Friends,
The book has been out a week now, and it is finding its readers, which is the part I hoped for and could not do on my own. If it has reached you and you have a minute, a few plain lines of review do a first book more good than almost anything else I know of.
This week I have a story for anyone new here, about a boy, a cracked fiddle, and a repair he tried to keep to himself. It is a good place to start.
Delilah
From the Bench
The Staples in the Fiddle
The case had not come down off that cabinet in years. The boy knew it for a fact, and he built his whole plan around it.
Also in the notebook
- Where I Go When I Leave at Five They wanted to know at the shop where a retired postmistress gets to when she puts on her coat at five. One Tuesday answers it. A For Sale sign turns up in a yard that would never carry one, the town builds the wrong story around it by suppertime, and it falls to Dot to put the record straight in a single sentence, aimed at the one ear that will carry it nowhere else.
Vernon had not said a word about the staples, but he had laid them out on a square of felt like evidence at an inquest, and I understood that to be an opinion.
From Fixed to Death