MY LATEST SUMMER book find is a winner: a chilling murder mystery with a secret sisterhood of privileged teens at its center. My own path to finding this gem of a thriller was pretty twisted, too.

It all started with a tantalizing article in the New York Times: the writer wrote of her experience of a dream I happen to share, expatriating herself and her family to Bali. (This was actually more my dream when I was young and single: the idea of moving our brood anywhere again is daunting, though not unimaginable.) I read the article, only salivating slightly, then looked at the accompanying photograph, a smiling family of four, the parents grinning in Balinese sarongs, clutching onto cute kids attempting to escape the camera. It could have been any family, including mine. But I looked closer, and read the caption. I knew this family, sort of: I recognized Bacon’s husband as a high school classmate of mine.

My husband will tell you that I can’t cross a street, anywhere in the world, without running into someone I know. This is not true. However, I do have a knack for remembering those whose paths I’ve crossed, and Charlotte Bacon’s husband is one. (For the record, he was, and I presume is, a lovely man and a very talented artist.)

But I learned Charlotte and I have one more connection, however tenuous. In addition to living my Balinese dream, she’s also quite successfully living out another. She’s written four novels (and, it bears mentioning, won the PEN/Faulkner prize for First Fiction for her first publication, a 1997 book of short stories entitled A Private State. Not shabby.) Given that, unusually for me, I have focused on mysteries this summer (witness my ongoing venture into Joan Schenkar’s superb biography of Patricia Highsmith) I opted first for Bacon’s most recent book, The Twisted Thread.

At Armitage Academy, a New England prep school, senior Claire Harkness is found dead in her dorm room. The newborn son she’s just secretly delivered is missing. A young teacher discovers that girls in Claire’s dorm, bound by loyalty to (and perhaps fear of) Claire, not to mention the traditions of a secret society they call the Reign (think the French Revolution’s reign of terror) know more than they’re telling.

I confess that I’m only a third of the way through, but I had to force myself to stop reading last night in order to go to sleep…and this is the book I’m taking to the hammock with me later this afternoon. It’s been compared, rightly, to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Yes, the two books share genre (mystery) and setting, schools for privileged kids, but they also share elegant, subtle prose. Whatever web Bacon ultimately weaves in The Twisted Thread, I know it will be surprising and well-drawn. I’ve already got an earlier novel of hers, The Split Estate, waiting on my always-overloaded nightstand.

Keep me posted: what’s your latest pick for this summer’s must-read?

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BEVERLY CLEARY, AUTHOR of arguably the best exasperating little sister book every written, turns 95 today. Do you remember Ramona? Whether you have children or not, now’s a good time to refresh your memory.

Ramona, fanciful younger sister of Beatrice (better known as Beezus) Quimby, is one of contemporary kid lit’s most enduring, and award-winning characters. In Ramona the Pest, Beezuz and Ramona and 10 more titles, Ramona’s flights of imagination often turn others’ lives topsy-turvy…just like every real-world little sister I’ve ever known.

Cleary has said in interviews that her inspiration came from her own life, and the lives of children she knew. And as the New York Times reported just this week, Cleary in turn inspired at least one other beloved children’s author, Judy Blume. Do you remember reading Ramona? Are your kids reading these books, too?

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A FEW YEARS back, my family made its own venture into the wilderness, moving from the urban sprawl of Los Angeles to the expansive green hills of the Hudson Valley. It’s paradise, yet the climate where we live can be wretched and unforgiving, the land hilly and full of stones. We marvel aloud at the tenacity and sheer strength of this area’s early settlers, the people who cleared all the trees, built the stone walls that still stand. We are awed by what they accomplished, and quite certain we, with our reliance on power tools, the internet, and central heating, would not have a prayer of replicating their achievements.

Novelist and memoirist Gabrielle Burton shares her own amazement at the resilience of our forefathers and mothers in her lucid, provocative novel, Impatient With Desire. The book tells the story of Tamsen Donner, wife of George Donner, leader of the infamous Oregon trail pioneers. To illuminate Tamsen’s circumstances and spirit, Burton gives us her version of Tamsen’s journal. (Burton spent over three decades researching Tamsen’s story, and uses her existing letters, some to her beloved sister, as the basis for some of the narrative and language.)

We learn that Tamsen wanted this adventure as much, perhaps more, than her husband. She was a traveller, and a student, and as much a partner to her husband as her times would allow. And when winter trapped the party in the  Sierra Nevadas and forced the Donners into the cannibalism that made them notorious, Tamsen agonized over how her desire for adventure had led her five children into peril. The novel is wonderful on its own, presenting the darkest circumstances without sensationalizing or moralizing, but even better when read alongside Burton’s memoir of her own family’s retracing of the Donner party’s journey, Searching for Tamsen Donner. Burton helps us understand the deep choices every mother makes between self, partner and children, and in the process, brings to life not just Tamsen, but the others who cleared and clawed their way across the country just 160 years ago.

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SOMETIMES, YOU JUST HAVE to read a book. You love (or know!) the author, the subject compels you, something on the dust jacket sucks you in, a review is so provocative you cannot skip it…I have hundreds of different paths to reading, but the one I took to my latest favorite read is roundabout, for sure–and yet, at least for my life here on TSP, it feels totally inevitable.

Gabrielle Burton is a writer, and mother to five filmmaker daughters, one of whom was my classmate in college. Somehow, Facebook asked me to become a fan of my friend Ursula’s mother’s new novel, and not thinking much about it, I did. Excerpts appeared on Facebook intermittently, and I read some of them with interest, but as with too much of the information that crosses my brain, even that which I know I cleave to, if only I had the time to fix upon it, my awareness of the novel dissipated before it caught my focus.

And then I read this dual review on NPR of not just Burton’s new novel, but of the somewhat eccentric memoir that narrates and preceded its creation.

Searching for Tamsen Donner tells the story of a determined feminist, dedicated writer, and mother to five daughters, who, in the 1970s, decided she just had to take her husband and kids on a journey across in America in the footsteps of our country’s most notorious group of pioneers, the Donner party. Burton’s explanation of why she had to make the trip, and what she and the girls found there, had me staying up late, reading in lieu of sleeping or working, shivering in recognition of my own endless painful seesaw between work and family.

Burton’s voice is strong, and funny, universal and iconoclast at once.  If you are a woman who does the awkward dance of loving your family, hard, and craving immersion in your own creative life, this book will resonate in your gut like the beat of a huge drum.

Next up on my nightstand: Burton’s long-gestating novel about Tamsen Donner, and her journey, Impatient With Desire. Not to worry, I’ll be reporting back.

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From the Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History

I CAN’T REMEMBER when I first became aware of the work of Eudora Welty, what story I read first, or when. I was probably in high school, and though I appreciated both Welty’s craft and her Southern settings (having spent part of my childhood in Tennessee) I lost track of her as an adult. Today, her birthday, is a good day to apologize to her for such a flagrant omission, and to remind myself that it’s time to dive back in.

Only last year, thanks to a wonderful website whose recommendations for books, music and tools for living are unerringly fantastic, I read Welty’s memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, a book that shook me, made me think hard on how I see my world, and what I might do with what I see.

Welty, a sister to two brothers, wrote endlessly about relationships within towns, within families, connections longed for or actually achieved. Welty never married, and though she traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe, she always came back to her home in Mississippi, where she finally settled for good to care for her aging mother, and where she died in 2001 at age 92.

It’s fitting that Eudora was also a photographer, for a time. In both photography and in writing, the emphasis in on the capture of a moment–but not any moment. Both writer and photographer, to succeed, must capture just the right moment so that the viewer or the reader may understand more about the subject than is contained in the words or the emulsion.

Welty strenuously resisted efforts by others to make her work about her or her life; she guarded her privacy, and seemed to have mostly behaved like the Southern lady she was, though she was know for a ready and wicked wit, too. How else could she have written the brilliant and wicked story “Why I Live at the P.O.”, a tale of sisterly jealousy so strong that its narrator leaves home to live at the Post Office where she works, all to escape her sister, who she feels is unfairly showered with the world’s blessings?

Eudora Welty, voted “Best All Round Girl” by her high school class, went on to win awards and veneration, without ever losing her sense that life is inevitably made in its tiniest details. Eudora, thank you, and happy birthday.

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