Books

Todd Elvis is an out-of-work ETA (Elvis Tribute Artist). Looking for a career change, he hooks up with three wildly unconventional octogenarians, joining them on their madcap romp through their Golden Years. There’s the ever-vivacious Rose, a retired opera singer with a zest for life and a houseful of treasures that her children have no interest in inheriting; Lily, a semi-retired acting teacher with a hearing problem who still must work to support herself; and Iris, an author with a closet full of unsold books about the paranormal. Her goal is to sell them all before passing from this earthly realm.

An Octogenarian herself, author June Gossler Anderson, writes historical non-fiction and historical fiction, paranormal non-fiction, children’s books, and for a change of pace, this book, Todd Elvis and the Three Octogenarians, bordering on old-age fantasy.

*Available at The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

When Bill dies suddenly and unexpectedly, Karen can’t help wondering what has happened to the essence of the man who was once her husband. Her quest to find answers leads to her becoming a ghost tour guide in the haunted City of Anoka and realizing that she knows things about the City’s past that aren’t written in the script. During one of her tours, she meets a psychic who introduces her to a past-life regressionist who sends her on a journey to “the other side,” to relive a past life in 1851 Anoka.

*Also available at The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

Between the covers of this book, you will find stories about the cities within Anoka County tracing the people who once lived in them and the things that happened in them that have become buried beneath the layers of more recent events. The author started “digging up the past” in Anoka County when she was asked to be one of four contributing history writers for the Anoka Union Herald. Under the auspices of the Anoka County Historical Society, she published 80 columns between June of 2009 and June of 2016 when her last column appeared in that popular section of the paper. They are now gathered together in this book in a loose chronological order according to the present Cities of Anoka County in which the events happened and the people lived.

*Also available at The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

Between the covers of this book are the accounts of those who have witnessed unexplainable happenings in both the Masonic Lodge and its next-door neighbor, Colonial Hall. In her book, the author delves into the history of both buildings and shares the findings of the experts in explaining the supernatural phenomena. She has personally taken part in paranormal investigations to better help both the reader and herself appreciate and understand what’s going on the realm of the unknown.

*Also available at Magus Books (1948 Central Ave. NE Mpls.) & The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

Ireland is famous for its “thin places,” a membrane or a thin layer between worlds that cross over each other. From pagan times to present, Ireland’s dark history has been recorded in its abbeys and churches, forts and castles, jails and graveyards by those who lived during those turbulent times and often perished because of them. Their ghosts are eyewitnesses to this history. Sometimes they are the history. A travelogue like no other, Traveling on the Dark Side: History and Haunting of the Emerald Isle, tells the stories of Ireland’s tumultuous past as recorded through the lens of its ghosts and legends.

*Also available at Magus Books (1948 Central Ave. NE Mpls.) & The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

Dracula was published in 1897 by Bram Stoker. This gothic novel launched an entire genre of literature and film about vampires, those sinister figures who use their super-natural powers to hunt humans and drink their blood. From the stone cold crypt beneath St. Michan’s Church in Dublin to the magnificent ruin of Whitby Abbey in England to the storied castles of Romania once frequented by Vlad Tepes III, known by reputation as “Vlad the Impaler,” the author traces the stories and influences that led to the creation of Bram Stoker’s timeless masterpiece of horror, Dracula.

*Also available at Magus Books (1948 Central Ave. NE Mpls.) & The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

Take an Indian burial ground, a Hmong refugee, a con artist, a mysterious Indian woman, the ethnocentric president of a society of Bluebloods, a curious stone, and thirteen-year old Elizabeth Mae Radcliff. Put them all in Maggie Falls, Minnesota and you’ve got The Shaman Stone, a rip-roaring mystery to please adolescents and adults alike.
Review by Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Latehomecomers, a Hmong family memoir: “The Shaman Stone, by June Gossler Anderson, is an ambitious project the seeks to speak to the foundations of a nation, more specifically, to a Minnesota that is growing in diversity and asking tough questions of allegiance to its young. The story is a fast-paced adolescent journey into discovering who we are as individuals with complicated family dynamics and the deeper politics of who belongs where. It traverses an imagined landscape in the familiars of Minnesota and traces the activities of places and people in a young girl’s encounter with the Hmong and Native American of prehistoric and contemporary Minnesota.”

*Also available at Magus Books (1948 Central Ave. NE Mpls.) & The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

Through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl, we are transported back in time, becoming part of her life as she struggles with the perils and excitement of going to grade school during the turmoil of WWII when patriotism was high and American families pulled together and sacrificed. Based on the author’s experiences as a schoolgirl in the 1940s, The Flip-flop Year takes you back to a time when chewing gum in class was a punishable offense and classes competed for the honor of amassing the biggest pile during school-wide paper sales.

*Also available at The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

Shades of Childhood, is a backward look at childhood from the vantage point of adulthood. Spanning the generations from the Model T Ford to Virtual Reality, it is a collection of funny little feel-good stories tied together by the grandmas and the grandpas, the aunts and the uncles, the sisters, and the Cousin, and especially the Mom and Dad whose strong sense of family set the scenes for the stories in this book. Children of all ages will enjoy these Children’s Stories for Grownups.

*Also available at The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

When the author’s oldest grandson, Nick, was little, his greatest joy was to go fishing with his dad and grandpa for “Normans.” It wasn’t too long before Grandma June conjured up Wally Walleye to keep Norman Northern company and sent them off on some fishy adventures. Tale One, “How Wally and Norman Became Friends,” Tale Two, “Diet and Exercise,” Tale Three, “Wally and Norman Go to School,” Tale Four, “Wally and Norman Go South for the Winter.”

*Also available at The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

“Worms in my house! Garbage in my basement!” Recycling takes on a new dimension when the Wriggles become worm farmers and find that “there is a place for everything, and everything is in its place.”

*Also available at The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

In 2016, June Gossler Anderson was asked to be part of a team of 27 DAR writers researching and writing the biographies of the 72 Minnesota men who have received our nation’s highest award, the Medal of Honor, to commemorate the Medal of Honor Convention that was to be held in Minneapolis/St.Paul in October of that year. June took the project one step farther and saw to the publication of this invaluable history. In the fall of 2022, Minnesota writer/historian, Doug Ohman, took the project to another level, using it for the basis of his PBS documentary in which he taped interviews with surviving friends and family of these men, now all deceased.

*Also available at The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)

On August 9th, 1862, Henry Brown Annis was one month short of his 31 ^st birthday when he enlisted in Company B, 96 ^th Illinois to fight for the Cause of the Union on the battlefields of Chickamauga and Chattanooga, leaving behind his wife, Emma, to tend the farm and care for their four young children. The Battle of Chickamauga was a bloody disaster for both sides and a shaky victory for the South. By comparison, its aftermath, the Battle of Chattanooga, was a glorious victory for the North and a severe blow to the dying Confederate Cause. Years later when reflecting on his Civil War adventures, Henry Annis wrote an account of the heady battle in his memoir, “Our Experience on Lookout Mountain, November 23,24,25, 1865.” One hundred years later, Henry’s great-granddaughter, June Gossler Anderson, came upon a copy of the faded yellow manuscript. Pondering its significance, she researched the battles and the role her ancestor and the 96 ^th Illinois had played in them, attempting to retrace Henry’s wartime experience and reconstruct it in the larger context of his regiment and of the battles themselves. Great-grandpa Henry and the Battle of Lookout Mountain

*Also available at The Big White House (3rd Ave., Anoka)