Watermark Books & Café is pleased to
announce that Billie Letts will be coming to Wichita on July 10, 2008 to
celebrate the release of her book, Made in the USA. The 7:00 p.m.
reading, presentation, and book signing will be held at the bookstore.
Letts is the author of acclaimed short
stories, screenplays, and three novels. Her novel, “Where the Heart Is,” was
an Oprah pick in 1998. Her new novel Made in the USA recently
received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly.
Here
it is...
¶Starred
review from Publisher’s Weekly, April 28, 2008.
In a second Letts
title where a pivotal event occurs at a Wal-Mart (the first was the author's
bestseller Where the Heart Is), two long-neglected kids have to fend
for themselves--and quickly. After their father's ex-girlfriend, Floy, who
is their guardian, drops dead at the chain's Spearfish, S.D., megastore,
15-year-old Lutie McFee persuades her 11-year-old brother, Fate, to take off
in Floy's Pontiac to their long-gone dad's last know address, a flea-bag
hotel in Las Vegas. There, they discover discouraging secrets about their
father's whereabouts. Lutie gets fake working papers and a string of
dead-end jobs. But with the threat of foster care looming, Lutie and
trivia-mad Fate are soon at the mercy of child predators. Letts (whose son
Tracy won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama) manages this potentially
maudlin or lurid material with frank lyricism, delivering a heartbreaking
tale about love, loss and survival that will stick with the reader long
after the last page is turned.
