Kickass and A Room Of One’s Own

Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper is looking forward to his appearance Wednesday (Feb. 12, 6 p.m.) at A Room of One’s Own, a Madison bookstore,  to promote his novel MARGARET’S WAR which details how war brings on the ultimate disempowerment of women—Send us your sons and lovers, men tell women, and we will give you gold stars and a bit of money when we kill them.”

In MARGARET’S WAR, the 15-year-old narrator, his reprobate lawyer friend and Margaret hatch a plot that attempts to involve Eleanor Roosevelt in a scheme to exchange a German POW for Margaret’s soldier husband who is MIA in Europe.  It doesn’t go well.

In his shameless book promotion, the keeper and Phyllis have visited libraries and historical groups all over the state and found great interest in the forgotten historical fact that there were thousands of German POWs in Wisconsin—38 branch camps, in 1944-45 to provide much needed labor for crop harvesting and processing.

Kickass has been asked—by the keeper, of course, to repeat reviewer Jim Rowen’s assessment of MARGARET’S WAR as the “best novel about Wisconsin I have ever read.”