On page 136 of Mongrels the narrator describes Brittany's grandfather. "In some book I'd read on my own, not for class, this old guy down on the Texas border had been described as having decades of sun folded into his face." Is that book possibly The Bird is Gone when LP Deal is describing the old man at the community center? "Ninety-two years of sunlight folded into the skin of his face, eyes cloudy from it."