitiously rearranging her home in proper feng shui style in the hopes of improving her ill-fated karma. Told with witty humor and genuine candor, Feng Shui and Charlotte Nightingale is a lighthearted and captivating tale of fulfillment and redemption.
Ferderbar was born and raised in Wisconsin. She recently returned to the state to live full-time after a hiatus on the West Coast. Ferderbar will discuss her book Feng Shui and Charlotte Nightingale at Boswell Book Co. at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 16.
Book Happenings
Michael Perry
7 p.m. June 11
Oconomowoc Public Library
200 W. South St.
Michael Perry and Dean Bakopoulos
7 p.m., June 19
Boswell Book Co.
2559 N. Downer Ave.
Acclaimed Wisconsin writer Michael Perry has a new book that focuses on a small-town Wisconsin farmer. Perry, a New York Times bestselling author, makes his fiction debut with The Jesus Cow, a lighthearted and entertaining story of a low-key cattle farmer whose life is suddenly filled with unexpected drama after the Christmas Eve birth of a calf sporting a Jesus shaped birthmark. Perry is the author of numerous books of non-fiction, including Population: 485. He will speak at the Oconomowoc Public Library in a free event sponsored by Books & Company. Perry will also visit Boswell Book Co. alongside author and UW-Madison graduate Dean Bakopoulos, whose new novel, Summerlong, is set in a Midwestern college town.
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Patricia Skalka
3 p.m., June 14
Boswell Book Co.
2559 N. Downer Ave.
Beneath the superficial calm of Door County, murderous emotions roil in the second Dave Cubiak murder mystery by Wisconsin author Patricia Skalka. By the start of Death at Gills Rock, the onetime Chicago homicide detective has been elected sheriff—and finds something suspicious in the apparently accidental death of a trio of World War II veterans. The retired Chicago homicide detective moved to Door hoping to escape such crimes, but murder “materialized from a stew of old grudges and misdeeds, terrifying the locals and pulling him in.”
Ron Legro and Avi Lank
7 p.m., June 15
Boswell Book Co.
2559 N. Downer Ave.
As a 10-year-old Chicago boy, Frank A. Kovac Jr. dreamed of living in Wisconsin’s North Woods—not for the trees and bears, but to see the starry night sky unfiltered by the light of big cities. Years later, Kovac fashioned a rotating planetarium in Monico, Wis., a replication of the universe visible from Earth that has become a tourist attraction. Former writers for the Milwaukee Sentinel and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Ron Legro and Avi Lank, tell his slightly quixotic story in the vivid prose of The Man Who Painted the Universe: The Story of a Planetarium in the Heart of the North Woods.
