Entering his room, I also entered a new world, one that was shrouded in the unfamiliar: medical specialists and surgeons, sedatives and transfusions, trach and feeding tubes, changes in medications, therapies and difficult diagnoses, long-term care facilities and rehab centers, and Lord knows what else\u2026after that first night, though a stranger there, I made that new world my home. I live there now, in the land of recovery. \u2014 from \u201cBecause We Must\u201d<\/p>\n
![\""Because](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/STP-L-BOOKS-0706_Youngblom_cover.jpg\")
(Courtesy of the University of Massachusetts Press)<\/p>\n
Tracy Youngblom\u2019s heartbreaking but ultimately hopeful memoir of life after her son Elias\u2019 car crash in 2015 is riveting reading as this Minnesota poet takes us into her family\u2019s life. First, seeing her son lying so broken in the hospital, she wonders whether he will survive. He does, but head injuries lead to the young man\u2019s blindness and a new way of navigating the world. Through medical crises and recovery, Youngblom was there for her son.<\/p>\n
On the day of the crash Youngblom, was rushing to finish preparing for a class she was going to teach when she met a uniformed officer at her door, telling her Elias had been in an accident while driving home to Coon Rapids from Fargo. His car had been hit head-on by a drunk driver.<\/p>\n
Youngblom thought she was prepared for seeing her son in the hospital, but she wasn\u2019t: \u201cHis head was swollen to an unrecognizable size, a small watermelon. Both of his eyes were swollen shut: his eyelids bulged, red and purple with bruising. Dark lines of stitches, along with bruises, crisscrossed his arms and his face, including one crooked, deep gash on his left cheek that met his mustachioed upper lip, twisting it upward\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Through years of Elias\u2019s rehab, learning Braille and finally living on his own, Youngblom was the one on whom Elias relied with resilience, grace and humor. His mother faced her own challenges about her marriage and religious faith as she fought for her son\u2019s care and coordinated with other family members. Always she tried to strike a balance between wanting to protect Elias while also letting him lead his own life as he became an adult. Now he is married and lives in Fargo where he continues his passion for drum corps music.<\/p>\n
Youngblom will read in celebration of winning the University of Massachusetts Press Juniper Prize at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls., in conversation with Lindsay Steffes, winner of the Juniper Prize for her novel \u201cGichigami.\u201d The prize recognizes outstanding works of literary fiction.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho Cares?: The real patient experience\u201d:<\/strong> by Melisssa Winger (Independently published, $29.99)<\/p>\n Melissa Winger has been a patient care advocate since 1997, undertaking the Herculean task of changing the nation\u2019s health care system to one in which the patient is treated as a human being. Her memoir could be a companion to Youngblom\u2019s because they had many of the same experiences under different circumstances.<\/p>\n Winger was an 18-year-old single mother when she gave birth to Evan, who has a rare genetic disorder. He is nonverbal and has endured countless surgeries because of more than 30 medical issues. From the beginning, Winger tried to advocate for her child, but nobody took seriously a young mother who needed help. For instance, when Evan was hospitalized as a baby, trained professionals took care of complicated procedures such as dealing with a feeding tube. But when he was released, Winger was expected to do these procedures herself with no help.<\/p>\n Along with her personal experiences, Winger references studies from reputable organizations that show the twisted mass of regulations and paperwork that knot the vast world of health care, discussing patient safety, medical devices and prescriptions, testing, home care, medical records, emergency care, funding, patient and family-centered care, and vulnerable-adult abuse. Evan now has been diagnosed with acute kidney problems and Winger must continue her often-exhausting fights for the best care available for her son. This book is so fact-filled and clear-eyed that it should have been published by a major publishing house. It should be in the hands of all of us who are potential patients as well as medical professionals.<\/p>\n \u201cBackwashed\u201d:<\/strong> by Pete Gallagher (Beaver\u2019s Pond Press, $21.95)<\/p>\n There\u2019s some kinkiness and lots of colorful characters in this novel set in and around St. Paul\u2019s Seventh Street. The twisty plot is so complicated that it\u2019s hard to know who is \u201cplaying\u201d whom and why. The main characters are Dion Drury and his bisexual sister, who never learned why their father was killed and why their mother disappeared 20 years earlier. Dion works as a civilian employee of the St. Paul police impound lot at night, and his sister is a bartender at one of two restaurants that are important meeting places in the story. What happened to the siblings\u2019 parents is being investigated by Kady L\u2019Orient, a young cop drawn to Dion while trying to make a name for herself, as well as a police lieutenant with a damaged eye who\u2019s the right-hand man and fixer for \u201cthe walrus,\u201d a ward politician who talks like the encyclopedia and is not exactly ethical in his dealings. Add a corpse in the St. Paul sewer system, the sultry owner of one of the restaurants who\u2019s married to the councilman, a big young tow truck driver whose dad was a house painter, and the piano-playing uncle with whom the siblings lived after their parents were gone, and you\u2019ve got a juicy story of corruption, deal-making and secrets\u00a0 set in familiar places St. Paul readers will enjoy visiting:<\/p>\n \u201d \u2018What can I say?\u2019 Evan told her. \u2018This is West Seventh Street. The truth takes a little while sometimes.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEscaping Limbo\u201d:<\/strong> by Mike E. Elliott (Beaver\u2019s Pond Press, $17.95)<\/p>\n Growing up Catholic in St. Paul is almost a literary subgenre, and former St. Paulite Elliott does it right in a coming-of-age story about Francis Paulson and his wild friend Izzy, set in 1968. While never belittling those who take their faith seriously, the author offers humor. For instance, the title comes from a confusing conversation his grieving mother has with the priest after she delivers a stillborn baby. The priest assures her the baby\u2019s soul is \u201csafe in limbo\u201d but when he tries to explain this place, using a Thanksgiving feast as a metaphor, it ends up being about pumpkin pie. Francis, who tells the story looking back on what happened in one year, is an altar boy in the limbo of adolescence. He wants to help Izzy get over the death of his older brother, which has sent Izzy\u2019s father into violent behavior. Meanwhile, Francis is saving money for a canoe trip to northern Minnesota with Izzy while defending his girlfriend Susan from Izzy\u2019s insults. He\u2019s also dealing with his little sister\u2019s fascination with fire and missing his beloved grandmother, founder of the family\u2019s candy factory. This tender story is a tribute to friendship and a young man questioning everything he was taught by his school\u2019s nuns and priest. The author divides his time between Minnesota and Arizona.<\/p>\n \u201cDevil\u2019s Thumb\u201d:<\/strong> by Dan Jorgensen (Speaking Volumes LLC, $19.95)<\/p>\n Devil\u2019s Thumb is a rock outcropping in the Black Hills in this third novel by Jorgensen, set in 1925 in and around the mining town of Keystone where Gutzon Borglum is poised to begin carving four presidents\u2019 faces on Mount Rushmore. This isn\u2019t the Wild West anymore, but there\u2019s crime. U.S. Marshal Al Twocrow, the only Native American lawman in the service, investigates two murders and a bootleg operation reported to be linked to gangster Al Capone. The plot is a tribute to women working in the area at the time, including a pilot who helps Twocrow when he needs swift transportation in her biplane, and a reporter who wants to get both sides of the controversy about Borglum\u2019s huge project. She\u2019s a tough woman, not too fazed by being kidnapped in a plot to stop the carving. The story starts slowly but picks up speed as a gang of bank robbers arrive after pulling a heist in Denver. There\u2019s lots of excitement as the marshal and the bad guys meet in an abandoned mine.<\/p>\n The author based this story on his experiences working at two newspapers in the Black Hills area. He was director of public relations at St. Olaf College and Augsburg University before retiring to Colorado in 2013.<\/p>\n \u201cCall Me Speed\u201d:<\/strong> by Dan Faveau (Independently published, $20.99)<\/p>\n Dan Faveau\u2019s second novel set during the Vietnam war (after \u201cThumbs Up\u201d) is not easy to read, but war isn\u2019t easy. The author, a combat-wounded veteran who served with the 1st Air Cavalry, follows a group of young soldiers as they fight in Vietnam\u2019s jungles and highlands, go on leave and always think about home.<\/p>\n Speed was a classroom troublemaker and outstanding athlete lauded for his running ability. Although his name is in the novel\u2019s title, his friends are just as important to the plot, including one who stood up to high school bullies and another who escapes farming to become a crack sniper. Horrific scenes of killing enemy soldiers face to face and young bodies thrown out of foxholes by grenades are vividly drawn, as well as the terrible living conditions the men endure as they slog up hills in endless rain with no shelter except their ponchos. Even the conclusion is sad as we see the veterans in old age. This war seems far away now, but Faveau helps us remember the real-life men who suffered and watched their comrades die as soldiers always do in our seemingly endless wars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two books that explore the deep flaws in our health care system are top of the pile today,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":43830,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,34193,1072,9656,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-43829","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-readers-and-writers","11":"tag-things-to-do","12":"tag-uncategorized","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114807338711320645","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\""Backwashed."\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/STP-L-BOOKS-0706_Gallagher_cover.jpg\")
(Courtesy of Beaver’s Pond Press)<\/p>\n![\""Escaping](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/STP-L-BOOKS-0706_Elliott_cover.jpg\")
(Courtesy of Beaver’s Pond Press)<\/p>\n![\""Devil's](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/STP-L-BOOKS-0706_Jorgensen_cover.jpg\")
(Courtesy of Speaking Volumes LLC)<\/p>\n