Librarian's Pick
Here's what our librarians are reading lately.Librarian’s Pick: The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls – Anissa Gray
“The novel follows a family of three grown sisters after Althea, the oldest sister and the family matriarch, is sent to jail along with her husband. Her sisters, Viola and Lillian, must rise to the occasion to care for Althea’s twin daughters. While each woman battles demons of her own, they take turns carrying the story, each adding a beautiful and vivid layer to the plot as the narrative torch is passed.
Viola, the middle sister, struggles with the eating disorder that has plagued her for years. As she contemplates whether or not she has what it takes to raise her teenage nieces, she’s also trying to reconcile her own marriage. Lillian, the youngest, has tenaciously held onto and restored her family’s old house, a place where she experienced profound pain and loneliness during her adolescence. She has a history of taking on the responsibilities of other people’s families: Along with Althea’s twin daughters, Lillian cares for her late ex-husband’s grandmother, Nai Nai. Althea’s twins are as different as sisters can be and have dealt with the fallout of their parents’ incarceration in vastly different ways. When Kim, the more headstrong of the twins, goes missing, Lillian and Violet must band together to bring her home.
The fourth narrator is Proctor, Althea’s husband, whose capacity for love is apparent in his letters to his wife. Through these letters, Proctor offers a subtle but brilliant contrast to the women’s internal monologues. Through these intimate perspectives, the family becomes a breathing entity, giving space to peripheral characters such as the parents (both deceased) and the brother, a troubled teen turned preacher.”
Librarian’s Pick: Black Leopard Red Wolf – Marlon James
“Tracker, James’ narrator, is a man without a true name, a man who seems to walk in the margins of society after a difficult childhood turned him into a loner. Still, he is renowned for his “nose,” the ability to search for and find lost things with uncanny skill, and so he is called into service to search for a vanished boy. To find the boy, he must also attempt a rare collaboration, teaming up with a strange band of characters, among them a shapeshifter known as Leopard. As the hunt begins and Tracker tells his tale, he must explore not only the significance of the boy he’s searching for but also the nature of truth itself.
Tracker’s voice—rendered in visceral, evocative prose—is immediately seductive, from his colorful use of profanity to the way he describes not just what happens to him but also how the perception of it all can shift in a moment. It’s the kind of voice that can carry you anywhere, and James puts it to good use, propelling the reader forward into an African fantasy landscape that rivals the greatest sword-and-sorcery storytellers in the history of the genre. The ambition is familiar, but the places James takes us are not, and that’s an irresistible combination.”
Librarian’s Pick: The Source of Self-Regard – Toni Morrison
“A new collection of essays and speeches from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison solidifies her legacy as one of America’s most thoughtful and important writers. Toni Morrison is such a peerless, masterful storyteller that it is easy to forget she is also one of our most engaged and engaging public intellectuals. Her new collection of essays and speeches, The Source of Self-Regard, reminds us of the breadth and depth of her concerns. Morrison ruminates on and illuminates the political, racial, social and literary issues that have long informed her work with a singular combination of curiosity and confidence.”
Librarian’s Pick: Finding Dorothy – Elizabeth Letts
“Hollywood, 1938: As soon as she learns that M-G-M is adapting her late husband’s masterpiece for the screen, seventy-seven-year-old Maud Gage Baum sets about trying to finagle her way onto the set. Nineteen years after Frank’s passing, Maud is the only person who can help the producers stay true to the spirit of the book—because she’s the only one left who knows its secrets.
But the moment she hears Judy Garland rehearsing the first notes of “Over the Rainbow,” Maud recognizes the yearning that defined her own life story, from her youth as a suffragette’s daughter to her coming of age as one of the first women in the Ivy League, from her blossoming romance with Frank to the hardscrabble prairie years that inspired The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Judy reminds Maud of a young girl she cared for and tried to help in South Dakota, a dreamer who never got her happy ending. Now, with the young actress under pressure from the studio as well as her ambitious stage mother, Maud resolves to protect her—the way she tried so hard to protect the real Dorothy.”
Librarian’s Pick: Black is the Body – Emily Bernard
“For author, professor and acclaimed academic Emily Bernard, facing adversities as a black woman in America has spawned the invaluable and hard-won ability to take control of her own narrative. Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine consists of 12 personal essays brimming with equal parts hope and fury, joy and pain. Whether exploring the delicate dynamics of her interracial marriage, the haunting memory of being stabbed by a white man while she was a graduate student at Yale or the process of adopting her twin daughters from Ethiopia, Bernard’s writing is intimate, honest and unafraid of diving into gray areas. Although society at large may deem the black body—and by extension, blackness—as synonymous with suffering, Bernard’s collection doesn’t shy away from the fact that sometimes scars are proof of life beyond the state of survival.”
Librarian’s Pick: The Far Field – Madhuri Vijay
“An unexpected friendship between a traveling Muslim garment seller from a remote Himalayan village and the aloof wife of a wealthy Hindu businessman from the southern Indian city of Bangalore forms the basis of The Far Field, the dazzling debut novel from Madhuri Vijay.
The salesman, Bashir Ahmed, is warm and charismatic, and his unlikely friend is the volatile mother of Shalini, a privileged young woman and the first-person narrator of the novel. After her mother’s death, Shalini, listless and troubled, goes off in search of Ahmed to find closure. At first it seems like an odd, reckless decision, to travel to the troubled northern end of the country—to Jammu and then Kashmir—in search of someone whom she only barely remembers from childhood and about whom she has only scant information.
In Jammu, Shalini lodges with a Muslim family that has been shattered by the loss of a son at the hands of the Indian Army. She then tracks down Ahmed’s family, who take her to their remote Indian village and treat her as one of their own. However, Shalini is in the midst of a fractured landscape, and nothing is what it seems. Hindus and Muslims are at loggerheads, and the army appears responsible for a series of disappearances. Foreign militants have been infiltrating the area, increasing tensions. Shalini’s longing for connection and love within this tumultuous setting only exacerbates her problems.”
Librarian’s Pick: The Au Pair – Emma Rous
” Seraphine is staying at Summerbourne, her family’s manor on the Norfolk coast, mourning the death of her father and reminiscing about her childhood. While rifling through old family photo albums, she is shocked to stumble across a chilling image. In it, her mother holds a baby, and Seraphine’s older brother and father stand smiling in the picture. The photograph is picture-perfect: a family posing proudly with their newborn. But Seraphine is a twin, and hours after she and her twin brother, Danny, were born, her mother tragically threw herself from the cliffs behind their luxurious home.
The mourning daughter begins a hunt for clues as to what happened on that dreadful day and why only one baby is in the photograph. Her search leads her to Laura, the family’s former au pair, who mysteriously left Summerbourne the same day Seraphine and Danny were born and their mother died. Then messages—at first subtle and then explicit—are sent to stop Seraphine from digging any deeper. Her brothers begin to worry for her sanity and then her safety, as odd events start to unfold throughout her search for the truth.”
Librarian’s Pick: Inheritance – Dani Shapiro
“When Shapiro was 23, her father died from injuries he suffered in a devastating car crash, a tragedy she chronicled in her 1998 memoir, Slow Motion Years later, when Shapiro’s husband decided to order a DNA kit, he asked her if she wanted one as well. She gamely agreed, and gave it little thought until several months later, when the kit’s shocking results showed that she was only half Jewish. Furthermore, she wasn’t biologically related to her half-sister, her father’s child from a previous marriage. An offhand remark made decades earlier by Shapiro’s now-deceased mother provided a clue to the puzzle: She told Shapiro that she had been conceived in Philadelphia.
With astonishing speed, Shapiro and her husband unraveled the mystery. Her parents had traveled to Philadelphia for artificial insemination; an anonymous sperm donor was Shapiro’s biological father. The DNA results and some internet sleuthing allowed Shapiro and her husband to track down the identity of her father, a now-retired physician who specialized in, of all things, medical ethics.
Librarian’s Pick: Andrew Carnegie Medals Shortlist 2019
Librarian’s Pick : The Paragon Hotel – Lyndsay Faye
” The year is 1921, the start of Prohibition. Mafia runaway Alice “Nobody” James has escaped trouble in Harlem by traveling cross-country by train while bleeding from a bullet wound. Max, a black porter, intervenes and checks the white Alice into the Paragon Hotel in Portland, Oregon. The hotel is an exclusively African-American sanctuary in a segregated city under siege by the Ku Klux Klan. There, Alice meets a host of compatriots who soon become like family as they bond together to search for one of their own, a biracial boy they fear may have fallen into the hands of the Klan.”