Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Karen Olsson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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The journalists, politicos, and barflies who inhabit Texas Monthly writer-at-large KAREN OLSSON’s first novel, WATERLOO (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), could have strolled right off the streets of Austin, real-world counterpart to the title’s fictional Texas capital. This wonderfully observed tale traces the personal and professional struggles of Waterloo Weekly reporter Nick Lasseter bracketed by the double-edged dealings of his lobbyist uncle, Bones, and the backroom bloodying of freshman assemblywoman Beverly Flintic. Olsson’s voice is pure pleasure, such as her take on Waterloo’s legislators and musicians, two populations “united in their desires not to have to work too hard…and to drink beer paid for by somebody else.” She has leaped onto the literary scene fully formed and spun a worldly, golden novel from a parochial pile of straw.
Julie Powell
Little, Brown
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Three years ago, thirty-year-old JULIE POWELL was a would-be actress working a lousy temp job and living in a lousy Queens apartment. In need of a Great Undertaking, the Austin native decided one night to cook her way through every recipe in Julia Child’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year’s time. Her whim begat the Julie/Julia Project blog, which irreverently documented her travails and has now metastasized into the rippingly funny confessional JULIE & JULIA: 365 DAYS, 524 RECIPES, 1 TINY APARTMENT KITCHEN (Little, Brown). Yes, Powell talks a good boeuf bourguignon, but she also riffs at length on her saucy friends, soul-sucking day job, and the breakdowns that threaten to derail the enterprise. Diaries do not get any better than Julie & Julia—like a dose of reality TV with real reality.
Mark Gimenez
Doubleday
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The shadow of To Kill a Mockingbird looms intentionally large over THE COLOR OF LAW (Doubleday). Atticus Finch is quoted at the outset, and protagonist A. Scott Fenney’s mother admonishes him to “be like Atticus. Be a lawyer. Do good.” Quite a display of brass for first-time novelist MARK GIMENEZ. His hero rakes in $750,000 a year as a partner at the Dallas firm of Ford Stevens, but easy street turns bumpy when a federal judge appoints him pro bono counsel to a 23-year-old hooker charged with murder. The victim’s father, a senator, tries to pressure Fenney into railroading the defendant, a wake-up call for the lawyer’s slumbering conscience. Gimenez, a Fort Worth–area lawyer himself, shows some rookie jitters, but The Color of Law is an unbeatable legal thriller with a lot of heart.
