CURTIS SITTENIELD

Standard-Examiner

Rowling's unmasking boosts sales Detective novel written under

pen name gets second printing after story leaks

By LAURIE MUCHNICK Bloomberg News

K. Rowling wanted to see how it would feel to publish a crime novel

• without all the pressure that goes with her famous name.

Now she knows. When "The Cuckoo's Calling"

(Mulholland Books/Little, Brown, $26) came out under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, it got nice reviews from publishing-industry magazines, but was virtually ignored by the mainstream press. It sold 1,500 hardcover copies in Britain, the publisher said, and fewer in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan, which covers about 80 percent of U.S. sales.

Then someone tipped off London's Sunday Times that Rowling was the book's author, and suddenly Little, Brown is printing 300,000 more copies.

Naturally, I sat right down and read the book once I found out Rowling had written it. Do I feel bad that I missed it in April? Not at all. It's an engaging detective story, but nothing makes it stand out among the hundreds of others that pass through my office every year.

The hero is Cormoran Strike, a London private eye who lost a leg in Afghanistan while working for the military police. As the story begins, he's deeply in debt and has only one client. He's split up with his posh girlfriend and is reduced to living in his shabby office off Charing Cross Road. A temp service he meant to cancel has sent him an eager-beaver secretary named Robin, and he doesn't have the heart to send her home.

Then in walks salvation: A rich lawyer, John Bristow, wants Strike to investigate the death of his adopted sister, a supermodel named Lula Landry, who fell to her death from her penthouse window in what the police quickly ruled a suicide. John thinks she was murdered.

The supermodel setup lets Rowling get in plenty of digs at the media, though she wasted an opportunity by not having Strike interview any of the paparazzi who were outside Lula's apartment a few hours before she died.

Among the people he does interview: an over-the-top fashion designer, a make-up artist, a homeless woman Lula befriended in rehab, an obnoxious movie producer and his social-climbing wife. In time-honored fashion, they each unwittingly give Strike a tiny part of the puzzle; he puts the pieces together with the help

of Robin, who (unsurprisingly) surprises Strike with her excellent detective instincts.

It turns out that investigating Lula's death isn't Strike's first brush with fame — his father is a Mick Jagger-like rock star and his mother is known as a super-groupie. I'm not sure what the point is of having him be an Afghanistan vet, except that he gets to take off his aching prosthesis a lot. Rowling seems more interested in the living-with-fame angle than the army-veteran angle, which makes sense from a famously private mega-selling author who's writing a book under a

When "The Cuckoo's Calling" came out under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, it got nice reviews, sold 1,500 hardcover copies in Britain and fewer in the United States. When London's Sunday Times was tipped off that J.K. Rowling (left) was the author, suddenly Little, Brown is printing 300,000 more copies.

DEBRA HURFORD BROWN/Mulholland Books

pseudonym. As always, Rowling has a way

with descriptions, and there's a lot of London atmosphere. Things pick up whenever Robin is around — it's fun to see her astonish Strike by slyly getting crucial information out of a sales assistant at a luxury boutique while trying on outrageously priced clothes.

Some of Rowling's most memorable characters have been girls and women — Hermione Granger, Professor McGonagall, profanity-spouting Krystal Weedon in "The Casual Vacancy." But they're always supporting characters. Since Rowling has promised that this is the first book in a series, I hope Robin will have a bigger role in future installments.

Does this mean I'll keep reading "Robert Galbraith" mysteries? Yes, though I won't await them with the anticipation of a new book by Donna Leon or Jacqueline Winspear. If you haven't read those two, you have some wonderful summer reading ahead of you.

The Mountains and Plains lndie Bestseller List, provided by IndieBound and MPIBA, for the week ended Sunday, July 14. Based on reporting from the inde-pendent booksellers of the MPIBA and IndieBound.

Mass market 1."A Game of Thrones" by

George R.R. Martin (Bantam, $9.99)

2."A Clash of Kings" by George R.R. Martin (Bantam, $9.99)

3."Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card (Tor, $7.99)

4."A Storm of Swords" by George R.R. Martin (Bantam, $9.99)

5."The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger (Little Brown, $6.99)

6."A Feast for Crows" by George R.R. Martin (Bantam, $9.99)

7."A Wanted Man" by Lee Child (Dell, $9.99)

8."Defending Jacob" by Wil-liam Landay (Dell, $7.99)

9."1984" by George Orwell (Signet, $9.99)

10."To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee (Grand Central, $7.99)

Children's interest 1."The Fault in Our Stars" by

John Green (Dutton, $17.99) 2."Wonder" by R.J. Palacio

(Knopf, $15.99) 3."Looking for Alaska" by

John Green (Speak, $9.99) 4."Miss Peregrine's Home for

Peculiar Children" by Ransom Riggs (Quirk, $10.99)

5."The Mouse with the Ques-tion MarkTail" by Richard Peck (Kelly Murphy (Illus.) (Dial, $16.99)

6."The BookThief" by Markus Zusak (Knopf, $12.99)

7."The 5th Wave" by Rick Yancey (Putnam, $18.99)

8."An Abundance of Kath-erines" by John Green (Speak, $9.99)

9."The One and Only Ivan" by Katherine Applegate, Patricia Castelao (Illus.) (Harper, $16.99)

10."Paper Towns" by John Green (Speak, $9.99)

4D Sunday, July 21, 2013 Books

Twin discovers her own identity in novel 'Sisterland' By KATY WALDMAN

Slate

I 'm a twin. I've never not been a twin, which means I can't tell you whether having a sibling

your own age is overall fun or difficult, good or bad — for me it's just the way it is. I've been a twin in many different and contradictory ways: a best friend to my sister, a bitter rival, supporting player, vivid example, even — painfully — a stranger.

But while my twin and I are different, as a twin (and I suspect as any sibling), you do end up surrendering huge swatches of your identity to someone who isn't you.

That quality of losing control over your own reflection, and of reflecting someone else, doesn't get a lot of play in the stories we tell about twinhood. Mostly we imagine shared jokes and secret languages, whispered conversations in bunk beds after Mom turns out the light. (Think "The Parent Trap," "It Takes Two," "Fred and George Weasley," the Winklevii). The idea of an uncanny bond finds expression in the trope of psychic twins, which Curtis Sittenfeld brings to life in her shrewd new book "Sisterland" (Random House, $27).

Yet Sittenfeld is acutely aware of how that bond can warp and fray — tellingly, her twins don't read each other's minds, but pick up on signals from the universe at large — and the novel ends up approaching sisterhood with the same delicate ambivalence it shows ESP Both a gift and a burden, twinhood (like psychicness) means intimacy that is sometimes thrilling, sometimes unwanted.

Kate and Violet Schramm, who form the center of "Sisterland," are a study in sensitivity gone awry. Despite their premonitions about the future, they excel at misunderstanding each other (though, of course, no one quite understands Kate the way Violet does, and vice versa). They live in St. Louis,

where Kate is married to an aquatic chemistry professor at Washington University and Vi is a professional seer. While Kate, who narrates the book, wants only to live a normal suburban life with her husband and two small children, Vi is flamboyant and brash. When tremors hit St. Louis, she goes on "Today" prophesying a much larger earthquake. The novel follows the aftershocks of that TV appearance, as a horrified Kate tries to perform damage control, though — haunted by stray apprehensions of her own —she half-believes Vi is right.

The novel shuttles back and forth between the present day, in which Kate cultivates a friendship with a stay-at-home father named Hank and weathers the storm from Vi's prediction, and scenes from the Schramms' adolescence. Sittenfeld could have plucked these recollected episodes from some universal sibling memory album: the popular high school girl who invites one twin to her sleepover party but not the other (never, ever OK); the sign adorning the bedroom door (the Schramms' says, "Sisterland: Population 2." Ours said, "Do not enter if you aren't Emmy/Katy.").

And she expertly draws out the rivalries and provocations that make every sibling exchange a coded mini-drama. After a party, Kate reports, "I left reeking of cigarette smoke, much of it directed at me by my sister." Naturally.

And yet the narrator, like so many of us, yearns for the tethers that come with having another half. Later, she startles at "the shocking weightlessness of being responsible only for myself." Divorcing your twin is the loneliest thing, like suffering from an existential phantom limb syndrome.

The third person in the room, of course, is Sittenfeld herself, who brings to "Sisterland" the same perceptive, no-frills lucidity she gave "Prep, Man of

My Dreams," and "American Wife." She is an attractive writer, though not a beautiful one, with a chatty, thoughtful, somehow elusive voice — like that of a wise but preoccupied friend.

What she doesn't say crowds behind what she does. And she is funny. "I heard myself say to Ben, 'I'm going to compost the rest of the bok choy,"' Kate reveals at one point, "and pretty much everything I was smug about then was encapsulated in that single sentence."

On a scale of witticisms about bok choy to whimsy, Sittenfeld goes for the leafy green every time. She is not interested in fanciful cutesiness, but rather in the push and pull of the sisters' connection, the alternating dance of irritation and appeasement, antagonism and loyalty. "For more than half my life, I'd been laying the groundwork for my own invisibility," says Kate, "for far longer, in fact, than Vi had been laying the groundwork for her exposure."

Weber State University professor Sally Shigley will lead a discussion about two novels deal-ing with espionage at 7 p.m. Aug. 1 at the Brigham City Library, 26 E. Forest St.

The novels to be discussed are "American Assassin" (Pocket Books, $9.99) by Vince Flynn, who died last month from prostate cancer, and "The Camel Club" (Vision, $8) by David Baldacci, of Vienna, Va.

The discussion is part of a year-long reading/discussion series on espionage and is funded by the library and the Utah Humanities Council. For more information, call 435-723-5850.

Author Craig Johnson, of Ucross, Wyo., will read from and sign the ninth book in his Walt Long-mire series, "A Serpent's Tooth" (Viking, $26.95), at 7 p.m. Thursday.

The success of The New York Times best-selling series contin-ues to grow after A&E's hit show "Longmire" introduced new fans to the Wyoming sheriff. 'A Serpent's Tooth" follows a Mormon splinter group's "lost boy" in his search for his missing mother. The trail leads to an interstate polygamy group that's presiding over a stockpile of weap-ons and harboring a vendetta.

The book signing will be at the Viridian Events Center, 8030 S. 1825 West, West Jordan.

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