Weekend picks for book lovers

Jul. 6, 2013
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'The Arrivals' is a weekend pick for book lovers.

by USA TODAY, USATODAY

by USA TODAY, USATODAY

What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY's picks for book lovers include a July Fourth-themed history and a grown-up sci-fi title from young-adult fave Melissa Marr.

The Arrivals by Melissa Marr; William Morrow, 288 pp.; fiction

Belinda Carlisle sang that "heaven is a place on Earth," but the Wasteland - where dead killers wind up in Melissa Marr's novel The Arrivals - is like Kenny Rogers' hell.

The book, Marr's second adult tome after creating a young-adult career for herself, explores the awesome fantasy/Western conceit of a place where weaponized monks, vampiric "bloedzuigers" and other monsters roam.

It's a terrain where towns seem like they're straight out of a wild frontier landscape and odd natives share existence with the Arrivals, a group of people who've died and been resurrected in this weird environment.

Chloe, a recovering alcoholic from the year 2010, wakes up in the Wasteland after having fallen off the wagon. There, she joins a gang of folks including Jack and Kitty, siblings from the Old West; Edgar, a Prohibition-era gangster; and Melody and Francis, straight from the 1960s.

In this novel by the author of the best-selling memoir The Glass Castle, 12-year-old Jean Holladay (known as "Bean") and her 15-year-old half-sister, Liz, are left to their own devices after their mother abandons them.