Librarian's Pick
Here's what our librarians are reading lately.Librarian’s Pick: The Island – Ragnar Jonasson
“The Island, finds the 50-ish Reykjavík detective investigating the connections between two murders. One was supposedly solved 10 years past, and the second, a modern-day killing, appears to have been an accidental fall—until ligature marks characteristic of strangling are identified on the victim’s throat. The story of the first death is simple enough. In 1987, a girl and her soon-to-be lover go off to the fjords for a romantic weekend. It begins blissfully and ends with the girl lying dead on the floor of their summer home and the boy fleeing the scene. Her father is arrested for the crime and commits suicide while in custody. Open and shut, but there are some nagging suspicions. More than one person is aware that the presiding officer, something of a climber in the police department, tampered ever so slightly with the evidence. Fast-forward 10 years to 1997, and the dead girl’s friends, including the aforementioned lover, go off to a remote island together for a reunion. One will not survive the outing, and Detective Inspector Hermannsdóttir will investigate, uncovering layer after layer of deceit. The Island was short-listed for Crime Novel of the Year Award in Iceland. Read it, and you will see why.”
Librarian’s Pick: Patsy – Nicole Dennis-Benn
“As the novel opens, it’s 1998, and Patsy is still in love with her childhood friend Cicely, who moved to America several years earlier. Patsy hopes to secure a tourist visa—her previous application was declined two years earlier with no explanation—and rekindle their romance. Soon, Patsy leaves Tru and Mama G, her religious mother who collects Jesus figurines, and flies to New York, where Cicely meets her at the airport.
Patsy’s surprise upon reuniting with her friend is one of the many turns this novel takes. Cicely lives in a brownstone in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, is married to an abusive would-be real estate mogul and is raising a son Tru’s age who takes violin lessons at a prestigious music academy. Over the next decade, Patsy fails to find the America—or the Cicely—of her dreams and has to settle for a job cleaning bathrooms in a faux-Jamaican restaurant before securing gigs as a nanny for a host of privileged women.
The story moves back and forth between Patsy’s increasingly disheartening experiences in America and Tru’s grim situation back home. Tru has to live with her father, Roy, a police officer she barely knows. As Tru enters her teens, she struggles with depression and her sexuality, all the while wondering why her mother has been gone for much longer than the promised six months and why she never calls.”
Librarian’s Pick: Ask Again, Yes – Mary Beth Keane
“In the early 1970s, Francis Gleason, an immigrant from Ireland, and Brian Stanhope attend the New York City police academy together and are paired in field training. Francis quickly marries Anne, a nurse and Irish immigrant. Brian marries Lena, the daughter of Polish and Italian immigrants. Though their career trajectories are different, within a year or two, Francis and Brian end up as neighbors in a suburban town about 20 miles north of New York.
The families are not close. In fact, Anne is unstable and aggressively antisocial. But Brian and Anne’s only son, Peter, and Francis and Lena’s youngest daughter, Kate, develop an extraordinary bond. When Peter and Kate are in eighth grade, Anne commits an act of violence that rips both families apart.”
Librarian’s Pick: Sisters And Rebels- Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
“Two decades after Confederates in the Attic, Massachusetts-based journalist Tony Horwitz dips back below the Mason-Dixon Line and into an ongoing national conflict in Spying on the South. The book retraces an antebellum journey undertaken by Frederick Law Olmsted, who explored the southern U.S. as the country careered toward civil war. Olmsted wrote dispatches for northern newspapers that were later collected into The Cotton Kingdom, a window into a society structured around slavery. Horwitz similarly seeks to shed light on the region. Pondering the “inescapable echoes of the 1850s” in today’s politics, he travels down the Ohio River on a coal barge, finds the remnants of a massive cotton and sugar plantation in Louisiana and even embarks on an uncomfortable mule ride through Texas. Horwitz is an amiable narrator who marries a journalist’s knack for scene-setting and chatting folks up with the ability to tell a good historical tale. Back up north, he concludes with a walk through New York’s Central Park, the crowning jewel in Olmsted’s subsequent career as a landscape architect.”
Librarian’s Pick: The Electric Hotel- Dominic Smith
“A photographer’s apprentice in Paris in the 1890s, Ballard was hired by the Lumière Brothers as a roaming projectionist. His travels took him as far away as Australia and America, where, in picaresque fashion, he befriended a stunt man, a French actress and the young owner of a seedy Brooklyn amusement parlor. Before long, this idiosyncratic troupe settled in the cliffs of Fort Lee, New Jersey (once a prime location for the making of American movies, hence the expression “cliffhanger”), pouring all their energy, money and talent into what Ballard refers to as the “great cinematic experiment.” It will come as no surprise to readers that the making of The Electric Hotel almost destroyed the lives and careers of the four friends.”
Librarian’s Pick: I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You- David Chariandy
“I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, a slim but touching missive to his teenage daughter. It opens with three dramatic events: President Trump’s election, a fatal shooting at a Canadian mosque and the casual racism of a white Canadian who cut in front of the dark-skinned Chariandy with the searing words, “I’m from here. I belong here.”
Struggling to counsel his daughter as she begins to face these modern realities, Chariandy turns to story—in this case, his own. He walks his daughter through the precarious and nurturing places, both geographic and psychic, that have marked his life. But this is no self-seeking memoir of struggle. Chariandy recounts the taunts he faced as a child alongside the history of slavery and indentured labor that brought his ancestors to Trinidad from Africa and South Asia. The result is a remarkable story of place and relation, of ancestry and association. In turn damning and hopeful, I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You reminds us of the deep history and connectedness of all human life.”
Librarian’s Pick: In West Mills- De’Shawn Charles Winslow
“Residents of West Mills, North Carolina, joke that their town never changes. Yet there’s never a dull moment for the stubborn, loyal characters in De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s debut novel, In West Mills. The novel opens in 1941 with a fight between main character Azalea “Knot” Centre and her man, Pratt. When Pratt enlists for the war, Knot’s neighbor Otis Lee looks after her and keeps her company. He chides her for her obsessive drinking and reading. In turn, she scolds him for his rift with a mutual friend, Valley. And so it goes, friends becoming family until the town includes three generations of fierce fighters and lovers.”
Librarian’s Pick: Green Valley – Louis Greenberg
“Louis Greenberg’s Green Valley asks what’s more valuable: freedom or peace? Tucked away from the world behind a massive wall, the sense-altering conclave of Green Valley promises an idyllic life. All inhabitants are fitted with brain-controlling hardware that coordinates a shared hallucination meant to block out the cruel realities of the outside world. When Lucie Sterling’s niece, Kira, goes missing inside Green Valley, Lucie must uncover the truth and expose the dark underbelly of this false refuge. The futuristic technology never distracts from the engaging narrative, and Greenberg centers the story on Lucie’s feelings of uncertainty and disgust even as she peels back the layers of her investigation.”
Librarian’s Pick: This Land is Our Land – Suketu Mehta
“In a heroic effort to dispel racist, destructive myths surrounding immigration, Mehta travels from city to city speaking to people at places like Friendship Park at the Mexican-American border. He also visits other countries like Morocco and the United Arab Emirates to hear the heartbreaking stories of regular people trying to migrate for a better life.
With humanity and keen insight, Mehta explores why people are migrating with higher frequency and explains why immigrants throughout history have always elicited reactionary views and backlash. But most importantly, he explains why we should stop falling for the same hateful rhetoric over and over again. Drawing from the history of racism and colonialism, he makes a case for why refugees and migrants have a positive influence on society instead of a negative one. His simple answer to anyone who asks why immigrants are coming here is: We are here because you were there.
Pulling from history, personal experiences and intimate profiles, Mehta examines the backlash to immigration, what’s behind it and why we have good reasons to be hopeful about the future.”
Librarian’s Pick: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong
“Poet Ocean Vuong’s highly anticipated debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, takes the form of a letter from a young writer to his illiterate mother. The writer, who goes by the nickname Little Dog and whose life bears a strong resemblance to Vuong’s own, is the first of his family to go to college. The letter is an attempt to share his fragile sense of self with his mother.
Little Dog’s grandmother survived the Vietnam War as a sex worker, and his mother was fathered by an American soldier. After immigrating to the United States and settling in a working-class Connecticut neighborhood, Little Dog became a victim of his mother’s abuse and a witness to his grandmother’s untreated schizophrenia. Without siblings or a father, Little Dog was isolated and lonely, hyperaware of his small size, his lack of English and his origins.”