Staff Picks

I love this upbeat book about a dog who learns that even if you make a mistake you can have THE BEST DAY EVER!
 

Publisher's description:
A sweet dog-loves-kid/kid-loves-dog story, in which the kid uses a wheelchair, from an award-winning children's poet and talented debut illustrator.

Find Best Day Ever! in our catalog

 

Publisher's description:

In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. It was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration -- the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina -- John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

 

 

 

 

In this charming picture book, two children named X and Y are introduced to several kinds of infinity while baking pies with their Aunt Z. With so much pie, it's lucky that they have infinite friends to share it with!

 

Publisher's description:

X and Y are desperate to bake infinite pie! With the help of quirky and uber-smart Aunt Z, X and Y will use math concepts to bake their way to success!

 

We've learned so much recently about life in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans, via new technology and new ways of looking at old data, that this book felt like a revelation.

 

Publisher's description:

The author shows how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques have come to previously unheard of conclusions about the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans: In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe. Certain cities such as Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, were greater in population than any European city. Tenochtitlan, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets. The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids. Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively "landscaped" by human beings. Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process that the journal Science recently described as man's first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.

 

The fast-paced, imaginative adventures of Zita the Spacegirl remind me of Calvin's alter-ego Spaceman Spiff in Calvin & Hobbes. Zita fearlessly travels through a galaxy of unusual aliens in order to save her friend Joseph.

 

Publisher's description

When young Zita discovers a device that opens a portal to another place, and her best friend is abducted, she is compelled to set out on a strange journey from star to star in order to get back home.

 

What a rich life! Rivka Lehrer, born with spina bifida, who has endured the pain of many surgeries and has been shaped by disability, embraced (and continues to embrace) the life of an artist, activist, friend, and lover. I particularly liked the inclusion of Rivka's portraits, reproduced in color in this book.

 

Publisher's description: 

What do we sacrifice in the pursuit of normalcy? And what becomes possible when we embrace monstrosity? In 1958, Riva is one of the first children born with spina bifida to survive. Her parents and doctors are determined to "fix" her, sending the message over and over again that she is broken. That she will never have a job, a romantic relationship, or an independent life. Enduring countless medical interventions, Riva tries her best to be a good girl and a good patient in the quest to be cured. Everything changes when, as an adult, Riva is invited to join a group of artists, writers, and performers who are building Disability Culture. Their work is daring, edgy, funny, and dark; it rejects tropes that define disabled people as pathetic, frightening, or worthless. They insist that disability is an opportunity for creativity and resistance. Emboldened, Riva asks if she can paint their portraits--an intimate and collaborative process that will transform the way she sees herself, others, and the world. With each portrait, and each person's story, the myths she's been told her whole life--about her body, her sexuality, and the value of normalcy--begin to crumble. Written with the vivid, cinematic prose of a visual artist, and the love and playfulness that defines all of Riva's work, this is an extraordinary story of survival and creativity. With the author's magnificent portraits featured throughout, this memoir invites us to stretch ourselves toward a world where bodies flow between all possible forms of what it is to be human.

Find Golem Girl in our online catalog.

 

 

 

Tana French writes immersive, suspenseful mysteries that I just can't put down, and this is my favorite. The dynamics between Detective Frank Mackey and the family he has been reluctantly reunited with are sharply realistic, often funny, and ultimately heartbreaking.

 

Publisher's description:

Planning to run away with his girlfriend to London in the hopes of escaping poverty, Frank concludes he has been dumped when Rosie fails to join him and is astonished when Rosie's suitcase and evidence of foul play are discovered more than twenty years later.

 

Publisher's description: 

Chronicling General Lafayette's years in Washington's army, Vowell reflects on the ideals of the American Revolution versus the reality of the Revolutionary War. Riding shotgun with Lafayette, Vowell swerves from the high-minded debates of Independence Hall to the frozen wasteland of Valley Forge, from bloody battlefields to the Palace of Versailles, bumping into John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Cornwallis, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette and various kings, Quakers and redcoats along the way. Drawn to the patriots' war out of a lust for glory, Enlightenment ideas and the traditional French hatred for the British, young Lafayette crossed the Atlantic expecting to join forces with an undivided people, encountering instead fault lines between the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, rebel and loyalist inhabitants, and a conspiracy to fire George Washington, the one man holding together the rickety, seemingly doomed patriot cause. While Vowell's yarn is full of the bickering and infighting that marks the American past--and present--her telling of the Revolution is just as much a story of friendship: between Washington and Lafayette, between the Americans and their French allies and, most of all between Lafayette and the American people

 

Find Lafayette in the Somewhat United States in our online catalog.

I love this book because it has everything...a sweeping history of the Great Migration--an event that's been overlooked for too long--richly-detailed biographies of three very different people who migrated from the South to the north or west U.S., and beautiful quotes by other authors at the beginning of each chapter. It added to my understanding of the world, and I enjoyed every minute of the book. The audiobook is beautifully narrated.

 

Publisher's description:

Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career. Wilkerson captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. A superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. This book is destined to become a classic, through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein.

I loved this book for its exciting story and gritty, grounded worldbuilding. I wanted to root for Cara from the beginning. She's an intriguingly complex character with a lot of secrets.

 

Publisher description:

A cross-dimensional examination of identity, privilege and belonging follows the adventures of a rare survivor whose counterparts in other realities have died and who stumbles on a dangerous secret threatening her new home and fragile place in it.