Events this week - Anuradha D Rajurkar, Margarita Montimore, Michelle Nijhuis

The Boswell virtual event schedule for this week

Tuesday, March 9, 7 pm
Anuradha D Rajurkar, author of American Betiya
in conversation with Lauren Fox

Register for the event here.  

Signed copies available. Personalization requests accepted!

Join us for the launch celebration for Milwaukee-area author Anuradha Rajurkar’s debut novel. She is the winner of the national SCBWI Emerging Voices award. She’ll chat with Lauren Fox, Milwaukee author of Send for Me.

American Betiya takes an honest look at the ways cultures can clash in an interracial relationship. Braiding together themes of sexuality, artistic expression, and appropriation, Rajurkar gives voice to a girl claiming ownership of her identity, one shattered stereotype at a time. Kathleen Glasgow, author of Girl in Pieces, says, "American Betiya thoughtfully examines cross-cultural boundaries, first love, the first steps of independence from family, and the power of art to transform and heal. I loved Rani's fierce, heartfelt, and beautifully told journey."

Rani Kelkar, a young woman growing up in Evanston, Illinois, can say she's never lied to her parents in her life. Then she meets Oliver, whose tattoos, charisma, and passion for art - the qualities that made him so attractive to Rani - make him her mother’s worst nightmare. They begin dating in secret, but when Oliver's troubled home life unravels, he starts to ask more of Rani than she knows how to give, desperately trying to fit into her world, no matter how high the cost.

Jim Higgins's review of American Betiya is featured here in the Smyrna/Clayton Sun-Times of Delaware.  

Wednesday, March 10, 7 pm
Margarita Montimore, author of Oona Out of Order
in conversation with Daniel Goldin and Jenny Chou

Register for the event here.  

Oona Out of Order is a national bestseller, Good Morning America Book Club pick, and a Boswell favorite. It’s also out in paperback on February 9 and we’re celebrating with special virtual event with Margarita Montimore. Oona Out of Order is a remarkably inventive novel about a woman who lives each year of her life out of order, exploring what it means to be human and live in the moment. For this event, Montimore will be in conversation with Boswellians Chou and Goldin.

If you loved The Immortalists or The Midnight Library, Oona Out of Order is a great book to read next. Boswellian Kay Wosewick calls Oona a “unique, fun, and thought-provoking tale.” And as Jenny Chou says, “For anyone who’s been waiting seventeen years for a novel as engrossing as The Time Traveler’s Wife, this is the book for you!" Please note that Oona Out of Order will also be the April selection of our Books & Beer Book Club. Details about that can be found right here.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she’s told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random. And so begins Oona Out of Order.

Here's more enthusiasm from Mary Cadden in USA Today: "Montimore proves an adept storyteller. Oona is a good balance between serious and silly. There are laughs, to be sure, but the author captures the essence of Kenzie's 19-year-old self in an older body without making the story slapstick. With its countless epiphanies and surprises, Oona proves difficult to put down. "  

Thursday, March 11, 7 pm
Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
in conversation with Dan Egan

Cohosted by Schlitz Audubon Nature Center

Register for this event here.

Acclaimed science journalist (Atlantic, National Geographic, New York Times Magazine) Michelle Nijhuis discusses her new and vibrant history of the modern conservation movement, as told through the lives and ideas of the people who built it. This event is cosponsored by Schlitz Audubon Nature Center and Boswell Book Company and Nijhuis will chat with Dan Egan, author of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. The first 20 folks to order Beloved Beasts get a matching field notebook.

In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. In Beloved Beasts, Nijhuis traces the movement’s history: from early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale.

Nijhuis’s book describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson and reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund. As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change escalate, Beloved Beasts charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species - including our own. 

Publishers Weekly writes that "Nijhuis’s comprehensive survey is sure to delight nature enthusiasts and those concerned with disappearing species." And Dan Cryer in The Boston Globe noted "Michelle Nijhuis’ spirited and engaging Beloved Beasts tracks the not always predictable course of species protection from the flora and fauna classification system developed in the 18th century by the Swede Carl Linnaeus to the present day. Although much of her subject matter has been previously chronicled, the author makes it new by treating it as one continuous story and by focusing on fascinating personalities like Edge. Her prose flows easily from these pen-portraits to heart-breaking statistics to larger social trends."

Plus one cosponsorship
Sunday, March 14, 2 pm
Christian Picciolini, author of Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism

Hosted by the Nathan and Eshter Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center, in partnership with Congregation Shalom,
Register for the event here.

HERC presents an afternoon with former White supremacist Christian Picciolini. After leaving the hate movement he helped create during his youth in the 1980s and '90s, he began the painstaking process of making amends and rebuilding his life. His life since leaving the white-power movement decades ago has been dedicated to helping others overcome their own hate. He now leads the Free Radicals Project, a global extremism prevention and disengagement network. It's all documented in Breaking Hate.

Photo credits!

Margarita Montimore by David Swanson

Michelle Nihjuis by Darcy Hunter

More on the Boswell upcoming events page.