"The Tenderness Of Stone: A Memoir"

Longtime Chico resident Ira Heinrich worked as a KHSL-TV anchor and long ago founded the Middle Mountain Foundation (now Middle Mountain Interpretive Hikes). "Over more than a decade," he writes in an email, he "directed an interpretive and preservation program in the Sutter Buttes (Esto-Yamani/Onolai)."

His interest in the "Buttes" is no mere whimsey. As a boy of ten they captured his heart when his parents moved into the area. If Mt. Shasta is a spiritual haven for some, so, too, was (and is) the "world's smallest mountain range" for Heinrich. In 2008 he published an account of his growing-up years (available from used book sellers) which is now in Amazon Kindle format. 

"The Tenderness Of Stone: A Memoir" (from Giri Marga Press) is stunningly beautiful prose. Its descriptions of the Middle Mountain penetrate the soul. "It is a time for telling secrets," Heinrich writes of his1960s life (and beyond), taking the reader "into a region of deep and tender intimacy and private tragedy."

"The Place in its totality," he remembers, "was imprinted on some hidden surface of my subconscious, so that I never ceased to feel the Buttes as part of my own body…. From that time on, with every step I took there, with every warm cave and wet, green canyon and serrated ridge or peak I explored, a sense of inexplicable mystery grew in me, even as the Mountain's voice endlessly whispered, 'Although your path is a mystery indeed, still the beginning and the ending of everything for you, is here.'"

One day in church he meets Avalee, her name "hauntingly beautiful to me still." She was 18, and "the two of us, tender, incredibly naïve and hardly more than children, were seduced by this enchanted mountain and its aura of fantasy and dream, into an utterly unlikely image of permanence, marriage and even babies."

She would chide Ira about his Mountain dreams. What's important is what's real, she'd say. But she loved the mountain, too, and was its gift--though not a permanent one. 

Reality? In the midst of a tragedy one day in Marysville, the Mountain still presided over Heinrich's life, unutterably powerful yet unspeakably tender.

"I'm Not Ready For This (Everybody Just Calm Down And Give Me A Minute)"

"We drove together," Anna and her mom, "from Omaha, Nebraska, to Chico, California, in my cute little Volkswagen Passat. … I was hired at Chico State University as an assistant residence coordinator" and there Anna would be completing her MA in Communication Studies. 

Her first date with Rob, her future husband, was at Chico's Olive Garden. Time passes, the couple returns to Nebraska to raise two daughters, and Anna becomes humor writer and personal essayist Anna Lind Thomas (AnnaLindThomas.com).

Skilled in making mountains out of molehills, and then realizing she's been sweating the small stuff, Thomas' first collection, "We'll Laugh About This (Someday): Essays On Taking Life A Smidge Too Seriously," is now joined by a companion volume. 

"I'm Not Ready For This (Everybody Just Calm Down And Give Me A Minute)" ($18.99 in paperback from Thomas Nelson; also for Amazon Kindle and in audiobook format read by the author) reflects on life's challenges.

That includes Rob's vasectomy (and his use of frozen vegetables as ice packs); oversleeping on the first day of sixth grade (and "our Indy 500-style ride to school"); and running a 10K (no runner's euphoria; "instead, my subconscious mind conjures up every injustice I've experienced since birth and lets me dole out insults I'd never say in real life"). 

Training for the run "was enlightening. I learned things about myself I'd rather not know. For instance, I have incredibly poor bladder and, on occasion, sphincter control. My legs and hips jiggle, but not all at once, or in sync…."

At times outrageously honest, Thomas is at her best describing the bittersweet moments, like her friendship with Cindy, an older student in her master's program at Chico State, who rolled "her own cigarettes. She was fast and efficient, licking and rolling and smoking them down before moving on to the next thing." 

The "next thing"? Being in Chico didn't seem a good fit; Cindy breezed through the material but "didn't give a crap…. Her fierce and gritty independence drew me in. And I felt safer and less vulnerable knowing her."

In a way, that's also Thomas' gift to the reader.

"The Lost Boys Of Happy Valley College: A Novel"

In the summer of 2016, eight still perpendicular 70-year-old men meet in Chico to reaffirm their friendship. All students at Chico State in the Sixties, they had last been together on October 12, 1969 at Candlestick Park. They were "watching a fellow Happy Valley College football teammate … playing for the Baltimore Colts against the hometown San Francisco Forty Niners."

Wait—"Happy Valley College"? That's the school's name given in Dick Carlsen's memoir-disguised-as-a-novel, "The Lost Boys Of Happy Valley College" ($15.99 in paperback from AuthorHouse; also for Amazon Kindle).

The group includes "Dave" and his twin, "Dan," and six other brothers-in-mischief. (In the acknowledgements page, Carlsen gives a shout-out to "my twin brother" Don "for sharing his notes on his Super Bowl officiating experience…." In light of the shenanigans all eight engaged in at Chico State, the reader understands why names have been changed.)

Yet Carlsen's tale is more than pranks at nearby Sutter Park ("named after General John Sutter, the founder of Happy Valley") or keggers with "The Raiders" ("a 'jock' organization on campus"). It's really about how each of the eight friends find themselves living out J.M. Barrie's original Peter Pan story. 

"Nostalgia had its grip on them, their common trait. It was in their DNA, from childhoods. Their Happy Valley experiences together offered up a bucket load of nostalgic reflections, which is probably why the other thing they had in common was their reluctance to leave Happy Valley. It was their Shangri La, their comfort zone, their happy place…."

Brought before "Dean Steen" after the "dance episode," the eight prepare to be punished for their "bad form," but Steen recognizes good character in each of their immature selves. He dubs them the "Lost Boys," those who "enjoyed a carefree life in Neverland. They were also mischief-makers," he adds.

By 2016, each had had a successful career but as they try to recreate the good old days (staying in a dorm on campus, frolicking at "Trout Hole") they come to realize how gripped they had been by Peter Pan Syndrome. 

The reunion is transformative, a coming-of-old-age story, as one by one there's "one less Lost Boy."

"Particle Beam (For Such A Time)"

Long-time Chicoan David Dirks, now Brentwood-based, is no stranger to government work as an audio and video engineer. His new novel brings his grade school hero, David Janzen, into adulthood and onto a team at a secret government lab "in the prairies of middle Indiana." Their mission is to develop a particle beam weapon called Teleforce. It's the Cold War 80s, the decade of the Iran-Contra Affair.

In two previous novels, "The Art Of Stretching" and "A Fickle Wind," Dirks detailed young Janzen's fascination with big balloons, "rat astronauts" and pictures taken high up from those very balloons. Now, years later, as an audio engineer, he is charged with bringing Nikola Tesla's invention to reality.

"Tesla," Dirks writes in the Prologue, "was arguably the most talented inventor of the twentieth century. Some say his genius rivaled Einstein's." Hidden away by the FBI, Tesla's Teleforce idea languishes "until someone, the right someone, at the right time, with proper understanding and authority opened the vault."

"Particle Beam (For Such A Time)" ($10.99 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle) is the story of what happens at the (fictional) Hans M. Mark National Laboratory which houses the super-secret Teleforce Defense Weapon Administration and the "commanding, overbearing presence of its leader, Horatio Glen Knightsen."

"As my Marine Sergeant used to say as we prepared for action in the Mekong Delta," Knightsen tells his team, "you have been assembled for such a time as this." That translates into long hours and time away from family. 

Janzen and a small group of compatriots frequently meet at a local watering hole and at Senior Engineer Joe Carson's place, where he is often in the company of his next door neighbors, Bunny and Sunny, mysterious and extraordinarily beautiful twins from Mexico.

The first part of the novel explores Teleforce's development and testing, but then things begin to go wrong. Janzen's friends find evidence that the project's secrets are being sold and, in the first chapter's flash-forward, Joe is arrested for the murder of Horatio Knightsen. 

What is the truth? Is Joe a murderer? Has Providence assembled Janzen's friends "for such a time as this"? The compelling answer: Oh, yes.