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Book reviews by library staff and guest contributors
It's 1946 and a young widow named Grace Healey stumbles upon a suitcase left under a bench in Grand Central Terminal in New York City. At the same moment, a former British special agent named Eleanor Trigg is hit by a car outside the station and killed instantly. What follows next is a tangled web of intrigue, espionage, heartbreak and heroism.
I grew up loving the work of Janet and Allan Ahlberg, so I was thrilled when I discovered Fairy Tales for Mr. Barker – a picture book written and illustrated by their daughter, Jessica Ahlberg. This cumulative story follows Lucy and her dog, Mr. Barker, through a series of fairy tales.
I used to love to wander through a bookstore and feed my reading need (this on top of checking many stacks of books out of the library). But at some point I stopped buying all those print copies, partially for space reasons, partially because of the changing bookstore landscape and partially because I was reading more and more digitally. So what's my version of strolling through the bookstore aisles? Late in the evening I look for ebook deals online to see if there's anything that catches my fancy (this on top of the library books I check out electronically and read on Libby!).
This is one of those books that I'm going to proclaim as universally beneficial. I can't imagine a person living on planet Earth who wouldn't be able to take away something from this book, starting with the shocking reality of the title Born a Crime. Trevor Noah, comedian, actor, and Jon Stewart's successor as host of The Daily Show was born in 1984 in South Africa to a black mother and a white father. His parent's interracial relationship was illegal under apartheid law, so therefore his birth was a crime.
The last few years have been a real heyday for Asian American literature. There have been blockbuster film adaptations of Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians and Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Celeste Ng’s unstoppable suburban drama Little Fires Everywhere, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer win for The Sympathizer, and critically lauded novels from Susan Choi (Trust Exercise) and Ling Ma (Severance), just to name a few.
In keeping with my new minted tradition (second posting like this, first one is here) I come to you with a report on how the Lakeview Mystery Book Group's recent discussions have gone.
July and August always feels a bit like a lull in the publishing calendar, as if the big book pushes of late May and June have exhausted publishers to the extent that they all pull up stakes and head out of town with bags bulging with books. But the upside of all those big May and June releases means midsummer is a great time for the so-called ‘midlist’ author to shine—those books that might not get the fanfare of a bestseller but are gems for the readers willing to seek them out. This July sees some particularly notable authors releasing titles that have strong appeal, but potentially with
Little Women was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869 making the classic 150 years old this year.
It’s nearly (official) summer and with the warmer temps comes OverDrive’s Big Library Read. This year’s selection is L. P. Fergusson’s World War II-set drama A Dangerous Act of Kindness. When Widow Millie Sanger finds downed German pilot Lukas Schiller on her property, she tends to his injuries and shelters him to ensure he isn’t discovered by the authorities. It could be a disastrous decision: England is at war with Germany, and the discovery of an enemy combatant on her farm could mean death for both of them.
