Welcome to the Reader's Roundtable edition of CADL CAST

with Jessica Trotter, Mari Garza and Cheryl Lindemann.

Welcome back to the Reader's Roundtable edition of CADL CAST.

I'm Jessica Trotter and I'm joined by Cheryl Lindemann and Mari Garza.

And we're your primary selection team here at CADL.

It's October.

We're taping this on a downright cold

morning after a wet and windy night, which sort of sets the stage. Yup.

For Halloween and spooky and surreal and all that.

And that's kind of the discussion we wanted to have today.

We have a collection of, I think, interesting,

seasonably creepy, interesting.

It's not it's not all horror, but it's just interesting.

Breeds that fit the season in their own way.

Yeah, definitely.

Definitely.

So I'm going to Kagasoff with a couple of picture books.

You know, this time of year is definitely all

about plan and your cast room for trick or treating.

I've got two titles.

The first one is a costume for Charlie.

It's by C.K.

Malone and this is a picture book that features Charlie, a child

who's trying hard to come up with a costume for Halloween that honors

their identity as both a boy and a girl.

In the

book, Charlie shown like kind of hunting through a trunk of, you know, costumes,

play costumes, searching for that perf act

disguise to go out on.

And I have to say that I do not come across many picture books

that have by gender children as part of the main storyline.

So I knew I had to read this.

It is illustrated by Alejandro Barajas

and Alejandro is a mexican painter.

And I would say that the cover image I'm in the book that what's on the cover

shows Charlie dressed as both little red riding Hood

and they are viewing themselves in a mirror with a reflection of Dracula.

That is the most striking image in the book.

I It was really interesting to read.

The author does include an afterword

that touches a little bit on by Gender Identity.

The other book I have is Scary Stories by Tony Johnston,

illustrated by Tony

de Paola, and this is really an old school book.

Ahmed dates back to 1978.

It was actually published

as Four Scary Stories, and in the book there's like an EMP,

there's a goblin, there's a scalawag, one of my favorite words,

and there's a boy lurking in the background of the story.

And it is definitely a picture book, but it kind of reads like a reader,

like an early reader, because there's like little sort of like chapters.

Not exactly.

But each child has, you know, a version of their story.

For me, the best part of this book were the vintage,

you know, illustrations by the late Tommy Debelle,

you know, and it was just a really fun read.

I could picture kids giggling to this.

As is common in picture books, you have a refrain let's repeated

throughout the book, and in this case the refrain is Zinc is zinc zu

and I'll end with the three little things shrieked

grab their pointed hats quickly, said Zinc,

Zinc Zu and poof, they were gone.

So I hope, I hope people pick that up.

Oh, fun.

That reminds me being a little kid and listening to the library

and read the story. Yeah, that's awesome.

So I don't know about any of our listeners,

but I tend to go in some patterns with my reading and it seems like

in October, every year or late September, I want to read a cozy mystery

and it's a little bit unique for me because I'm a nonfiction selector.

I tend to read almost entirely non

exclusively nonfiction and some kid's books.

And so I'm always every year it happens, you know, its leaves start to turn.

There's moms in the stores and I want to read a cozy mystery,

but I'm a little particular about what I like in a cozy mystery.

And so it's always I'm drawn to them, but I don't always love them

as much as I think I will.

But I discovered the first in the series

last year, a couple of years ago now, and for this podcast

I'm actually talking about number three in this series, but I think this could be

standalone books as well.

It's called A Killer Sun by Abby Collette,

and it's number three in the ice cream parlor mystery.

And this is a mystery series set in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

And it's just a delightful town, and it has a wonderful cast of characters,

including our main protagonist, Ron.

When Cruise.

She's the owner of Cruise Creamery,

which is an ice cream business that's been in her family for generations.

She actually left her corporate job after getting an MBA to come home to her

family town to run the the ice cream shop.

And this is an ice cream shop where they make homemade ice cream.

And she uses the vintage recipes of her grandmother, which is just very,

very cool.

And she'll make really unique things like kiwi sorbet.

Show us as a fresh fruit sorbet. And it's not what you think.

It's not just raspberry sap yogurt and blueberry pops like ice cream type pops.

So it's just wonderful.

Well, she's just launched a new food truck.

That's an ice cream truck.

It's now an ice cream delivery truck.

It's more of a food truck that sells ice cream. A little different.

She doesn't go down the streets with the with a song playing.

So she is having this truck at the harvest time

Festival, which is a huge festival in the town for fall. And

somebody gets murdered.

And this is somebody that is a high school classmate that she never got along with

and they were poisoned

and they look to be possibly poisoned after they had her ice cream.

She doesn't want to be roped into these murders.

It's happened two times before and it's a tiny town.

She doesn't she doesn't know why this keeps happening to her.

She really fights it.

But of course, she gets roped in.

She has some fantastic sidekicks, two best friends, Maisie,

who's like an ACORN show, loving, mystery loving detective type friend.

And Rhea. Who's that really?

No nonsense, assertive, slightly aggressive, kind of pushy friend

who, you know, works in the medical field and is really no nonsense.

But one of the best parts of this is her own character,

the character Bronwyn Irwin and her tight knit family who you will grow to love.

So it has a lot of setting, a lot of really good character development.

And of course, the mystery.

So I highly recommend this one.

Okay. My first one is

also not horror.

As I said, we're not doing a horror.

And actually not neither of minor horror, but it's creepy in its own way.

It's the book eaters.

By Susan, you mean this is it's a tough oh, excuse me, twisty,

gothic feeling, kind of.

It's a debut fantasy thriller.

It's got a lot going on.

It features a mother who's just trying to take care of her son,

who has unique dietary needs

and per the title of the book,

she is actually a normal book eater.

So she can eat a book and it will sustain her.

And she remembers everything in the book.

Well, her son, unfortunately, is slightly different in that he

consumes minds

and keeps everybody's personalities.

So it's not is.

GROSS Well, okay.

In one sense, I guess it is it's gruesome as it sounds, but it's it's

one of those things it's an interesting story.

You find yourself sort of trying, thinking about who's

who's the monster in this story. Is it the kid?

Is it the people after them?

Is it the mother who's trying to keep her kid alive no matter what it's required?

It's it's a really interesting story that

explores trauma, self-determination and family.

And it's fantasy is so good for looking at some of those really big topics.

And it's just it's and it's also just a thrilling, kind of twisty story.

So it's a really great debut

and that's the Book Eaters by Sunita.

Well.

It sounds entirely unique.

It it's it really was it was very different from anything I had read.

Yeah. Wow.

So I have a young adult title

also perfect for Halloween It's Dead Flip by Sarah Ferguson

and I guess you could say this is a little horror y a horror

but honestly I think it read kind of like a a Stranger Things episode.

I know that's all the rage right now and everybody loves that sort of stuff.

You've got three friends in the story.

There's Corey, McCarron, Maz and Sam,

and they have been best buds since the seventh grade.

And this is actually a book that's kind of set in the late

eighties, 1987 and 1992.

So it kind of alternates chapters between the characters, though.

Sam really doesn't make an appearance from his point of view until later on.

So they're very short chapters and you get a look back

at what happens when a pinball machine enters the life of these three.

The pinball machine known as the saucer,

comes with glowing red eyes at the local party store.

And Sam somehow is affected by it

in such a way that he's got nightmares and he ends up disappearing

during their Halloween trick or treating night.

So Ford future you've got Maz

who who is family is from

Iran and Corey

who is trying to come to terms maybe not even come to terms

as much as like just be honest about her queer identity

and wanting to be able to be open with with friends family, etc.

So they're going back and forth.

And now they used to be best buds, but since Sam has disappeared,

they're no longer best buds.

Of the two that are left.

But get this, Sam does return.

But still, as a

12 year old, it's kind of creepy that way.

I really love this book because FARZAD, the author,

is just really good at coming up with not just snark and sarcasm,

but just things that, you know, teens might think about.

And depending on where you come from, what your outlook on life

or how you view the world, you know, can be really different.

There's this line that Sam says who clearly Sam is the kid

who might have the most trouble in life and that, you know, maybe he's not super

wealthy, single parent,

you know, parent who left the family really rough.

But he says this line about, you know, there's nothing great about grown up mass.

And you hear that line a lot when you're a kid, right?

Grow up, grow up, stop acting like a baby.

And, you know, Sam knows there's there's something hard coming up.

So anyway, I think that this is going to appeal,

especially to me like a John X person and maybe others.

There's a lot of nostalgia in the book.

Pee-Wee Herman

And something that I really loved actually, is that the role of parents,

like when the kids do naughty things like, you know, dump punch bowls

on someone's carpet, they make the kids go and apologize to the parents.

So to the property owners, I should say, I'm like.

That's.

Nice to know that parents are out there looking out

for their kids, trying to help them

develop good manners.

So, yeah, I hope you'll read that one.

Awesome.

Very cool.

That was I was about that age in 1987.

So that really resonates in I think we're starting to see

some of those like Gen-X era books almost being like historical fiction.

I think we've talked about that before and have a good laugh about it.

Yeah, I guess you could say,

like our growing up era, it has entered that that time.

Okay, so I'm taking monsters in a totally different direction

into a book that was released this year called The Monsters Bones

The Discovery of T-Rex and How It Shook Our World by David K Randall.

And this is quite the tale.

It's one of those narrative nonfiction books that reads in a really exciting way.

It's an excellent combination of kind of biography, history and science,

so it can appeal to people who like all of those types of nonfiction.

And it's the story of two men,

Henry Fairfield Osborn, who was a very privileged socialite who,

you know, had a life of luxury and ended up working

at the American Museum of Natural History and really wanted it to succeed.

And believe it or not, the turn of the century,

it really wasn't doing very well.

People who are more interested in the P.T.

Barnum types shows not so much in minerals and mammal bones and that sort of thing.

And then you have the other character from history

who I knew nothing about named Barnum Brown.

And Barnum Brown's probably one of the more, more

important paleontologists in history.

So it's really the story of these two men who couldn't be more different.

And it goes all over.

It goes into the west where everybody is looking for dinosaur bones.

I didn't really know that was like the gold rush.

You know, you're it's like I'm going to go try to find some dinosaur bones.

And then it goes it goes in other countries,

but it follows the stories and the lives of these two men

and really shows how the Museum of Natural History

came to be, came to finally have success, which really was reliant on something

like the large dinosaurs being there, and also about how dinosaurs

came into our consciousness, you know, and that was during that period.

So this book goes from the late 1800s

until World War Two and chronicles

not just this museum, but talks about the Carnegie Museum,

the Field Museum and all of these powerful players.

You have Rockefeller, Peabody, Marshall Field and all of the power

that really was behind trying to get these expeditions

run and then to get the bones and actually kind of at the end

sort of talks about how dinosaur bones have been a commodity.

You know, they're the commodity they're sold now.

And sort of the ethics of that, is that really what needs to be happening

with something like dinosaur bones?

But that is where we're at now.

So just a fascinating read, The Monster's Bones.

Right.

And then

my next one is, again, sort of it's a creepy read.

It's Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.

This is actually it's

I it it's a novel more bordering on a novella.

It's not a long read.

It's actually very quick and it's just a very surreal

and interesting look at grief and a marriage.

Mary is the wife of a

research scientist

who goes on a mission, a deep sea mission.

They lose contact.

They don't know what's going on.

But eventually, very late and long passed,

really, when anybody should have been able to survive,

the submissive comes back up

and Leah is alive.

But slowly but surely, Mary.

Mary is sort of thinking her wife did not really come back.

Um, she's not.

There's something physically wrong.

She's just.

They can't have conversations.

Mary is doing her best to kind of support them both.

She's calling to make sure that they have medical coverage

for whatever is going on, that they can run some tests

to do something to maybe get her wife back.

And it's just not working.

And you get

flashbacks from before the expedition and the meeting and that sort of thing.

You get flashbacks of, you know, right up to the meeting.

Then you have moments of interspersed, you have moments of

Leah's actual experiences, as in the submersible, not quite knowing

whether this

was intended or whatever happened to their ship,

whether it was intended by their employers, or whether it was not intended.

But it's just a very creepy feeling that something's wrong, feeling

that something's out there,

kind of other people on the crew not acting right.

And you get so in, but you don't get full of answers

necessarily about what's going on as this is happening.

But it's it's a really

it's just a very surreal and interesting

look at the dissolution of that relationship as Leah as yes.

As Leah is physically changing throughout this whole thing.

Um, it reminded me a little bit of,

um, Caramel del Toro's

book, the movie, and I'm blanking on the title,

but it was the Oscar winning story.

And I imagining it right now.

I can see the cover.

Yeah, yeah, yep, nope.

It's not going to come, but I will put it in the show notes.

You all know what I'm talking about. It had a fish.

That was an amazing.

But and

she is changing in a way that feels that way.

So it's it's just a very again, a creepy but really interesting short read.

Yeah that really caught my eye.

And it is really more about the relationship and

but it has the backdrop of the, of the scientific experience

of a corporation that's not returning her calls anymore of, you know,

that sort of thing is also in the background.

So it's an interesting eye opening read.

Yeah, neat.

Well, I do have one last title

that I want to recommend is actually a book of poems.

It's monsters growling in the background

and it's illustrated by Martin Antivirus.

And really that's the reason I'm recommending it as the illustrations.

Although some of the poems are definitely notable, it's

both, you know, a collection of classic and contemporary poems

that are kind of scary.

But the illustrations, wow, reminiscent if you are familiar

with Duncan tone a you I think that's how you say his name.

He's a mexican illustrator.

A mexican American illustrator, maybe.

I'm not sure.

But yeah, very,

very striking, very colorful.

You have to see the opening poem Halloween Party

by Canas, but it's just an amazing Dracula

image with the bats you can't see here as you're listening to me out there.

Audience Fascinating, but it is awesome.

There's also a someone by Walter de la Mer is featured in there

and that's got this like huge of arias that is just pretty, pretty intense.

And then the one that I really loved,

I know I have read

Shakespeare's let's see if I can find it now.

When I had it, I had it.

I had it.

Song of the Witches by Macbeth from Macbeth.

And I know I've read Macbeth long, long, long ago, but I couldn't

I had no memory of this double, double toil and trouble.

Fire, burn and cauldron bubble.

Cool it with a baboons blood.

Then the charm is firm and good

and the illustrations are these witches in a weird way.

Kind of reminds me of, like, fast food or something.

I don't know.

But yeah, I really like this collection.

It's a skinny book, like a picture book,

but definitely really interesting poems.

So you know what it looks like to me?

It reminds me of those black velvet posters

where you can shine the light and it's kind of fluorescence.

Yeah, it looks fluorescent.

Like you could turn out the lights in that book would glow. Right.

I think that would. Also make really cool t T-shirts.

Yeah, that's absolutely I could totally see that.

Posters for.

Sure. Yeah, it looks kind of heavy metal. Yeah.

Great little 1987 book, too.

Yeah. Eighties metal vibe. Yeah.

Cool.

It's lovely talking with you guys.

Yeah. Oh, it's fun. Okay.

Until next episode.

Happy Harvest.

Happy Halloween. Yes.