From Publishers Weekly
Fox weaves a colorful tale of ancient Cherokee legends, magic, and the beings known as the Immortals, the creators of the world. Years after the events of 2009's Zadayi Red , Shonan is chief of his people and refuses to allow his family to use magic, which he blames for a great loss. But his son, Aku, inherited his mother's shape-shifting ability and longs to use it. Just as he begins to learn his power, he encounters a violent tribe called the Brown Leaf People and is forced on a quest to the Darkening Land, the underworld, to save his sister and father with the help of his great-grandmother and unusual companions. Readers who like plenty of introspection to accompany their spell casting will enjoy this exploration of Cherokee lore combined with a classic coming-of-age narrative. (Mar.)
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Review
Northern California Independent Bookseller Association’s 2009 Best Book Award Winner
San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller
"Visionary financier Isaias Hellman was the Warren Buffett and Alan Greenspan of early California rolled into one. He arrived in L.A. as a practically penniless, 16-year-old German Jew when there were only 300 other Europeans in town. Three decades later, he controlled much of the booming city’s capital, land, and public works—then he acquired Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco through a merger, earning headlines as the West’s richest man. Hellman starred in so many aspects of the state’s phoenixlike rise between the Civil War and the Depression that he became our Zelig, only with a really thick portfolio. The banker’s bonds with the financial elite—fellow Jews like Meyer Lehman (his brotherin- law), gentiles like Collis Huntington—made skittish pioneer depositors in both cities less prone to panic. Still, this giant figure had been lost to history until local journalist Frances Dinkelspiel, Hellman’s great-great-granddaughter (and the sister of this magazine’s president), stumbled onto his papers at the California Historical Society. Eureka! Many underappreciated developments in California’s astonishing adolescence—the emergence of SoCal, the UC system, post-1906 San Francisco, Hiram Johnson, Lake Tahoe, Southern Pacific Railroad, Hetch Hetchy, U.S. Zionism, you name it—are recovered here in elegantly restrained prose. A-"--San Francisco Magazine
"Impressively researched and engagingly told...Dinkelspiel does an excellent job of tracing Hellman's career as a financier, and sketches in a crisp portrait into the glittering San Francisco Jewish community into which he and his family ultimately settled. [A] compelling account of Hellman the giant of finance."--...