Librarian's Pick
Here's what our librarians are reading lately.Librarian’s Pick: Inland – Tea Obreht
“Wife and mother Nora Lark lives in an unincorporated Arizona town struck by drought. When Inland opens, her husband is out searching for potable water and her two older sons have disappeared, leaving her alone with her youngest son, Toby, and her husband’s 17-year-old cousin, Josie, known for her psychic powers. Both Josie and Toby swear the homestead is being menaced by a mysterious beast, and between the young cousins’ growing hysteria and the lack of drinking water, Nora is at her wit’s end. But how can Nora doubt their claim when she herself carries on a daily conversation with her daughter, Evelyn, who died of heatstroke as a baby?
Outlaw Mattie Lurie has only the dimmest memories of childhood and the Muslim religion in which he was raised before coming to the United States. Surrounded by death for most of his life, Lurie encounters ghosts at every turn. Orphaned young, he did whatever he could to survive and, after killing a man, remains on the run. When Lurie meets up with a traveling caravan of camels and their drivers who are working for the U.S. Army, he feels a personal connection to their leader, Hi Jolly, and throws in his lot with theirs.
Obreht mixes the fictional with the factual in the same effortless way she mixes the magical with the real, the beast with the human. Inland is based, in part, on the true history of the use of camels in the Southwest after the Mexican-American War significantly expanded America’s borders. Though the novel could have benefited from some streamlining, the final chapter in which the paths of Nora and Lurie finally cross is a brilliant prose poem on the interrelationship between the living and the dead, between memory and loss.”
Librarian’s Pick: Gravity Is The Thing – Jaclyn Moriarty
“The invitation seems a bit silly to Abigail Sorenson: attend an all-expenses-paid retreat on an island off the coast of Tasmania to learn about a self-help book. But it’s an opportunity she can’t refuse, even if she does expect a catch in the form of a sales pitch.
This retreat isn’t about any old self-help book. The invitation promises to reveal the mystery behind The Guidebook, a tome Abi has received by mail, one chapter at a time, for 20 years. The first chapter arrived when Abi was 15, just before her slightly younger brother, Robert, also 15, disappeared. Although the events didn’t seem to be connected, they’re inextricably bound in Abi’s mind. So what’s the worst that could happen? The retreat might be a sales pitch scam, or it could solve the mysteries that have defined Abi’s life.
Abi couldn’t have predicted the retreat’s reveal, and the experience stays with her as she returns to life in Sydney. Abi begins to reflect on her life, the end of her marriage, the fact that she runs what she’s dubbed a happiness café. Has her light attitude toward life been an effort to turn from the gravity of her experiences? The Guidebook examined another meaning of the word: “Of course, gravity is not a thing. It’s just a way of describing the fact that things fall.” Perhaps Abi has been resisting that fall for decades.”
Librarian’s Pick: Haben – Haben Girma
“Haben Girma was born deafblind in California, to refugee parents forced to flee war-torn Eritrea. While her mother and father struggled to cope as immigrants, Girma simply yearned to belong—“a deafblind girl in a sighted, hearing world.” As her vision and hearing continued to fade and her parents grew increasingly cautious, Girma fought for her independence. Against their wishes, she went to Mali to help build a schoolhouse, left home for college in Portland, Oregon, and moved across the country for Harvard Law School. Along the way, she found new ways to manage her disabilities, through technology, teamwork and self-education that included a “blindness boot camp.” Today Girma speaks from a global stage, advocating for improved access to education and services for disabled people. In her often hilarious and utterly inspiring memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, she shares her trials and triumphs.”
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Librarian’s Pick: A Pure Heart – Rajia Hassib
“A Pure Heart grapples with the question of how to be many things at once—a condition that afflicts everyone but requires only some to justify their complexities.
Rajia Hassib’s novel follows the divergent lives of two Egyptian sisters, Rose and Gameela Gubran. Rose, an Egyptologist, falls for an American journalist and moves with him to New York. Gameela remains in Egypt, embraces Islam and marries a much older man. The story begins in the aftermath of Gameela’s death due to a suicide bombing during the chaotic years following Egypt’s failed revolution. Slowly, Hassib charts the events leading up to this conclusion, working her way backward through a series of intertwined lives in both Egypt and America.
Hassib is especially talented at rendering the small details of daily Egyptian life—not in some exoticized fashion but rather as a foundation on which to lay the wide variety of experiences, ideologies and aspirations of the country’s citizenry. These details, found throughout the book, shine. A description of habitual lateness, for example: “What are a few minutes here or there in a country that’s been around for seven thousand years?” There is some hand-holding—not a single Arabic phrase or idiom goes unexplained for the benefit of the Western reader—but for the most part, it works.”
Librarian’s Pick: Don’t Wait Up – Liz Astrof
“What kind of mom is Liz Astrof, who, when her son was born, quipped, “Don’t take the tags off—we may not be keeping him”? She’s a hilariously honest one who shares a series of personal essays in Don’t Wait Up: Confessions of a Stay-at-Work Mom. A TV comedy writer (“The King of Queens,” “2 Broke Girls” and more), she describes how endless hours in the writing room fill her with guilt about her family (strong-willed daughter; anxious, fact-spewing son; supportive husband), leaving her to wonder how much of her children’s early years she’s going to watch on an iPhone.
Interspersed with Astrof’s domestic tales are moving, fascinating and, of course, amusing essays that explore her troubled upbringing. Her mentally unstable mother left when Astrof was 5. Amid the abuse, Astrof and her older brother, Jeff, would hide under the bed, murmuring “safe-safe” to each other. As an adult, Astrof constantly questions her parenting skills, fearing she might turn into her mother. In a stunning essay called “Happy New Year,” Astrof finds herself coming to the rescue of her son in the midst of a meltdown, noting, “If I ever feared I was anything like my mother—which I did, every moment of every day—it was moments like this, moments of knowing what to do for my child and wanting to do them, that proved to me that I wasn’t anything like her.”
Don’t Wait Up is a funny, fascinating memoir of mothering that will definitely keep readers up way past their bedtime, laughing and sometimes crying page after page.”
Librarian’s Pick: The Oysterville Sewing Circle – Susan Wiggs
“Caroline Shelby’s life has been turned upside down. First, scandal destroys the promising clothing designer’s budding career in New York. Then, Caroline’s close friend dies suddenly, leaving her the legal guardian of her friend’s two young children, Flick and Addie, a task for which she feels totally unprepared.
With nothing to keep her in New York, Caroline drives cross-country with her two grieving charges to Oysterville, Washington, the hometown she left years earlier and to which she never envisioned returning. There, she finds her family and town both familiar and changed. She must also face her first love, Will, who married her then-best friend, Sierra. Returning to the fabric shop where she discovered her love of design, Caroline slowly begins to rebuild her life and career and even discovers her mothering skills. She also assuages her guilt in failing to help her late friend by creating the Oysterville Sewing Circle, a group for women who’ve experienced abuse.”
Librarian’s Pick: They Called Us Enemy – George Takei
“In They Called Us Enemy, pop culture icon and social activist George Takei harks back to his childhood, several years of which were spent in internment camps during World War II. He was 4 when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and 120,000 Japanese Americans were subsequently removed from their homes and sent to prison camps along the West Coast.
Takei and co-writers Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott capture the terror, fear and frustration of those years, and Harmony Becker’s art masterfully conveys the harsh violence of warplanes and bombs, as well as the sweet sadness of kids playing within barbed-wire fences.
They Called Us Enemy is an important read for anyone who wants to learn the full truth of our country’s history of institutionalized racism and gain greater context for our present. A tribute to Takei’s parents, this meditation on citizenship and community will educate, challenge and inspire.”
Librarian’s Pick: Thing’s You Save in a Fire – Katherine Center
“Some people work to live, but Cassie Hanwell lives to work. Her job as a firefighter—and an extremely good one at that—gives her a sense of purpose that nothing else ever has. With grit and unwavering determination, Cassie has worked her way up the ranks of the Austin, Texas, fire department, earning the respect and admiration of her male colleagues. She’s even the first woman to win the department’s prestigious Valor Award. But on the evening of the award ceremony, an impulsive decision, triggered by an encounter with a blast from her past, may jeopardize everything for which Cassie has worked so hard. With her career on the line, Cassie agrees to transfer to an old-school fire department on the outskirts of Boston, where she’ll have to prove herself to her new squad, who have made it clear that there’s no room for a “lady” in their fire station.
The only person who doesn’t ignore her or treat her with outright hostility is a fellow newcomer, known as the Rookie, who proves to be a different kind of problem—because Cassie decided a long time ago that she would never fall in love, no matter how considerate or attractive or good a cook he might be. There’s no way her career can survive another scandal, but as she spends more time with the Rookie—and begins reconnecting with her estranged mother—Cassie can’t help but wonder if she should let her past go up in flames and make room for something new.”
Librarian’s Pick: Motherland – Elissa Altman
“There’s a jagged longing that animates the relationship between daughters and mothers. A daughter’s desire to please and be loved often cascades into enduring joy or peripatetic bitterness, while a mother’s desire to be loved and emulated often pours into exultant pride or raging resentment. Elissa Altman’s haltingly poignant Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing captures with clear-eyed candor the ways that Altman struggles to love her mother despite her mother’s insistence on creating Altman in her own image.
Altman’s mother, Rita, is a lifelong Manhattanite who buys makeup from Saks or Bloomingdale’s to assuage her loneliness and preserve her image of herself as a beautiful woman who once appeared on television. Rita’s marriage to Altman’s father ended in divorce because she felt like he could never provide for her material needs, and she continues to search for men who can. Rita wants a daughter who resembles her, so she tries to dress her only daughter elegantly and buys her cosmetics that will emphasize her beauty. Altman’s tomboyish approach to life disappoints her mother, and as Altman grows older, she eventually moves out of the city to Connecticut to live with her wife.
The circles of love, longing and loathing widen, punctuated by Rita’s daily calls to her daughter, calling forth Altman’s own anger, regret and love. As Altman so gracefully describes it, “My mother and I have been burning for half a century. . . . We bob and weave; we love and we loathe; we shout and whisper, and the next morning we do it all over again.” When her mother falls and becomes fully dependent on her, Altman feels the rush of “can’t-live-with-her-can’t-not-take-care-of-her” wash over her as she shuttles to Manhattan to care for her mother, who continues to be dissatisfied with her daughter and her daughter’s chosen life.
The beauty of Motherland lies in its embrace of the raggedness of relationships and in its candid acknowledgment that sometimes resolution and reconciliation simply elude us. But that longing for reconciliation itself functions as a form of resolution.”
Librarian’s Pick: Delayed Rays of A Star – Amanda Lee Koe
“Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Leni Riefenstahl were three of the most famous people in 20th-century cinema, no mean feat given the dominance of men in the cutthroat industry. And they each endured their share of prejudice, whether from accidents of birth or ill-advised associations.
The narrative begins in 1928, when Dietrich, relegated to cabaret gigs and bit parts in films, crashes the Berlin Press Ball on a producer’s last-minute invitation. There, she meets Wong, a Los Angeles native who is already an international star but who has dealt with more than her share of racism, from boys in school who made slit eyes at her to producers who commanded her to “scream like a Chinese” and said she’d be replaced if she declined. Neither woman could have known that they would embark on a brief romance, nor that four years later they would star together in Shanghai Express, one of the films that brought Dietrich the stardom she craved.
Also at the party is Riefenstahl, a photographer and wannabe actress who is angered years later when Dietrich beats her for the lead role in The Blue Angel. Most of her sections in the novel focus on her attempts to make the film Tiefland in the early 1940s and her cozy relationship with Hitler.
Many of the novel’s most affecting scenes are of the women in old age: bedridden 88-year-old Dietrich puttering around her Paris apartment and receiving mysterious calls from a 17-year-old boy who quotes Rilke to her; Wong reduced to being offered commercials in which she would have to sport a Fu Manchu mustache made of toothpaste; and 101-year-old Riefenstahl, determined “to set things straight” decades after her Nazi propaganda work.
The novel is sometimes overwritten, but Delayed Rays of a Star is a heartfelt tribute to extraordinary women who helped define modern cinema and a reminder that discrimination has always come in many guises.”