• September’s Book of the Month

    Author: Blackall, Sophie

    Publisher: New York : Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, [2021]

    Most cats appreciate a toy mouse–and might even purr once in a while. Not Max, who prefers to stare at the wall. One by one, his new family gives up on him, except for the boy, who loves his cat so much, he’ll do anything to keep him. Even the thing he dreads most. Which, as it turns out, makes everything quite positive! —

  • July’s Book of the Month

    Author: Kelly, Martha Hall 

    Publisher: Random House (Firm), (issuing body.)

    Unsung women and their quest for love, freedom, and second chances. / Caroline Ferriday, a socialite in New York, has her hands full with her post at the French consulate, but on the eve of a fateful war, her world is changed forever when Hitler’s army invades Poland in September, 1939; and then sets its sights on France. Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, an ocean away from Caroline, senses her carefree youth disappearing as she is drawn deeper into her role as courier for the underground resistance movement. In a tense atmosphere of watchful eyes and suspecting neighbors, one false move can have dire consequences. For Herta Oberheuser, the ambitious young German doctor, an ad for a government medical position seems her ticket out of a desolate life. Once hired, though, Herta finds herself trapped in a male-dominated realm of Nazi secrets and power. The lives of these three women are set on a collision course when the unthinkable happens and Kasia is sent to Ravensbruck, the notorious Nazi concentration camp for women. Their stories cross continents–from New York to Paris, Germany, and Poland–as Caroline and Kasia strive to bring justice to those whom history has forgotten.

  • June’s Book of the Month

    Author: Harmel, Kristin

    Publisher: New York : Gallery Books, 2020.

    Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a magazine lying open nearby. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in sixty-five years–a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names. The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II–an experience Eva remembers well–and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from–or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer–but will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war? As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva decides she must find a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.

  • May’s Book of the Month

    Author: Abdullah, Chelsea

    Publisher: New York, NY : Orbit, 2022.

    Summary: “Loulie al-Nazari is the Midnight Merchant: a criminal who, with the help of her jinn bodyguard, hunts and sells illegal magic. When she saves the life of a cowardly prince, she draws the attention of his powerful father, the sultan, who blackmails her into finding an ancient lamp that has the power to revive the barren land-at the cost of sacrificing all jinn. With no choice but to obey or be executed, Loulie journeys with the sultan’s oldest son to find the artifact. Aided by her bodyguard, who has secrets of his own, they must survive ghoul attacks, outwit a vengeful jinn queen, and confront a malicious killer from Loulie’s past. And, in a world where story is reality and illusion is truth, Loulie will discover that everything-her enemy, her magic, even her own past-is not what it seems, and she must decide who she will become in this new reality”–

  • April’s Book of the Month

    Author: Barbara Kingsolver

    Publisher: New York : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2022.

    Summary: “Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.” Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It’s the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

  • March’s Book of the Month

    Author: Toews, Miriam 1964

    Publisher: Waterville, Maine : Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2019.

    Summary: Between 2005 and 2009, in a remote religious Mennonite colony, over a hundred girls and women were knocked unconscious and raped, often repeatedly, by what many thought were ghosts or demons, as a punishment for their sins. As the women tentatively began to share the details of the attacks — waking up sore and bleeding and not understanding why — their stories were chalked up to ‘wild female imagination’. Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events. Eight women, all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their colony and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in, meet secretly in a hayloft with the intention of making a decision about how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. They have two days to make a plan, while the men of the colony are away in the city attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists (not ghosts as it turns out but local men) and bring them home. How should we live? How should we love? How should we treat one another? How should we organise our societies? These are questions the women in Women Talking ask one another.

  • February’s Book of the Month

    Author: Sullivan, Tom

    Publisher: New York, NY : Balzer + Bray, Harper Alley, imprints of HarperCollins Publishers, [2021]

    A minute-by-minute account of the only unsolved airplane hijacking in the United States uses reproductions of FBI files and investigation photographs to chronicle the events surrounding an unidentified extortionist’s 1971 hijacking and disappearance.

  • January’s Book of the Month

    Author: Hur, June

    Publisher: New York : Feiwel and Friends, 2021.

    1426, Joseon (Korea). Hwani’s family has never been the same since she and her younger sister went missing and were later found unconscious in the forest near a gruesome crime scene.Years later, Detective Min-Hwani’s father-learns that thirteen girls have recently disappeared from the same forest that nearly stole his daughters. He travels to their hometown on the island of Jeju to investigate… only to vanish as well.Determined to find her father and solve the case that tore their family apart, Hwani returns home to pick up the trail. As she digs into the secrets of the small village-and collides with her now estranged sister, Maewol-Hwani comes to realize that the answer could lie within her own buried memories of what happened in the forest all those years ago.