"Crown of Dust," the debut novel by Mary Volmer, director of the SMC Honors Program, was reviewed as part of a five-book "Fiction Chronicle" in the New York Times Book Review. The novel is a gender-bending story of friendship, love and redemption set in the Wild West during the gold rush. The reviewer praised Volmer's "terse present-tense voice that invests her pioneers with piquant inner lives and a poker-faced lyricism."

Click here to read the review. (Scroll down to the third review.)