Blue Bicycle Books

Award-winning copywriter and author Marti Healy will be here Sat., June 18, 1 – 3 pm, to sign her novel The Secret Child. An Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Bookstores Alliance (SIBA), the book is in turns historical and fantastical, moving between Irish clans in Boston and Carolina Bay Celtic fairies in the South.

Healy will also have her first two books, The God-Dog Connection and The Rhythm of Selby on hand to sign. Currently living in Aiken, SC, Healy is working on her fourth book with her dogs Sophie and Teddy and her cat Sparkey.

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Join us for the 11^th annual Piccolo Fiction Invitational, Sat., June 4, 5 – 7 pm. For 2011, this traditionally open-armed event is a special “PFX,” inviting four South Carolina writers to share new work during the festival. The four writers will read in the courtyard adjacent to the store: Lisa Kerr, assistant professor at MUSC and author of Girls vs. Bears, Stephanie Hunt, contributing editor at Skirt! Magazine and SoMa Review, Anthony Varallo, assistant professor of English at the College of Charleston and the award-winning author of Out Loud, and Quitman Marshall, author of The Birth Gift, 14th Street, and The Slow Comet.

Free and open to the public, with reception to follow.

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Charleston native Katie Crouch brings her fresh take on the modern South to the young adult genre in her first novel for teens, The Magnolia League (Little Brown, hb., 368 pp., $17.95).

Savannah’s Magnolia Leaguers are an elite inner circle of proper Southern girls who use more than charm and good looks to stay popular and get the attention of boys. They also have a little Voodoo magic on their side. (Think Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil meets Gossip Girl.)

Crouch, the New York Times bestselling author of Girls in Trucks and Men and Dogs, will sign books at Blue Bicycle Books, Sat. Apr. 30, 1 – 3 pm. She’ll also be visiting area schools, including her alma mater Porter-Gaud.

More about The Magnolia League:

After the death of her free-spirited mother, the 16-year-old unlikely Southern debutante Alexandra

Lee is forced to move from Northern California to Savannah to live with her wealthy and matriarchal grandmother.

By birth, Alex is a rightful— if unwilling—member of the Magnolia League, Savannah’s longstanding debutante society. As Alex is thrust into the inner circle of the illustrious league (and adheres to a full-body makeover, etiquette lessons, and a bizarre and slightly hazy initiation ceremony) she discovers that the Magnolias made a pact with a legendary Voodoo family, the Buzzards. In exchange for everlasting youth, beauty and power, the women of the Magnolia League must remain in Savannah…forever.

Shocked with this discovery, Alex digs deeper into the pact and begins to fear that her mother’s death may not have been an accident. Does the Magnolia’s power come with a deadly price?

About the Author:

The author of Girls in Trucks and Men and Dogs, Katie Crouch was raised in Charleston where she attended Cotillion training but never was a debutante. She studied writing at Brown and Columbia Universities and now lives in San Francisco. For more information visit www.pickapoppy.com or www.katiecrouch.com

Pre order a signed copy here!

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Beach season is upon us. Sure, tricep dips are easily to do on a spare office chair, but what about the curls for the girls? Fortunately Blue Bike Books has plenty of volumes even thicker than the dictionary this gent is using, long books like to Infinite Jest (1104 manly pages, $17.98) to work those biceps.

(Quick Workouts, Time-Life, 1987. $19.98)