We at Shelf Awareness feel a bit like proud parents about the publication of Water Ghosts by Shawna Yang Ryan (Penguin Press, April 16). This is why:

Marilyn Dahl, our book review editor, belongs to a writing group. A member of that group is a writer, Katherine Ellis, who urged her to read a book called Locke 1928. Katherine didn't let up and kept asking, "Did you read it yet?" Marilyn finally got a copy, read the novel and was blown away. Her review ran in December 2007.

Then Dan Lazar from Writers House literary agency read Marilyn's glowing review of Locke 1928 and got a copy. He did some Google research, saw that it was published by a small press (El Leon Literary Arts), imagined the author didn't have an agent and thought maybe she would have a second book in her down the road that he could represent. Then he learned there was an opportunity to resell Locke 1928 itself, which was even more exciting, so he signed her up right away. He sold the book to Penguin Press, which is publishing it April 16 with the title Water Ghosts.

Friendship. Persistence. Luck. What an amazing chain of events, but it's basically what booksellers do every day.

Alice B. Acheson, marketing and publicity specialist in Friday Harbor, Wash., wrote in response to Chris Kerr's report on the memorial for Jean Srnecz:

For all of us who were unable to attend the service, many thanks for providing so many of the details.

In the tributes I've read, I haven't seen a reference to her deep interest in "educating" beginning publishers. For 10 years, I was the publicist for the Western States Book Awards (when it was awarded to an unpublished manuscript). A grant of $5,000 was given to the author and another $5,000 to the publisher, the latter to be used for marketing the book.

The Awards Board included publishing professionals, Jean and I among them, who gave the winning publishers a "publishing institute" during the year prior to publication in the hope that publishing in the west, as a whole, would benefit.

I believe it did, and Jean certainly poured her energy and expertise into the project.

The memorial scholarship is a most appropriate tribute to further her lifetime commitment. So sad that it was awarded posthumously and such a short time before her retirement.

Catherine Weller, co-owner of Sam Weller's Bookstore, Salt Lake City, Utah, which is closing its downstore store and searching for a new location (Shelf Awareness, March 12, 2009), told the Salt Lake Tribune, "We haven't been profitable for a few years. We've been able to get by. But with the economy, just getting by isn't enough."

---

Cool Idea of the Month: as part of its One Book, One Town celebration of The Invention of Hugo Cabret in Fairfield, Conn., the Fairfield Public Library has joined with several partners to host silent film screenings, a reader's theater, a magic show and a book-talking pizza party, all of which leads up to a speech by Caldecott-winning author-artist Brian Selznick himself on Wednesday, March 25, at 7 p.m. at Fairfield Warde High School.

The library's partners are the Pequot Library, the Friends of Fairfield Public Library, the Fairfield Arts Council, the Fairfield Museum, Fairfield University and Borders. For more information, click here.

---

Department of amplification: one of the writers on Friday's Independent Mystery Booksellers Association bestseller list was misidentified. The author of Silent on the Moor (Mira) is Deanna Raybourn, not Denise Raybourn. The culprit remains at large.

---

March Madness update: Matty Goldberg, v-p, sales and marketing, at Perseus Books Group extends John McPhee's winning streak: "Hadn't seen John McPhee in the pages of the New Yorker for quite some while. Hadn't seen him write about sports since A Sense of Where You Are, also one of my favorite basketball books of all time. Thought you'd like this recent piece on the Native American roots of b'ball. P.S. Hyperion just reissued David Halberstam's wonderful Breaks of the Game, in which he follows the star-crossed Portland Trailblazers for a
year. Great piece of journalism."

---

And the University of Nebraska Press has the NCAA basketball tournament covered this year with a March Madness blog written by Alan Jay Zaremba, author of The Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas, which the press has just released. Zaremba will be in Las Vegas from March 18-22, including an appearance at the Gambler's Book Shop.

 

For more than a century under various auspices there has been a bookstore in downtown Boise, Idaho.  A Novel Adventure, which opened last September, continues that literary tradition.

Mike Rainey, his wife, Becky, and two other family members had been looking for a local business to buy when they happened upon what was then the Boise Book & Gift Co. "We just fell in love with it," said Rainey, who manages the day-to-day operations of the store.

In addition to bearing a new name, the store has been remodeled and revitalized. Along with additional seating areas, there is now space to display works by Northwest artists and photographers. Artwork is changed monthly to coincide with First Thursday, when downtown galleries and other shops provide refreshments and entertainment. The event draws hundreds of people to the area. At A Novel Adventure, wine is served and a folk band plays. "One day a month we become an art gallery," Rainey said. "It has really pushed sales on those particular nights."

With art galleries, restaurants, hotels and a large number of banks and other businesses, downtown Boise draws a mix of locals and out-of-towners--like the thousands who visited the city for the 2009 Special Olympics World Winter Games--and brings significant foot traffic into the bookstore.

Despite the ailing economy, Rainey and his trio of partners decided to forge ahead and pursue their plans to become retailers. "It actually seemed like it was a good time to open a business, if you can hang on, because everything is cheap right now," he said. "The possibility exists that we'll sink before people start swimming again, but it's no fun buying at the peak of the market and riding it all the way down. I'd rather buy at the bottom and ride it all the way up."

Before running the show at A Novel Adventure, Rainey served in the U.S. Army (where he met his wife, who is now a lawyer) and then went college on the G.I. Bill. A recent journey for the Raineys was attending the ABA's Winter Institute in Salt Lake City in January. "We're new at this, and we're still figuring it out," remarked Rainey. "I was really inspired by the time we spent at the Winter Institute. It was the coolest thing in the world." Encouragement from close to home has come from Bruce and Laura DeLaney, the owners of Rediscovered Bookshop in Boise. "They've been mentors to us and given us invaluable advice," Rainey said.

A category in which Rainey has a personal interest is travel, and those titles are given prominent placement at the front of the store. Also popular are guidebooks related to sites and activities in and around the city and the state such as rock climbing, hiking and mountain biking. Also selling well are travel narratives like The Tecate Journals: Seventy Days on the Rio Grande by Keith Bowden, The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost and Living in a Foreign Language: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy by Michael Tucker.

In the spirit of la dolce vita, A Novel Adventure hosted an Italian-themed evening last month. Customers sampled Italian wines, dined on food prepared by a chef friend of Rainey, listened to a tenor and took in a presentation by a woman who leads tours to Sardinia. And this past Saturday, novel adventurers enjoyed a Celtic celebration with bagpipes, poetry and pints.--Shannon McKenna Schmidt

A Novel Adventure is located at 906 W. Main Street, Boise, Idaho 83702; 208-344-8088; anoveladventure.com.

Tomorrow morning on Fox & Friends: General Richard Myers, author of Eyes on the Horizon: Serving on the Front Lines of National Security (Threshold Editions, $27, 9781416560128/1416560122). He will also appear today on the Glenn Beck Show.

---

Tomorrow the Diane Rehm Show's Readers' Review focuses on I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

---

Tomorrow on NPR's On Point: Jan Wong, author of A Comrade Lost and Found: A Beijing Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25, 9780151013425/015101342X).

---

Tomorrow on the View: Joy Bauer, author of Joy's Life Diet: Four Steps to Thin Forever (Morrow, $25.99, 9780061665745/0061665746).

---

Tomorrow on Oprah: Peter Walsh, author of Enough Already!: Clearing Mental Clutter to Become the Best You (Free Press, $26, 9781416560180/1416560181).

---

Tomorrow night on Larry King Live: Joan Rivers, author of Murder at the Academy Awards (Pocket, $24, 9781416599371/1416599371).

---

Tomorrow night on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Nandan Nilekani, author of Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation (Penguin Press, $29.95, 9781594202049/1594202044).

---

Tomorrow night on the Colbert Report: Juan Cole, author of Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95, 9780230607545/0230607543).

Salvatore Scibona has won the $10,000 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award for his novel, The End, Galley Cat reported. Runners up were Jon Fasman, author of The Unpossessed City, Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances, Sana Krasikov, author of One More Year, and Zachary Mason, author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey.

---

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig has won the 2009 Yale Drama Series Award for Playwriting for her play Lidless. The prize includes a $10,000 award from the David C. Horn Foundation, a staged reading of the work at Yale Rep and publication of the play by Yale University Press.

Runners up are The Danger of Bleeding Brown by Enrique Urueta and Hell Money by Ruth McKee.

Lidless is about a former Guantanamo Bay detainee "who journeys to the home of his female U.S. Army interrogator 15 years after his detention, demanding half her liver for the damage she wreaked on his body and soul during her interrogations."

Playwright David Hare, who judged the award, called Lidless "an extraordinary and original attempt to show the enduring strain on the victims of the U.S.'s deployment of torture at Guantanamo."

Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, March 24:

True Detectives: A Novel by Jonathan Kellerman (Ballantine, $27, 9780345495143/0345495144) follows rival brothers, an LAPD detective and a high-end private eye, who investigate a woman's disapperance.

Pursuit by Karen Robards (Putnam, $24.95, 9780399155420/0399155422) explores the fallout of an amnesic lawyer's presence at a car accident that kills the First Lady.

It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita by Heather Armstrong (Simon Spotlight, $24, 9781416936015/1416936017) chronicles the hardships of a new mother.

Oh, Johnny: A Novel by Jim Lehrer (Random House, $25, 9781400067626/1400067626) tells the story of a Marine with major league baseball ambitions who fights in the Pacific during 1944.

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto by Mark R. Levin (Threshold Editions, $25, 9781416562856/1416562850) shares the opinions of a conservative talk radio host.

Now in paperback:

Buckingham Palace Gardens: A Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Novel by Anne Perry (Ballantine, $7.99, 9780345469328/0345469321).

Where Are You Now?: A Novel by Mary Higgins Clark (Pocket, $7.99, 9781416570882/1416570888).

They survived genocide, refugee camps and a move to a strange home thousands of miles from the places of their birth. Soccer was all they had in common. In his deeply satisfying new book, New York Times reporter Warren St. John tells the story of the Fugees, their remarkable young coach and how these newcomers have forged distinctive American lives after resettlement in the tiny Georgia town of Clarkston (population 7,100; area one square mile).

The heroine of St. John's compelling story is Luma Mufleh, a 31-year-old native of Jordan who graduated from Smith College in 1997 and remained in the U.S. in defiance of her parents. When she signs on as volunteer coach of a team of adolescents and teenagers from countries as diverse as Burundi and Bosnia, it's clear she's found her life's work. She's a tough taskmaster, determined that the young men in her charge will conform to her rigorous training rules. Even as she's imparting savvy soccer coaching, she makes sure the boys receive extra tutoring, provides enormous helpings of moral and financial support to them and their families and does battle with a recalcitrant Clarkston mayor to secure the team a decent playing field.

It's hard not to root for the Fugees, clad in ill-fitting shoes and makeshift uniforms and forced to practice on a dusty, glass-strewn playground, when they find themselves pitted against teams of affluent opponents, chauffeured from their suburban McMansions to the games in gleaming SUVs. But Outcasts United isn't merely a sugarcoated story of refugee youth submerging their differences in sport. It freely explores the tensions that flare among the young players, as they chafe under Luma's unyielding standards and as ethnic and religious differences surface. And it's a frank portrayal of the fierce determination of the Fugees' parents to overcome the daily hardships they confront simply trying to survive in their new homeland.   

St. John doesn't confine his attention to the immigrants, providing a richly-detailed picture of the ways their presence has reshaped life in one sleepy Southern town. He describes the Thriftown supermarket's evolution from a failing grocery store into an international food bazaar, the former Clarkston Baptist Church's reinvention as a religiously diverse place of worship and the hiring of the town's first black police chief. "America is changing," one local pastor observes. "Get over it."

Franklin Foer once wrote that soccer "explains the world." Warren St. John does a fine job explaining a small slice of it in this bighearted book.--Harvey Freedenberg

Shelf Talker: The inspiring story of a motley band of young immigrants and how soccer transformed their lives and the life of a small American town.