Share how the Tucson Festival of Books inspired you

The Tucson Festival of Books can be inspirational and we hope you’ll share how it inspired you.

I’m caught in the web of dreams, disappointment and deceit that is woven into tale of a Nigerian couple in Nebraska in Julie Iromuanya’s “Mr. and Mrs. Doctor.”

Seeing snow for the first time through the eyes of Ifi the day she joins Job, her husband from an arranged marriage, in America. Their lives are based on a lie — that Job is a doctor, not a nursing assistant on the night shift.

Iromuanya takes us into their ragged world, with cockroaches on the floor and cracks in the walls of their dingy, crumbling apartment, as Job tries to define his world with a huge television and a white lab coat and a stethoscope.

The book is one of the five finalists for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, which will be awarded April 11 in New York.

Reading about Iromuanya, who is an assistant professor of English and Africana literature at the University of Arizona, fascinated me. She is the daughter of Igbo Nigerian immigrants and grew up in the Midwest.

The simple complexity of the story’s premise was intriguing and I decided to read the book, which I might not have selected had I not been introduced to it at the festival.

Every page is intriguing.

Mystery writer J.A. Jance tells the story of how the Tucson Festival of Books has the power to change lives.

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A few years ago, through one of Literacy Connects coaches, Jance says in her blog, “I met a woman named Marcia, who at age 58, was using my Joanna Brady books to learn to read.

“Her inability to read came from a combination of English as a Second Language and dyslexia. Now in her sixties and able to read, Marcia has advanced out of what was once a permanently a dead-end job,” Jance says.

“She’s read all the Joanna books and has moved on to the Beaumonts, enjoying reading ‘every single word.’ Oh, and she also volunteers and reads books aloud at her grandkids’ schools!”

Jance told the “Marcia” story when she received the Founders Award at the festival’s Authors Dinner to demonstrate “how the festival’s literacy efforts have changed one person’s life for the better and made a difference in the community at large in the process.”

The book festival piques imaginations and can be inspirational.

It can inspire you to read a compelling new author (like Iromuanya) push you to read a book outside of your genre comfort zone (like a Jance mystery), explore a new topic you didn’t know about, start writing your own novel (even if it is just for you to read), pursue a new course or take an unexpected action.

Tell us how the book festival inspired you and we’ll post some of the replies on our blog, tucson.com/bookfest, and in the newspaper.

Send an email to abrown@tucson.com with your stories.