For your reading pleasure today, a twisty domestic suspense novel and a strange/wonderful journey through a damaged brain seeking healing through art.

(Courtesy of Lake Union Publishing)

“Fortune”: by Ellen Won Steil (Lake Union Publishing, $16.99)

Ellen Won Steil (Courtesy of the author)

It was as though they were the Witches of Rosemary Hills. A trio of outcasts at this point, assembled around the table to determine their next move. It didn’t matter what choices they had made since that night eighteen years ago to catapult them away from it. It was a game of chess they could never win, carrying them back together, no matter what. This was their bond. This was the inevitable cost of what they’d done. — from “Fortune”

It was prom night 2004 when good friends Alex, Cleo and Jemma were covered in blood as they did what needed to be done. It was their secret and they couldn’t know it was the same night the body of a baby the town called Baby Ava was found. The child was buried and the mystery surrounding her death was never solved.

As “Fortune” begins it’s 2022 and Cleo Song, Alexandra Collins and Jemma Slater haven’t seen one another for years. Now they are all back in Rosemary Hills. Cleo is a Korean American (as is the author) who has moved in with her mother along with her young son. Jemma is a controversial state senator who has a son and a teen daughter who has secrets, and Alex is a top divorce lawyer whose own marriage is crumbling. She sees her dominating mother although Maud tormented her when she was a child.

When the town’s richest man dies, his widow Edie discovers in a deposit box she didn’t know existed the names of the three women on top of a yellowed picture of a baby. Why did her beloved husband leave this strange memento?

To unlock the secret, Edie announces a $43 million lottery open to everyone in the town. All they need to do is donate a drop of their blood. This is just her ruse to find a DNA match — and there is one.

But if readers who think they know where this twist-and-turn story is going, think again. At least half the book is taken up with the three women’s childhoods and current family lives, planting clues. Now the trio is being threatened by Edie, who insists if they don’t donate their blood she will go to the authorities.

And there are mysteries within mysteries. For instance, who is the silent and unseen patient Cleo is hired to read to?

If you want stories about women at a critical time of their lives, this one is for you.

The author, who lives in Minnesota, grew up in Iowa and holds a law degree from William Mitchell College of Law. She says she believes most good stories have at least a hint of darkness in them. But she offsets that belief with tender writing about the women’s love for their children.

(Wisdom Editions)

“In the Cobwebs of My Mind”: by Megan Bacigalupo (Wisdom Editions, $18.99)

Nabu then tossed letters and numbers into my subarachnoid space. Spider used all eight of her legs and spread many alphabets in different directions and languages… some were primordial, some pictographs. Spider then said, ‘Nabu is the keeper of these letters. I am associated with magic. In the web so are you. We exist in the cobwebs of your mind. This is your reality.’ — from “In the Cobwebs of My Mind”

Megan Bacigalupo (Courtesy of the author)

Subtitled  “A Vivid and Magical Recollection of Surviving a Brain Hemorrhage,” this unusual book is a window into the author’s artistic, imaginative mind as she grapples with the effects of a brain aneurysm in 2017. She knows how lucky she is to have survived an ordeal that kills people or leaves them disfigured and with other physical problems.

Bacigalupo has an artistic brain, and her memories of those two weeks in the ICU and months after are interesting because they are sometimes supernatural. For instance, in the hospital she felt surrounded by those living and dead, including her grandmother with her beehive hairdo. She has always felt a dual relationship with a horse who led her through the hospital halls and appeared when she needed help. Throughout her story she is accompanied by her muses Spider and Nabu, a Babylonian god of writing.

The author’s need to tell her story led her down many paths. She wrote essays and short stories and used other forms but it wasn’t until she was mentored by Bain Boehlke, former Jungle Theater artistic director, that her imagination took a leap. At her mentor’s urging, she began to envision her experience as a play or one-woman show, and much of the book is made up of her efforts to write a script and sketch out stage settings using her own artwork ranging from the abstract (spider webs like filaments in the brain) to her spirit guides.

This is not a linear book; brain trauma doesn’t work that way. It meanders through the author’s research on how the brain works, her hospital records, memories of how she felt just before the crisis as she rode a bike, and the exhaustion and confusion after her surgery. The best way to read it is to just go along on her journey, which Bacigalupo dedicated to all survivors of brain hemorrhage.

The author holds a degree in human services and has worked in the Minneapolis restaurant business for decades. Since her stroke she has had articles published in national publications. Her parents, Charleen and Ronald, are well-known in the Twin Cities. Ronald, who died in 2003, was publisher for a few years of the Highland Villager newspaper. The couple co-founded the Downtowner community newspaper in the 1970s. After their divorce, Charleen founded Charleen Bacigalupo Productions. In the book Megan thanks her mother for her support.

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