"Joe And Me: A Love Story Of A Guitar And Her Boy"

In 1933 Victor Marcini, master luthier (a maker of stringed instruments) crafts a special guitar for his soon-to-be born son. Young Joe begins calling her "Wose" and, later, Rose, since she's partially made of rosewood. Readers get the whole story not from Joe, but from Rose.

Rose is a magic guitar. "Joe And Me: A Love Story Of A Guitar And Her Boy" ($13.99 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle) is lovingly crafted by Chicoan Carolyn Ayres, combining her own love of the guitar with a deep insight into how the world looks through Rose-colored glasses.

"Although I had no eyes or ears," Rose tells readers, "I could see and hear. Victor had inadvertently activated the tree consciousness that was ingrained in my wood."

Though Rose doesn't talk, she expresses herself in more subtle ways. As Joe's guitar instructor says in wonderment, "I've never seen or heard another like it. When you play it, the guitar seems to be trying to please you by resonating with a tone I can't get from it." That's what love will do. 

Rose's narration is studded with puns (and Ayers provides a short glossary of music terms so those not familiar can join the fun). Yet--and this is hard to explain--the wordplays are not jokey but rather part of Rose's stream of consciousness. 

When Victor's wife, Collette, takes ill, Rose begins to fret. With Collette's death, and then Victor's, Joe flees the area so creditors will not claim Rose for themselves.

Joe, now a teenager, hooks up with a musical group and is soon packing them in with his playing. But Rose's magical sounds attract the attention of thieves, and Rose tells the extraordinary story of what happens over the next decades as she is separated from Joe, yearning to return. 

Rose, it turns out, is not only magically beautiful, but knows it all too well. Events will take her down a peg but that's part of the symphony of her life, a symphony constructed by Ayers with a kind of whimsical clarity that will surely pluck the heartstrings of those who listen carefully.

"Unpacking The Trauma: How To Heal And Create A Life You Love"

Dax Meredith (daxmeredith.com), the pen name of a Chico area author, college instructor and counselor, wrote of her escape from the Camp Fire in "The Sound Of The Snow Geese." Now, in a new book, Meredith offers a comprehensive approach to "Unpacking The Trauma" ($11.98 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle).

Subtitled "How To Heal And Create A Life You Love," the book is not intended as a substitute for professional mental health advice. Rather, it offers a series of techniques, in forty-two short chapters, to "take your power back from what was a hurtful or harmful situation ... and then to purposefully focus instead on something positive."

Each chapter begins with a comment made by a hurting person, such as "I can't seem to find my way out of this. When does it end?" Meredith then discusses actions to take and follows with a summary of the steps. She writes with the voice of an imperfect human who has "been there" but who has found a way "to unpack that heavy trauma that is strapped to your body." 

So, "when does it end"? "It might pass like a ginormous, gnarly kidney stone when you are least expecting it," she replies, "but it will pass. Knowing that your situation is (or was) temporary is a key component of getting through it." She recognizes, though, that "with illness, pain, and grief, it isn't taking it one day at a time. It's often getting through moments at a time."

If you can get through the next couple of minutes, or even an hour, "pass the time with healthy strategies. Some of these include ... meditation, prayer, mindfulness, music, aromatherapy, acupressure, imagery, breathing, and mantras. Have a plan in place for what you want to use...."

Meredith's goal is for readers "to begin to see each day as an opportunity to define how you want your life to feel. ... Practice positive thinking (and positive feeling) every single day, and use your energy on what you can change or accomplish, instead of dwelling on the past, fear, or negative thoughts."

Meredith is a friendly and compassionate guide.

"The Doomsday Medallion: A VanOps Thriller"

It's the present moment and the world is on the brink in the new page-turner by Grass Valley novelist Avanti Centrae (avanticentrae.com). One of the characters sums it up: "China just invaded one of Taiwan's outlying islands. And a sixteen-year-old female civilian in France predicted it."

For the teenager, Avril, it's more than a lucky guess. A student of the sixteenth-century seer Nostradamus, who some say predicted the fall of the twin towers, she "received some sort of walnut box from her father as part of her inheritance," a box originally belonging to Nostradamus himself, passed down the family line over the centuries.

Does the box contain Nostradamus' formula for his trances? If the formula falls into the wrong hands, and the invaders can then see the future, including the U.S. response to their aggression, they would be unstoppable.

Enter VanOps, short for "Vanguard Operations," a shadowy CIA organization investigating just such security-threatening "technologies." The team includes twins Will Argones and Maddy Marshall, Maddy's boyfriend "Bear" Thorenson, and Doyle, who has family in Taiwan and who, along with Maddy, belongs to "an ancient sect of royal spies."

The box, it turns out, contains not an herbal formula but a series of cryptic quatrains, a puzzle pointing to a hidden medallion on which all will be revealed. The race is on to decode the poetry and find the object even as sinister forces are bent on the same mission.

"The Doomsday Medallion: A VanOps Thriller" ($17.99 in paperback from Thunder Creek Press; also for Amazon Kindle) is the third in the series, begun with "The Lost Power" and continued with "Solstice Shadows." The new book's deft plotting, propulsive action, and revelations of long-hidden secrets, family and otherwise (who needs Dan Brown?) make for edge-of-the-seat reading.

The quest takes the team to many countries, with threats to life at every turn, but the deepening relationship between Maddy and Bear points to a sweetness in the tale which is underlined by Will, whose wife had died earlier, wondering, as he protects Avril, "what it would have been like to be a dad."

Tender touches, and world-historical implications. Get a clue, and read the book.

"Cartwheels: Finding Your Special Kind Of Smart"

When Tracy Peterson (teachertracypeterson.com) graduated from Chico State, she went on to get her Master's in Special Education. After almost four decades of teaching in California, Kansas, Nebraska, and Arkansas, she's teamed with Little Rock third grader Sloane LaFrance to write a children's book for kids with dyslexia.

"Cartwheels: Finding Your Special Kind Of Smart" ($11.95 in paperback from Et Alia Press) is narrated by Sloane and features whimsical, colorful illustrations by fine-arts major Lindsey Witting. 

"I am six years old," Sloane says. "I love to make up dances and put on shows. I play soccer and take gymnastics. I especially like to do cartwheels. I do cartwheels EVERYWHERE." But something seemed amiss. A year earlier, in kindergarten, while "the other kids were putting sounds together to make words," Sloane was having difficulty. 

One of her teachers told her to "Pay attention. Focus. You know this!" "But," she says, "no matter how hard I looked at those letters ... I never could remember which sounds were supposed to go with which letters....."

In first grade, Sloane didn't want to read; she just wanted to do cartwheels. One day she met with "a really nice lady; Mom and Dad said she was going to ask me to do some things that showed my special kind of smart. We talked and did puzzles."

Then came the diagnosis of dyslexia. How to communicate it to Sloane? Your brain is smart, her parents told her, and "it could crack this reading code ... I just had to learn it in a different way." 

Gradually she is able to make sense of letters and their sounds; now reading is sometimes actually fun. (A word to parents at the end of the book says perhaps one in five people have difficulty "decoding" sounds, letters, and words. There are many strategies since each brain is different, but "early intervention is key" to enable kids to "find their own special kind of smart.")

It was sometimes hard as Sloane worked with a special ed teacher, "and sometimes when my brain was too full, I would even get up and do cartwheels." But not, Sloane cautions, "in the classroom!"

"A Fickle Wind"

Will Russia start a nuclear war? In late October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy warned the Soviet Union of a "full retaliatory response" if it launched nuclear missiles against "any nation in the Western Hemisphere."

Yet life went on for David Janzen, 12, at Central Elementary School in Del Rio Vista, "a small, central California farming community." The new novel by David H. Dirks, "A Fickle Wind" ($8.99 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle), continues Janzen's balloon experiments begun in "The Art Of Stretching." (The sketches by Benjamin Pacheco perfectly capture the kid-centric fascination with engineering.)

In the earlier novel, Janzen and his friend Jack, who uses a wheelchair, inflate a homemade balloon with natural gas from the science classroom (Janzen's dad is the science teacher) in their effort to send a "rat astronaut" into the skies and back again safely. Now, in the new story, the goal is to hoist a radio-controlled camera into the Del Rio Vista sky and take pictures from high overhead.

Dirks, a long-time Chicoan, was one of the first three engineers for KCHO radio after it debuted April 22, 1969; he now lives in Brentwood with his wife, Karen. Janzen, on the cusp of high school, is infused with the same love of engineering. 

Ribbed at home by his three sisters, taunted at school for being a "shrimp," and bullied by a neighbor kid who secretly envies the experiments, Janzen manages to navigate his world with equanimity, expanding in awareness and friendships, including Fernando Chavez and MBB (Molly Beth Brown, "unpretentious," with "beauty more hidden than revealed").

The camera experiment makes for a great tale, and when Janzen and friends gather they revel in all their childhood stories. But childhood is ending. When he is baptized at thirteen, afterward chomping down Aunt Martha's baptismal cake, David wonders at how "the two worlds, sacred and secular, were, as they say, miles apart... Day-to-day living was carried out with only a notional nod to the sacred."

In unpretentious prose, foreshadowing something beautiful not yet fully revealed, the novel evokes a forgotten wonder--even as it makes the reader yearn for the next installment.