Sigrid Brown's Blog
November 9, 2023
Pen name and a new book!
I published The Girl in Duluth under the name Sigrid Brown, but my real name is Cheri Johnson. I’m excited to announce that I have a new book, Annika Rose, coming out under my real name on May 21, 2024. It’s being published by Red Hen Press.
Genre-wise, Annika Rose sits more squarely in the category of literary fiction than The Girl in Duluth. However, it’s also got a lot of mystery and suspense. In Annika Rose, I re-tell the story of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby in northern Minnesota, with a kind of feminist twist. There’s no supernatural element, but the story is told through the eyes of the weird and wild Annika Rose, one of my favorite characters I’ve ever created; she’s very dear to me. Some of the characters and storylines also hearken back to stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: in particular, the stories in which divine entities go after and rape mortal women (an element they have in common with Rosemary's Baby).
In early 2024, we’ll be holding a Goodreads Giveaway for Annika Rose. Follow my Cheri Johnson author profile, where I’ll post an announcement about the giveaway and other news about the book!
Genre-wise, Annika Rose sits more squarely in the category of literary fiction than The Girl in Duluth. However, it’s also got a lot of mystery and suspense. In Annika Rose, I re-tell the story of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby in northern Minnesota, with a kind of feminist twist. There’s no supernatural element, but the story is told through the eyes of the weird and wild Annika Rose, one of my favorite characters I’ve ever created; she’s very dear to me. Some of the characters and storylines also hearken back to stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: in particular, the stories in which divine entities go after and rape mortal women (an element they have in common with Rosemary's Baby).
In early 2024, we’ll be holding a Goodreads Giveaway for Annika Rose. Follow my Cheri Johnson author profile, where I’ll post an announcement about the giveaway and other news about the book!
April 28, 2023
Exciting news!
I got wonderful news this week. Thanks so much to the Midwest Independent Publishers Association: my novel The Girl in Duluth is a finalist for a Midwest Book Award! There’s an awards ceremony and everything on June 17 at Open Book in Minneapolis. I’m so excited!
I’m also excited to check out the other books that were chosen as finalists: including, in the Mystery/Thriller category, Sue Berg's Driftless Deceit and Michael Allan Mallory's The Lost Dragon Murder.
I’m also excited to check out the other books that were chosen as finalists: including, in the Mystery/Thriller category, Sue Berg's Driftless Deceit and Michael Allan Mallory's The Lost Dragon Murder.
October 12, 2022
Watch a video of me reading from The Girl in Duluth!
How I love reading out loud! Watch me read from Chapter 3 of my debut novel The Girl in Duluth at Eat My Words Bookstore in Northeast Minneapolis at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmTIG....
September 21, 2022
Reading from The Girl in Duluth on September 27 at Eat My Words Bookstore in northeast Minneapolis
I’m so excited to be reading from my debut novel The Girl in Duluth next week at one of my favorite Twin Cities bookstores: Eat My Words Bookstore in northeast Minneapolis (9/27 at 7 pm). I’ll be sharing the stage with Twin Cities historian and writer Phil Adamo. Phil will read from his new novel The Medievalist: A Novel, called by Kirkus Reviews “an engrossing tale” & “a delightfully peculiar blend of intellectual and criminal investigation.”
In The Medievalist, controversial Yale professor Abe Kantorowicz enlists two grad students to fight neo-Nazis on the battlefield of propaganda. Set in today’s America, the novel is chock full of real history, yet resonates with present-day issues: the dangers of racism and white supremacy, the uses and abuses of the past, and the responsibilities of academia.
Phil taught for twenty years at Augsburg University and has published both popular & academic books and articles about the Middle Ages, including New Monks in Old Habits: The Formation of the Caulite Monastic Order, 1193-1267 and “Braveheart at the Battle of Falkirk” in Medieval LEGO (2015).
Read my review of The Medievalist below!
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The Medievalist is told primarily from the point-of-view of Molly Isaacson, a new graduate student at Yale, and we meet her on the day she sees for the first time the library where she’ll be working. The thing I love the most about this book is the way Adamo captures the rapturous moments Molly has when she sees her study carrel stacked with books, hears professors debate, understands the significance of a detail in an illuminated manuscript—when it dawns on her, and keeps dawning on her in richer and richer ways, that she’s made it to the place where the joy of scholarship is hers, where she gets to do it every day, where she’s around other people who share that joy. Then the story quickly shows us that there are many things that endanger this pleasure: the threat of white supremacists co-opting pieces of the historical world she’s endlessly fascinated by, Molly’s own confusion and moral dilemmas about how *she* should or shouldn’t use that same history. Those dangers make her joy feel all the more precious and rare.
In The Medievalist, controversial Yale professor Abe Kantorowicz enlists two grad students to fight neo-Nazis on the battlefield of propaganda. Set in today’s America, the novel is chock full of real history, yet resonates with present-day issues: the dangers of racism and white supremacy, the uses and abuses of the past, and the responsibilities of academia.
Phil taught for twenty years at Augsburg University and has published both popular & academic books and articles about the Middle Ages, including New Monks in Old Habits: The Formation of the Caulite Monastic Order, 1193-1267 and “Braveheart at the Battle of Falkirk” in Medieval LEGO (2015).
Read my review of The Medievalist below!
*
The Medievalist is told primarily from the point-of-view of Molly Isaacson, a new graduate student at Yale, and we meet her on the day she sees for the first time the library where she’ll be working. The thing I love the most about this book is the way Adamo captures the rapturous moments Molly has when she sees her study carrel stacked with books, hears professors debate, understands the significance of a detail in an illuminated manuscript—when it dawns on her, and keeps dawning on her in richer and richer ways, that she’s made it to the place where the joy of scholarship is hers, where she gets to do it every day, where she’s around other people who share that joy. Then the story quickly shows us that there are many things that endanger this pleasure: the threat of white supremacists co-opting pieces of the historical world she’s endlessly fascinated by, Molly’s own confusion and moral dilemmas about how *she* should or shouldn’t use that same history. Those dangers make her joy feel all the more precious and rare.
June 30, 2022
Crystal Spring Gibbins's Now/Here
Even though many of Gibbins's apt and lovely descriptions of nature occur in full daylight ("wild asparagus waves its ferny head," "[The mayflies'] sway-back bodies/ flex and glisten in the sun"), reading her book felt most to me like being in the woods in the dark. I love the dark and I love the woods, and the way you usually hear or sense something before you see it, right when it's right upon you. I get the feeling that Gibbins sees the natural world this way. Even when she knows what's coming, because she's seen it a million times in different years, in different seasons, that thing's beauty--and sometimes its danger--is a source of constant wonder and surprise to her. It's a joy to be in this book, which also lives fully in the world of other books; many of the poems make references to other poems and poets. I like this feeling of searching, borrowing, trying to find both the thing and the right way to say the thing. Now/Here
June 26, 2022
We have our winners of a copy of The Girl in Duluth!
Thank you to the over 5400 people who entered the giveaway for my debut novel The Girl in Duluth! I appreciate your interest in my work so much. And congratulations to the 20 winners! We can’t wait to send you a copy this week (and I’m making you a bookmark, too). The Girl in Duluth
June 25, 2022
Darcie Little Badger's Elatsoe
I first read about Darcie Little Badger’s YA novel Elatsoe in Alexandra Alter’s 2020 essay on Native American and First Nations writers who are writing speculative fiction (‘We’ve Already Survived an Apocalypse’: Indigenous Writers Are Changing Sci-Fi”). I was intrigued by Alter’s description of why Little Badger, a Lipan Apache writer, feels drawn to this genre: “[S]he wanted to write about young Indigenous characters in an alternative, magic-filled, contemporary America because so much fiction featuring Native characters is historical and feels outdated.”
I was not disappointed. This is a very cool book. Little Badger notes in the book bio that she is “a fan of the weird, beautiful, and haunting,” and I believe it. From the very beginning, we dive headfirst into a world that is undeniably our own but also, as the jacket copy aptly states, “slightly stranger …. This America [has] been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and those not.” Often I read fantastic-sounding jacket copy and blurbs and feel the book doesn’t live up to the hype; that is not the case here.
Like J.K. Rowling, Little Badger has a knack for finding evocative, interesting, and often amusing details in both her “real” world and her strange one. The book’s first two paragraphs:
“Ellie bought the life-sized plastic skull at a garage sale (the goth neighbors were moving to Salem, and they could not fit an entire Halloween warehouse into their black van). After bringing the purchase home, she dug through her box of craft supplies and glued a pair of googly eyes in its shallow eye sockets.
‘I got you a new friend, Kirby!’ Ellie said. ‘Here, boy! C’mon!” Kirby already fetched tennis balls and puppy toys. Sure, anything looked astonishing when it zipped across the room in the mouth of an invisible dog, but a floating googly skull would be extra special.’”
The dog is a ghost and Ellie is the one who raised its spirit from the dead. But she also has a box of googly eyes and frequents garage sales. Little Badger weaves together the world we know and the slightly off-kilter world she’s introducing with such ease that the effect is wonderfully discombobulating. At times, her ease—she feels so comfortable here—makes me feel almost uneasy, which in turn makes me feel I’ve truly landed in another place. My experience of reading Elatsoe reminded me of reading the marvelous stories of British-Nigerian-American writer Lesley Nneka Arimah (Arimah was born in the UK, grew up in Nigeria, but now lives in the U.S., so I don’t know exactly which term to use). I remember feeling, when I brought Arimah’s collection What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky to a coffee shop to read it, that there was some kind of live animal or electric thing zinging around in my backpack.
Ellie (Elatsoe’s) world is filled with both deep familial love and friendship (please excuse the copious references, but good books always make me think of my experience of reading other good books; Little Badger’s descriptions of family relationships remind me of those in Madeline L’Engle’s Austin family series, another of my favorites). But there are also great dangers here. These dangers unfold in a story and plot that feel for the most part sure-footed, though there were a few places where I felt that the structure or pacing of how a scene played out, or how one scene led to another, couldn’t quite land on a satisfying rhythm; this meant, for me, that sometimes, great details lost their oomph, particularly in action scenes. Maybe part of the issue is that I want dramatic, dangerous, and evocative moments to slice a little more cleanly, take my breath away. Sometimes instead they get lost in sentences with metaphors, adjectives, and lots of commas, as in this description of a ghostly piano:
“The piano flew up as if seized by a tornado, sailed over Dr. Allerton, and plummeted toward the now-screaming crowd.”
To be clear: I love metaphors, adjectives, and commas, and often use them to excess in my own work. But I felt that I wanted to see sentences like this one get stripped down or broken up somehow to highlight tense moments.
These are mostly prose-level quibbles. Little Badger’s imaginative powers are superb. I’m looking forward to reading her second novel, A Snake Falls to Earth.
Elatsoe
I was not disappointed. This is a very cool book. Little Badger notes in the book bio that she is “a fan of the weird, beautiful, and haunting,” and I believe it. From the very beginning, we dive headfirst into a world that is undeniably our own but also, as the jacket copy aptly states, “slightly stranger …. This America [has] been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and those not.” Often I read fantastic-sounding jacket copy and blurbs and feel the book doesn’t live up to the hype; that is not the case here.
Like J.K. Rowling, Little Badger has a knack for finding evocative, interesting, and often amusing details in both her “real” world and her strange one. The book’s first two paragraphs:
“Ellie bought the life-sized plastic skull at a garage sale (the goth neighbors were moving to Salem, and they could not fit an entire Halloween warehouse into their black van). After bringing the purchase home, she dug through her box of craft supplies and glued a pair of googly eyes in its shallow eye sockets.
‘I got you a new friend, Kirby!’ Ellie said. ‘Here, boy! C’mon!” Kirby already fetched tennis balls and puppy toys. Sure, anything looked astonishing when it zipped across the room in the mouth of an invisible dog, but a floating googly skull would be extra special.’”
The dog is a ghost and Ellie is the one who raised its spirit from the dead. But she also has a box of googly eyes and frequents garage sales. Little Badger weaves together the world we know and the slightly off-kilter world she’s introducing with such ease that the effect is wonderfully discombobulating. At times, her ease—she feels so comfortable here—makes me feel almost uneasy, which in turn makes me feel I’ve truly landed in another place. My experience of reading Elatsoe reminded me of reading the marvelous stories of British-Nigerian-American writer Lesley Nneka Arimah (Arimah was born in the UK, grew up in Nigeria, but now lives in the U.S., so I don’t know exactly which term to use). I remember feeling, when I brought Arimah’s collection What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky to a coffee shop to read it, that there was some kind of live animal or electric thing zinging around in my backpack.
Ellie (Elatsoe’s) world is filled with both deep familial love and friendship (please excuse the copious references, but good books always make me think of my experience of reading other good books; Little Badger’s descriptions of family relationships remind me of those in Madeline L’Engle’s Austin family series, another of my favorites). But there are also great dangers here. These dangers unfold in a story and plot that feel for the most part sure-footed, though there were a few places where I felt that the structure or pacing of how a scene played out, or how one scene led to another, couldn’t quite land on a satisfying rhythm; this meant, for me, that sometimes, great details lost their oomph, particularly in action scenes. Maybe part of the issue is that I want dramatic, dangerous, and evocative moments to slice a little more cleanly, take my breath away. Sometimes instead they get lost in sentences with metaphors, adjectives, and lots of commas, as in this description of a ghostly piano:
“The piano flew up as if seized by a tornado, sailed over Dr. Allerton, and plummeted toward the now-screaming crowd.”
To be clear: I love metaphors, adjectives, and commas, and often use them to excess in my own work. But I felt that I wanted to see sentences like this one get stripped down or broken up somehow to highlight tense moments.
These are mostly prose-level quibbles. Little Badger’s imaginative powers are superb. I’m looking forward to reading her second novel, A Snake Falls to Earth.
Elatsoe
June 16, 2022
S.A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland
This book was recommended to me by a friend as "new American noir" because he knows I like Raymond Chandler. I think Cosby does, too; I noticed he's fond of colorful metaphors and personification and I like it. For example, on p. 24:
"When he stepped off the porch, he could feel the sun beating down on him like he owed it money."
and, on p. 46:
"He had a gun in every room of his house. They were like good friends who were always down to do bad things."
I enjoyed the book very much and I give it 4 stars. My review:
Cosby makes me believe 100% in his sympathetic main character Beauregard and the pressures that send him back into a world where his specialized skills at driving and souping up machines to do all kinds of crazy things make wild heists and getaways possible; I am a sucker for anyone who can describe work well and Cosby’s descriptions were marvelous and believable (at least to someone like me who doesn’t know much about cars). The narrative has authority on this and other matters but Cosby doesn’t milk it, either; there’s restraint and balance here; he’s as interested in the relationships between the characters and Beauregard’s psychological tension as he is in the action scenes, and as comfortable writing about the bureaucratic machinations in a nursing home as he is about what’s going on behind a tattered shower curtain in a hillbilly sex-and-drug den. The plotting and pacing are also strong. I’m definitely interested in reading more from Cosby.
"When he stepped off the porch, he could feel the sun beating down on him like he owed it money."
and, on p. 46:
"He had a gun in every room of his house. They were like good friends who were always down to do bad things."
I enjoyed the book very much and I give it 4 stars. My review:
Cosby makes me believe 100% in his sympathetic main character Beauregard and the pressures that send him back into a world where his specialized skills at driving and souping up machines to do all kinds of crazy things make wild heists and getaways possible; I am a sucker for anyone who can describe work well and Cosby’s descriptions were marvelous and believable (at least to someone like me who doesn’t know much about cars). The narrative has authority on this and other matters but Cosby doesn’t milk it, either; there’s restraint and balance here; he’s as interested in the relationships between the characters and Beauregard’s psychological tension as he is in the action scenes, and as comfortable writing about the bureaucratic machinations in a nursing home as he is about what’s going on behind a tattered shower curtain in a hillbilly sex-and-drug den. The plotting and pacing are also strong. I’m definitely interested in reading more from Cosby.
