by Bethany & Staff
With just one week left of Summer Reading, these hot to go library staff picks will help you meet your reading goals and get BINGO (and a free book!). Click here for more information on our Summer Reading Challenge for grownups.
This book is first of all a blunt reminder of what I think we all know deep down but can lose sight of sometimes. Life is not fair. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen for no reason. And you have no control over most things in the universe, including what other people think and do, and even your own natural limitations. And these authors say we should truly accept all that unfairness. That will free our energy up to do whatever small act is actually within our control. If we do what we can with bad luck and live up to our own moral standards, then we can give ourselves credit for trying and take pride in our approach, regardless of the outcome. They walked through how this approach looks in lots of scenarios that would be familiar to a lot of us: addiction, self-esteem, parenthood, etc.
This book requires commitment but it's well worth it. Damon Fields, also known as “Demon Copperhead,” is born very poor and to a teenage mother in a trailer in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. Demon uses his wit and charm to survive poverty in the contemporary American South. This book feels like a contemporary telling of David Copperfield and the fact that many of the same problems and experiences in Dickens' novel are yet to be solved in today's times.
Annie is an AI humanoid robot who was built to be the perfect girlfriend. Suffocated by an overbearing and occasionally abusive partner, Annie learns as much as she can about the outside world from within their apartment and crafts a plan for escape. Greer's debut is a clever meditation on what it means to be human and what we owe to those we think are beneath us.
Tova, an old woman who cleans the aquarium at night; Cameron, a young man who grew up not knowing either of his parents; and Marcellus, a very intelligent and very bored octopus in captivity. All three of these viewpoints come together in a story about finding your family and learning to live with the past. This has been on my to-read list for a long time, and I absolutely devoured it in two afternoons! I can't wait to see what Shelby Van Pelt writes next.
The goals of emperors, governors, people of faith, colonizers, and warriors are all explored in the novel. Set in the early 1500s, Hernan Cortes and his conquistadors find themselves in the royal palace on Moctezuma, but something seems off. Throughout the novel, you begin the understand the true intentions of all parties involved, revolving around the strange beasts the bearded men came with.
This book is the latest novel released in the Mercy Thompson series and it did not disappoint. It is written in a slightly different style, but I loved how the book is mixing and blending mythologies and different beliefs to tell more of the story of Mercy and her pack. What is also refreshing to see as well is that it doesn't erase the trauma from the last two books and shows how everyone is healing and growing together and how even "heroes" have some off days.
For newly independent readers, this early chapter book is a charming look at Little Shrew's daily life. Little Shrew is a tiny creature with a few good friends, modest ambitions, and a job in a currency exchange. I found myself envying Shrew's beautifully illustrated life before realizing it's actually a lot like my own. I can't decide if I'm comforted by having the life I already live aestheticized, or if I'm sad that even in a world with adorable anthropomorphic animals, the most we can hope for is a nine-to-five with distant dreams of vacation. But maybe Little Shrew is showing us that it's enough?
Tara’s Double Feature
The story of the Rosewood massacre is a violent, racist chapter in Florida's history that was almost left to oblivion. All the residents were killed or scared away, and all the buildings were burned down except for the one that belonged to the white family. The town of Rosewood ceased to exist over a weekend. Like I did with Killers of the Flower Moon, I watched the film first, which was a dramatization, and then read the book for more of the story. I enjoyed the nuances portrayed in the characters' characters. I also enjoyed reading about places I've been to, like Cedar Key and Plant City, from this different, dark perspective. History must be remembered.
Happy reading!
