It’s Back to School time again, and the Bank of Books Malibu is marking the occasion with a Back to School Storytime for the little ones. Mr. Steve from St. Aidan’s Preschool will be with at the bookstore Saturday, Aug. 22 at 10:30 am to help slide from summer vacation into a new school year.
At 2 pm, they’ll welcome local author John Sharer, who will read and sign his new book “The Cockney Lad and Jim Crow.” Set in the same era as Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman,” “The Cockney Lad and Jim Crow” tells the story of seventeen-year-old Peter Mason, who flees the privation of postwar England for a new start in 1950s America. A chance meeting with an African-American man on a bus leads the naïve young Brit to journey to Jackson, Mississippi, where he encounters both the genial hospitality and the virulent racism typical of that era in the Deep South. When Peter falls in love with a young African-American beauty, he puts his own life and the life of her entire family in peril, and learns a bitter truth about a trusted friend.
Pacific Palisades-based author John Sharer knows the territory well; he himself is a British expatriate who traveled through the Deep South during the 1950s. John is also a distinguished Los Angeles attorney, and his courtroom scenes are unsparing in their depiction of the unequal justice African-Americans received in mid-century Mississippi. Join us for a provocative discussion of a time and place when black lives didn’t matter.
Coming to Bank of Books next week: On Saturday, Augt. 29 at 10:30 am, they’ll host a Butterfly Storytime and fundraiser for the Malibu Monarch Project, featuring a reading of local author Karen Smythe’s new book “Fredrick the Butterfly.” Karen has generously offered to donate a percentage of the sales of her book at the event to the MMP, which is working to maintain butterfly habitat in Malibu. And at 2 pm, another Malibu author, Michael Ker, will join to read and sign his new novel “American Pride.”
Bank of Books Malibu is located at 29169 Point Dume Village, Heathercliff Rd., #109.
For more information visit www.bankofbooks.com or call 310.457.5699.
