You won't find visions sugar plums dancing in wee ones heads, but rather a nightmare dreamscape that features our most terrible imaginings.
If you like B- grade horror movies, this book will play that out in your head. This will keep your eyes moving across the page to see what unexpected horror comes next.
Lyla is an amazing cellist - blowing away the competition and playing in elite venues. She is an A student and a school star - but it is all getting overwhelming.
And then they start sharing a practice room - Tripp on odd days (on a borrowed, school guitar) and Lyla in even days (mostly staring at her cello). Lyla and Tripp begin leaving each other snippy notes in the strings of the guitar and this story is born.
And there is more - Mary Amato has created a webpage with the songs from Guitar Notes and a whole lot more. Check it out here: Guitar Notes Songs
"There was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it slived you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately." And thus begins The Graveyard Book.
It doesn't take long for Fred to reconnect with a former friend and make some new friends, but the self doubt that she constantly lives with plays havoc with her life. She is starting to swirl out of control - not being able to sleep and cutting her arms in order to feel something - even eating food which she knows will make her sick in order to punish herself.
This is a great book to view/read if you want to vicariously want to taste this brand of mental illness. And perhaps the hope that is sitting beyond mental illness if help arrives.
This is a quick read which is more than worth the time.
In October of 1919 a group of Black sharecroppers met at their church with the intent of staring a union. These men had been farming other's land and were not being given a fair share of the profits. The landowners were angry and formed a mob that shot at the sharecroppers, destroyed their church and burned it to the ground. Many were rounded up for arrest, and twelve of these men were sentenced to death for crimes they didn't commit.
Enter Scipio Africanus Jones. Though he wasn't allowed into law school, he found some lawyers who would let him apprentice with them. He stepped up and fought in court for these men, often using his own money to provide for their defense.
This man is the definition of a hero - dedicated, persistent, caring, stubborn.
You can read about this man in Race Against Time found on the shelves of the South Library.
In Julie's world the age of legal majority is 25 and she is only 23. When she learns that he mother wants to move her out of her childhood home, she decides to step out on her own, even though that will lead to an illegal existence. Even worse, the world has changed - between global warming, and the bombs that various countries lobbed at each other - the air isn't even safe to breath. But she runs anyway, and finds herself in a sketchy world that was beyond her imaginings.
What is the best part of this book? For me it was the characters. Mr. Greene did a great job of creating some very three dimensional characters who, though flawed, were intriging and likeable. People I wanted to meet.
Try this book. You will find it on the shelves of the Nashua South Library (as soon as I get it cataloged.)
Inge's War is a story about a German family during World War 2. Inge's grandaughter wanted to know what her family's role in WWII was and spent hours talking to her grandmother, other relatives, and visiting places where her family walked. What she learned surprised her and gave her a deeper understanding of her family's history.
It is important that we read widely when learning about history because there are as many versions of history as there are people who lived that history. It is easy to look at a few facts and pass judgement on a group of people, but that is accepting a simplistic view of our world and that is rarely helpful.
Check out Inge's War and expand your understanding of what it is like to live in war. Then and Now. There are elemental truths here that are truth, there are specific details here that are also truth.
You can find this book on the shelves of South's library or check out the Online Catalog for Nashua Public Library for more copies.
Are you an action/adventure movie watcher? reader? game player? Well this might be a great book to pick up and read.
A quick description: Warring nations launch nuclear bombs at each other creating an event called Omega. The radiation and percussion of these bombs change the world and increasing the fractured politics with different factions dividing themselves from each other. Children and animals are born with birth defects or altered. Lawlessness becomes the norm. Most devices that are electronic don't work. - This is the story of several teens - boys who are in a facility for "less thans" (and yes that is as terrible as it sounds) and the girls here were assigned to a facility for twins - where an evil doctor carries out horrific experiments on them. (yes there are overtones of Naziism.) How does one move on from those horrible circumstances? Read this book to find out.
Between these pages you will find bravery, leadership, uncertainty, evil, friendship, and even love.
You can find this book in the hands of 9th graders, on the shelves on Nashua South, or check out the Online Catalog for Nashua Public Library.
Honestly I would have never picked this book up if it weren't for my eblock buddy, Ariel. "It's so good, Miss, It's so good!" I don't love murder and mayhem - but this was indeed pretty good and a bit freaky.
This is for you if you love mysteries, especially ones where there is a twist. This isn't for you if you dislike decapitation or other equally grizly methods of becoming dead.
#noescape is a prequel to #murdertrending. And I will NOT be reading the second book - I think that I have had enough murder for now.
Enjoy. You will find this on the shelves at South, and in the catalog at Nashua Public Library.
The dedication in this book reads, "For everyone we lost and everything we learned in the strangest year of our lives - 2020"
And that sets the tone for this beautifully illustrated graphic novel. Actually - this is more than your typical graphic novel with amazing artistry and a message that it so relevant in our troubled world.
So we live with the challenges of COVID, political strife, and a world filled with ugly acts of violence. This leaves us all uneasy - this book offers a bit of hope.
Breathe
In through the mouth
Out through the nose
Find on the shelves of Nashua South (as soon as I get it processed - I just pulled it out of the box and read it last night - it is a VERY FAST READ and amazing) and Nashua Public Library.
Sophie is excited for a few hours all to herself - it is something that happens VERY infrequently. Between her senior year in high school, college selection, clubs, and a father who is chief of police and incredibly protective she gets little alone time or time alone with her boyfriend, Griffen. When she calls Griffin to share the good news - he suggests that Sophie joins him at a party. Unfortunately, when she gets there she overhears him talking about how he was looking forward to some time away from her - and the heartbreak begins.
Sophie makes her way to her Nona's and Papa's house - a place where her very large extended family gather and is quickly embraced by her Nona and surrounded with love. But Nona is always scheming and she finds a way to take Sophie's mind off her troubles: 10 blind dates during the Christmas break. AND the blind dates will be set up by members of Sophie's extended family. What could go wrong???
Reading this book is a great little brain vacation for anyone who likes crazy antics, a few laughs, and an escape from studying for exams. This is a story about love - the love of friends, the love of family, the heartbreak of lost love, and finally of just plain luv.
You can find this book on the shelves of the South Library or check out NPL for audio and ebook options. There is also a companion book, 10 Truths and a Dare which I look forward to reading when I need something light.
But here is the truth. I tried to read this book several months ago. I just couldn't. It didn't feel real to me, just a bit much for my senses. I couldn't handle teen angst. I had enough of our day-to-day realism and a bit of painful mythology was too much. I put Cemetery Boys down and walked away.
It kept calling me to read it. No, not in a spooky sense, but several students recommended it. I saw it on lists of books that others had enjoyed. I heard about if from other librarians and read an inticing review. AND I finally had to give in and read it - I am glad that I did.
This story is a romp through culture and family and community. It is a coming-of-age novel with a serious plot twist - surprising but it doesn't leave you hanging. Here you will find an urban landscape, characters of many stripes and personalities and energy levels. This story is deeply embeded in Latino culture and centers around Day of the Dead celebrations, but there is a trans main character. The story honors family including extended family. But mostly, this book is about finding one's self.
Favorite quote: "You don't need anyone's permission to be you."
Found on the shelves of the South Library. Also you will find it in audio, ebook, and print editions through the Nashua Public Library.
What is even better? Each of these stories have some type of complexity: interracial, or LGBT, or forbidden relationships. Each of these stories was a little different than the others, but all of them were good.
AND reading Color Outside the Lines is a way to sample a bunch of different authors. These are pages in which to walk in someone else's shoes and see how it feels to be someone very different than yourself. These are stories through which to learn more about yourself and others. These are stories to sip slowly - one at a time so you can digest each tale. This is honestly one of the best short stories collections I have read. I hope you might also enjoy it.
You will find this book on the shelves on Nashua South or you can find it in the Nashua Public Library catalog.
"I like how you look at me. There's a story in your eyes that I would give anything to hear."
~ Lori M. Lee in Starlight and Moonlight
Recently, I have read several books that are heavy reads - in information, in context, in content. Books that have heartbreaking elements, that contain abuse, that require VERY CLOSE READING and a lot of notes. This book was not that. (Ok, there was a little abuse in Four, but it wasn't incredibly heavy.)
At the end of last week I started in on another book - nonfiction and full of information that I needed to digest in order to better understand the story. And for the first time ever, reading became too much. I was struggling to open the book, to continue to leaf through the pages. I reached for my "to read" pile and picked up Four - a book that was recommended to me by a student, M. This is just what I needed. A palate cleanser, literary parsley. (Did you know that parsley refreshes your mouth so that you can enjoy the next flavor that your tongue encounters? It also freshens your breath.)
Four is a companion novel for the Divergent series. When I opened the book and started reading it took me back to a simpler time in my life - free from the scattered busyness that the COVID pandemic dumped upon us. The story was a simpler story than what I had been reading. Reading about these characters that I hadn't encountered for many years felt like going back to a book home. The story was still satisfying in that it gave me plenty to think about but it wasn't a struggle and exactly the right book for me in the right moment.
I hope you try the Divergent series, or even just the short stories in Four. It will make you think about caste, and labels in a new way. It might even make you consider that labels that you have affixed to yourself. But if it isn't the right book at the right time for you - go find something that fills your reading or learning needs.
In this graphic novel, Kiku is transported back in time to1940's San Francisco - where her grandmother was a teenager. At the time, Japanese Americans faced a lot of racial discrimination in the United States. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the U.S. government rounded up all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, forced them to leave their homes, businesses and communities and moved them into camps in rural areas of the western United States. It felt these legal immigrants and American citizens represented a potential threat to the U.S. because of their ancestral ties to Japan. Kiku's grandmother and her family are sent to one of these camps and Kiku ends up in the same camp. While there, Kiku experiences first hand what life was like for her grandmother and others who tried to make a life for themselves in a hostile environment.
Reading this historical fiction novel gives you insight into what life was like for the first and second generation Japanese Americans (check out the glossary at the back of the book for translations of the Japanese terms used in the story). Now 80 years later, Japanese Americans are still impacted by the camps. Many of those in the internment camps rarely spoke of their time there and as a result, even their families did not know about their wartime experiences. Through reading stories like Displacement, we build empathy and make progress towards understanding the full effect of these forgotten periods on our collective history. This knowledge in turn helps us to identify injustice, helps us to prevent violations of civil liberties and empowers us to stand up with those who are unfairly targeted. What makes this book powerful is the connections drawn between the experiences of the Japanese Americans during World War II and the headlines of today.
For more information, I also highly recommend checking out Densho - a website which is dedicated to preserving the experiences of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.
This book is available in the Nashua South Media Center.
Recently she Tweeted:
The Scenarios are repeating themselves, the war has only one face that is Destruction. Each passing day is a real test for humanity. #StandWithUkraine️ #Ukraine️
"The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is.
One way or another, I got two or thress dollars for every person killed.
Some business I'm in."
This is the story of Kurt Vonnegut, "more or less" charaterized through the main character in this story, Billy Pilgrim. Some of the story is of war. Some of the story is about becoming unstuck in time - moving back and forth through the ages and seeing all at once. Part of this story is pure fantasy - about an alien society of Tralfamadorians who put Billy Pilgrim in a zoo. Mostly, this is a story of war - how it dehumanizes people, how it is incredibly arbitrary, and how life's ripples impact more than those who are in front of us.
I read this is two forms this weekend, both in the original book and in a new graphic novel. Both books can be found on the shelves of Nashua South, and through that Nashua Public Library. This story isn't for the faint of heart - war is horrible.
Wishing for peace!
War!
War is terrible and never simple. The consequences of war impacts people world wide.
Kent State is about protesters in 1970 speaking out against the United States's involvement in the Vietnam war. The protests escalated. The National Guard was called in and things got messy.
Imagine a warm spring day. Finally being able to shed your winter coat. Image the sun shining down. Imagine that your friend, your brother, your father, your uncle... was sent to fight a war that you don't even believe in or understand why the USA is involved with. Imagine that involvement becoming escalated. Image joining other students on the lawn of the university to share your thoughts, your discomfort, your anger... and then:
"It was mayhem.
The police chasing,
the students screaming at them,
the Guard stomping toward us,
the helicopters churning above us,
gassing us from the air,
ghostly tendrils from the canisters
spiraling through the spotlights --"
This was the campus of Kent State on May 4th 1970. A day when protest became violent. Imagine this ripple of war.
Kent State has an interesting format. It is a novel in verse. There are a number of voices that tell the story - each uses a different font. None of them are identified. This is a really unique way to show a number of perspectives concerning a single event. Even if we stand beside each other and witness the same happening - our stories will be different. Our backgrounds, our mood, what we know, what we desire - will all impact our perspective.
The book Kent State is available on the shelves of the Nashua South library. You can also find this book on the shelves at the Nashua Public Library and through their app, Hoopla.
Want to learn more about the protests at Kent State? Learn about it here: The May 4th Shootings at Kent State University: The Search for Historical Accuracy
I can't remember the last time I took a sick day - this might be a once a decade happening for me. But this morning I was hit by the migraine fairy and was incapable of doing anything but sitting in the dark. Eventually, the fairy loosened her grip and I could read a bit if the light was dim and it was quiet.
So how do I spend a sick day (after I slept through first block?) I start a knitting project that matches the colors of my book that I am reading. (And drink LOTS of water - doesn't water heal everything?)
This is a terribly sad and confusing story well told through a series of interviews. The interviewees all had Guantanamo connections - from prisoners to attorneys to NCIS. Then the interviews were placed in a comic strip format and each interview was illustrated by a different artist. The color scheme pulls the book together - all in sunset colors (as is my knitting project - that is a coincidence.)
This story makes my heart hurt, but I am glad that I read it.
Guantanamo Voices will soon be found on the Nashua South shelves (I just need to figure out where to put it), on the shelves at the Nashua Public Library and through NPL's Hoopla.
Annaleigh is one of 12 sisters who are slowly dying off, by a series of unfortunate events? But are these deaths totally random or does an evil root tie them all together? This retelling of the Brother's Grimm tale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses will leave the reader guessing until the end.
If soft cozy romance novels are your thing - turn the other way. This book is DARK.
Black Brother, Black Brother is about biracial siblings who start attending a new school. However, their experiences are very different. Trey is the popular athletic kid but Donte is seen as a problem. What is the most visible difference between the boys? Trey is light colored, like their Norwegian-descended father, Donte has his African American mom's coloring.
One bully really makes Donte's life miserable. Alan is the captain of the fencing team and the bain of Donte's existence. Donte decides that the only way out of his mess is to get retribution and decides to beat Alan at his own game - fencing.
In the end notes of this book, Jewell writes that her own biracial children, one with light skin and the other with darker skin, have had very different experiences growing up in the USA. She says, "My grandmother taught me that everyone is a 'mixed-blood stew' and that diversity of appearance (skin color, hair and eye color) are to be celebrated. Everyone is human and everyone carries an ethnic heritage that results from the origins and journeys their ancestors made."
Reading Black Brother, Black Brother reminds us that we need to celebrate our differences - it is those differences that make our world an interesting place to live.
You can find this book on the shelf at the Nashua South library.
This is about books, and love, and life, and death. It is messy and funny and heartbreaking.
"We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.
I am thankful for this book. I borrowed it through my SORA account which is connected to my Nashua Public Library Libby account. You can connect your accounts too.
So what is spectacular about this book? I found it enlightening and a bit brain twisting. Wikipedia tells me that this book was originally published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Bent. Here Harriet (Linda in the story) shares her story of living in slavery. By some standards she was lucky. Jacobs reports,
"I was never cruelly overworked; I was never lacerated with the whip from head to foot; I was never so beaten and bruised that I could not turn from one side to the other; I never had my heel-strings cut to prevent my running away; I was never chained to a log and forced to drag it about, while I toiled in the fields from morning till night; I was never branded with hot iron, or torn by bloodhounds. But though my life in slavery was comparatively devoid of hardships, God pity the woman who is compelled to lead such a life!"
BUT - she served a lecherous master who would not free her. She was afraid of what he would do with her and her children. She was afraid of what happened to slave girls at a certain age because they offered their masters value in their ability to produce more slave children. She was afraid to be around him. She was afraid that she would lose her children. She was so afraid of remaining with her master that she escaped slavery to hide for many years. But I don't want to share more. Read this book. The light it sheds on being both slave and female is mind boggling.
You can read this book via the Project Gutenberg site: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Can you imagine going to your Gurudwara (house of worship) on a Sunday morning only to be stopped by police because there has been a nearby shooting? Finding that the shooting was in your Gurudwara and your father is there and your mother is there and you can't get there. Panic is setting in and you cannot learn what it is going on?
Arno was that former skinhead and when he heard about the shooting he just hoped that he wasn't responsible for recruiting the shooter. Pardeep was that Sikh who soon learned that his father was killed. Later they meet each other and forged a way to move forward together through their pain in order to create a more peaceful, harmonious world. Together they created an organization that promotes caring, kindness, and mutual respect.
This is their story.
(You can find this book on the shelves at South or Nashua Public Library. It is also available through NPL's Hoopla.)
I started wondering why I couldn't get started. Because it is set in Texas, I wondered if the language was messing me up. Maybe I wasn't getting the patterns of a Southern drawl. So I borrowed an audio copy. Well that didn't work, the narrator was terrible - whiney and Northern US sounding. But I heard enough of the story through the audio that I was invested in the book and managed to read through to the end.
Ellie is a Lipan Apache in an alternate United States, a place where magic and monsters live in the same place as cell phones and pistacio ice cream. Ellie's (Elatsoe) magical power is that she can bring ghosts up from below. She enjoys her dog, Kirby, as much dead as alive - and there are some advantages to having an invisible dog (If I had one, it would always accompany me to school!) But with her connection to the dead, some strange things can happen. The night that her cousin died he came to her in a dream and told her that he had been murdered and asked that she protect his family. And here we go into the pages of a magical murder mystery.
Where can you find this book of ghosts and monsters and magic? Try the shelves of our library. You can also read in through SORA if you connect your account to NPL, and Hoopla (through NPL, but skip the audio - trust me when I tell you it was terrible.)
White Smoke by Tiffany D. Jackson is a book that she recently recommended. I could access this book through SORA along with my Nashua Public Library connection. So off I went on this reading adventure.
It is about a girl, Marigold, who was in a bad place in her life (not spelled out at the beginning of the story) who moves with her family to a new house in a new town. It is a new start for the whole family. But when they arrive at their Victorian home they discover that it has been abandoned for the last 30 years, and that it is on a street in which all the homes are abandoned. Soon after they move in, things begin to go bump in the night...
To be honest, I didn't love it as much as Ashlee did, BUT I did enjoy the book quite a bit. Why?
Don't you just love this cover? Art plays a big role in this book and the cover completely fits with the story.
Learn more about it at the Nashua Public Library!
What are you reading?
Can you imagine living in the midst of a pandemic? Oh, you can? Well, what if it was the black plague? What if there wasn't modern medicine to care for those in need? What if people were dying in the streets and in the fields or in their homes? That is what is happening at the beginning of this story as John and his brother stride through the streets of their community. John wants to do good deeds and when he finds a baby under the body of a dead woman he picks it up, but life turns to horror when he discovers the baby is infected with the plague.
As John fears his immenent death he hears a voice, a voice of second chance. He learns that he will live for six more day. However he will skip through the centuries and each of these days will take place 99 years after the last.
What stays the same? What is different? Is there salvation in good deeds, in a life well lived? Can man make a difference?
Take a break from our own pandemic and trapse through time with John and decide if you agree with John's sentiment:
"The man who has no knowledge of the past has no wisdom."
Find this book on the shelves at South or through Hoopla at the Nashua Public Library.
However, this book was a bit hard to get through. There is a lot of information here and important information, but it was hard to get through. The telling wasn't linear and skipped from one character to another. I had the book in front of me in print, and also was listening to the audio book. (which I borrowed through SORA - I have the Nashua Public library connected to my SORA account.) I ended up speeding up the recording to 175 percent so that I could get through it. There is a pretty good index so I think it could be helpful for reports on the Space Race, Feminisim, Civil Rights, American History.
AND THEN I watched the movie. I am not sure how accurate the movie was, and it certainly didn't cover all of the information in the book, but it was enjoyable. It centered on three of the women and told their stories in a manner that could be digested.
So lessons learned -
First off, I hope and pray that 2022 is filled with great blessings, great health, and plenty of learning.
And let's start that learning with my new book challenge which looks a little different from the reading challenges that I have created in the past. Originally I would just challenge myself with random parameters: a red book, a fancy cover, a science fiction book... Then I decided to record only books that were recommended. In my 2022 READING GOAL I am combining my desire to read recommended titles with a push to read different genres and about different topics. The elementary schools have started the Nashua Nine Challenge which encourages students to read across genres - to try new things and I am doing the same. Why do this challege? It expands the boundaries of my reading world to places I wouldn't go left to my own devices. You can see my new challenge and what I read last year on our website.
My new life goal? I NEED TO MAKE things. I have worked so hard these past few years that I have lost the maker part of myself. I plan on centering my making around things that you do with needles - mostly knitting and crocheting but maybe some sewing thrown in (not masks - I have made too many of those.) I want to improve my skills and try new things.
And then onto When Books Went to War. I have discovered that knitting and listening to audio books work together beautifully. I just listened to this book (I also have a copy in hand so I have read some too) while I have made a loom hat and one fingerless mitten (using double pointed needles!) for my wife. (I need to find another audio for the other mitten.)
When Books Went to War is about how books, information, and stories impacted World War 2. Germany was attacking libraries and free thought. Books were being burned that didn't agree with their Nazi sentiments. Books authored by Jews, those that championed socialism, pacifism, reform or sexual freedom were tossed into the flames. Helen Keller stated that, "History has taught you nothing, if you think you can kill ideas... Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them."
As the United States entered this war they determined that their foes must be fought on two fronts - both in battle and in the mind. The USA's reaction to Germany's censorship was to place information at the tips of soldiers and sailors fingers in the form of books and magazines. This is that story.
As the World War 2 poster said, "Books are Weapons in the War of Ideas"