For those who have wondered about the stuff of fantastical tales and where it is found, Wolfe's charming memoir offers a view of the world through a storyteller's goggles. Wolfe, author of the acclaimed fable The Woman Who Lives in the Earth
, grew up in the early 1940s wandering through the tunnels under his father's Colorado tuberculosis sanitarium and across the mesas above it, where he traded with the pack rats that looted small, shiny treasures from houses and hid them in the cracks in the rocks. He spent the latter half of his childhood on his stepfather's ranch, running free with his imagination and "inventing skiing," until family violence forced him to Missoula, Mont., and he discovered a trapping of city life that haunts him throughout the book: "Instead of nature, other people became my mirror." The book ends while Wolfe is in his 20s, working in a copper mine, which is forever changing the depth of his perception: "The latticework of the underground found a conscious expression... extending itself up to the surface as a way of thinking." Thirteen hundred feet below ground, Wolfe decides he will tell stories. His memoir contains no mirrors—just magic. (June)
