Staff Picks

This is a wonderful meditation on reading in general and, specifically, what I'll call "The Book From Childhood." Almost all of us have one. Miller's was The Chronicles of Narnia. Many of us have returned to The Book as adults only to be disappointed in some way. Miller shows us how we can "get back in" and appreciate Our Book anew. I especially liked her take on the great works of children's literature, which are often viewed with condescension by "serious" literary critics but, she argues, shouldn't be. And I love the idea that we can still openly love certain books and great works of art even if their creators had some glaring faults (sexism, racism, etc. among them) or unsavory motives. I found myself relating to her as I read such thoughts as if she were my braver, more honest, more analytical, and more skeptical self.

 

Publisher's description: 

The Magician's Book is an intellectual adventure story, in which Miller travels to Lewis's childhood home in Ireland, the possible inspiration for Narnia's landscape; unfolds his intense friendship with J.R.R.Tolkien, a bond that led the two of them to create the greatest myth-worlds of modern times; and explores Lewis's influence on writers like Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Franzen, and Philip Pullman. Finally reclaiming Narnia "for the rest of us," Miller casts the Chronicles as a profoundly literary creation, and the portal to a life-long adventure in books, art, and the imagination. Erudite, wide-ranging, and playful, The Magician's Book is for all who live in thrall to the magic of books.

Find The Magician's Book in our online catalog.

 

I love these stories about Anna and her family, because they provide a window into a country and a way of life unfamiliar to many American children. Yet even as the cultural details may be different and intriguing, the palpable love and caring among family members is front and center. Great for families beginning to read chapter books with their young children and also for newly independent readers.

 

Publisher's description: Anna Hibiscus lives in Africa. Amazing Africa. She lives with her whole family in a wonderful house. There is always somebody to laugh or play with. She loves to splash in the sea with her cousins and have parties with her aunties. But more than anything else in the world, Anna Hibiscus would love to see snow.

 

 

The outbreaks of a new virus start slowly in Africa, "a headline at the bottom of a news website". Until a week later, the virus is worldwide and attacks fast. The infected die within hours. And it's in the air so how could there be an escape? But there is something different about this virus, the way it moves, almost like it's adapting, getting to know it's prey and their weaknesses. And if the remaining humans want to survive, they need a plan, and fast. But the question is, who can they really trust? When this virus seems to have the skill to create life itself, and to reconstruct already existing life. Looking for a new dystopian read? Then this is for you. This book immediately throws the reader into action, which I love because then you never get bored of it. Happy reading!

- Noemi, eighth-grade teen volunteer

Publisher's description:

An unidentified virus wipes out most of the Earth's population and Leon, his mother, and younger sister Grace, who just moved to London from New York, must run for their lives.

Find Plague Land in our online catalog.

This graphic novel centers around Mia, a teen girl who has recently been assigned as a crew member of a team that rebuilds broken down structures in space. On a Sunbeam is split between two timelines: the first features Mia and her new space crew as they bond and go on missions together throughout space. The second timeline shows Mia in boarding school and falling in love with a fellow classmate named Grace. The reader is forced to make connections between the two timelines to figure out why Mia is now in space with her crew and not in school anymore with her love, Grace. The timelines converge in a thrilling conclusion. This was a wonderful graphic novel. I loved the space setting and science fiction elements. The art style is simple but striking. The outer space imagery is beautifully depicted, and the spacecraft setting is excellently crafted. I loved that it is split in two timelines, one in a boarding school and one aboard a spacecraft, both of which are really fun settings. Mia's crew members all have their own compelling storylines and relationships, and the reader falls in love with all of them. Mia is a lovely, flawed protagonist. She's a little lost and confused, but the reader can't help but root for her. I also found it incredibly interesting that there is never a mention of men in the story at any point. All the characters are in relationships with women, and there seems to be no men in this universe, which is such a unique and interesting detail.

 

Publisher's description:

A ragtag crew travels to the deepest reaches of space, rebuilding beautiful, broken structures to piece the past together. Two girls meet in boarding school and fall deeply in love, only to learn the pain of loss.

 

Find On a Sunbeam in our online catalog.

 

 

A thought provoking book about how we can learn to appreciate the earth and others by changing the story we tell ourselves. The philosophical questions are approached in a way that lets us learn along with the narrator as he makes his discoveries with his teacher...a gorilla. The presentation is so digestible and the big picture idea of how our culture is divided into takers and leavers feels so profound. The leavers let others grow and become themselves and the takers need to destroy and stamp out the competition to conquer. I love the idea that we can make a difference by thinking hard about how we tell our story.

 

Publisher's description: 

The narrator of this extraordinary tale is a man in search for truth. He answers an ad in a local newspaper from a teacher looking for serious pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling delicately on a slender branch. "You are the teacher?" he asks incredulously. "I am the teacher," the gorilla replies. Ishmael is a creature of immense wisdom and he has a story to tell, one that no other human being has ever heard. It is a story that extends backward and forward over the lifespan of the earth from the birth of time to a future there is still time save. Like all great teachers, Ishmael refuses to make the lesson easy; he demands the final illumination to come from within ourselves. Is it man's destiny to rule the world? Or is it a higher destiny possible for him-- one more wonderful than he has ever imagined?

This is a novel about many things, but its main theme is families: the ones we're born into, the ones we create, the ones that are about friends more than blood ties, the ones we fantasize about being a part of (rightly or wrongly), and, in the end, the ones that, if we are lucky and see a good thing for what it is, can sustain us through tough times both personally and globally. It helps that this book also features clever characters, snappy dialogue, humor and compassion, and sharp commentary on current affairs starting with the 1980s and leaping to the present.

 

Publisher's description:

Two generations of an American family come of age on either side of the September 11 attacks, transforming their ambitions against a backdrop of dramatic political and environmental changes.

 

Gracing the cover of this week's New York Times Book Review, this moving novel from last year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature arrives to nearly universal critical acclaim. Author Abdulrazak Gurnah has written a sweeping and dramatic chronicle of life in East Africa under German colonialization during the early 20th century, which should be of interest to readers who enjoyed Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace or Patrice Nganang's A Trail of Crab Tracks.

 

Publisher's description:

When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back -until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.

 

Check into the Dream Motel and take a long, twisting walk with Patti Smith down the lanes of her memory during the pivotal year of the monkey. Reading this book, like all her books, is much like losing yourself in one of her songs. Her lyrical words weave through her regret at losing friends to sickness and old age, and express her rage at that year's hostile political climate. It's small. Try it.

 

Publisher's description:
Following a run of new year's concerts at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, in which she debates intellectual grifters and spars with the likes of a postmodern Cheshire Cat. Then, in February 2016, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. For Smith--inveterately curious, always exploring, always writing--this becomes a year of reckoning with the changes in life's gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert, from a Kentucky farm to the hospital room of a valued mentor, Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape in a haunting, poetic blend of fact and fiction. As a stranger tells her, "Anything is possible. After all, it's the Year of the Monkey." But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world.

 

Find Year of the Monkey in our online catalog.

Companion Piece is so incredible. The book takes place during COVID time, and thus during the current ecological ruination of the world. It weaves in the power of imagination and the power of words (and pronoun changes) to change/make history. It is humble, powerful, and deeply caring. The main character is a free-thinking lesbian. Despite taking place in contemporary society, there is a fair amount of history presented too. I wish that my art could do what this text does, and as skillfully.

 

Publisher's description:

Here we are in extraordinary times. Is this history? What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other? What have we lost? What stays with us? What does it take to unlock our future? Following her astonishing Seasonal Quartet, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its timeless and contemporary, legendary and unpindownable, spellbinding and shapeshifting forms. Companion Piece stands apart from the Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself. But like Smith's groundbreaking series, this new novel boldly captures the spirit of the times. 'Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting.

 

Grandma's coming for a visit, and the house and everyone in it is a mess! It's time to get cleaning--we've got to vacuum, feed the fishes, mop the floor, find the baby, and most importantly the cat needs a bath! But that clever cat does NOT want to take a bath, and they'll do whatever it takes to confuse the family and avoid that wet tub! A sweet, silly, lovely portrayal of a mixed race, two-father family trying desperately to clean up for their grandma's visit, this book is hilarious and so fun to read. Look for all the special jokes in the pictures when you read it with your little ones!

 

Publisher's description:

It's cleaning day, but the family cat will do anything to avoid getting a bath. So instead of mopping the floor or feeding the fish, the family is soon busy rocking the rug, vacuuming the lawn, and sweeping the dishes. Bouncy rhyme carries the story headlong into the growing hilarity, until finally Dad restores some kind of order—but will the family cat avoid getting his whiskers wet? The cat keeps scrambling the list of chores with hilarious effects. Get ready for a rollicking read-aloud with a truly purrfect ending.