Library Corner November 1st
New Fiction
Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England. But small town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father -in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically. The leader, and soon Alice’s greatest ally, is Margery, a smart talking, self-sufficient woman who’s never asked a man’s permission for anything. They will be joined by three other singular women who become known as the Pack-horse Librarians of Kentucky. What happens to them – and to the men they love- becomes an unforgettable drama of loyalty, justice, humanity, and passion. These heroic women refuse to be cowed by men or by convention. And though they face all kinds of dangers in a landscape that is at times breathtakingly beautiful, at others brutal, they’re committed to their jobs: bringing books to people who have never had any, arming them with facts that will change their lives. Based on a true story rooted in America’s past, Jojo Moyes’ The Giver of Stars is a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond.
Rose Dennis wakes up in a hospital gown, her brain in a fog, only to discover that she’s been committed to an Alzheimer’s unit in a nursing home. With no memory of how she ended up in this position, Rose is sure that something is very wrong. When she overhears one of the administrators saying about her that she’s “not making it through the week,” Rose is convinced that if she’s to survive, she has to get out of the nursing home. Becoming more and more lucid, she devises a plan. She goes back to her now-abandoned house to hide while she figures out her next move. The only problem is, how does she convince anyone that she’s not actually demented? With her memory shaky, how does she know she can trust herself? But any lingering doubt that she’s in real danger is erased when a would-be killer shows up in the middle of the night, proving that someone is determined to get rid of her. With the help of her sister, Marion, a reclusive computer hacker; her thirteen-year-old granddaughter, Mel; and Mel’s friend Royal, Rose begins to piece together the fragments of her life, gather her strength, and fight back in order to find out who is after her and take back control. But someone out there is still determined to kill Rose, and they’re holding all the cards. Gripping and spine-tingling, What Rose Forgot by Nevada Barr is sure to raise the hackles of lovers of psychological thrillers.
Young Hiram Walker is born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her – but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children – the violent and capricious separation of families – and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved.
New Non-Fiction
As one of the most celebrated cave divers in the world, Jill Heinerth has seen the planet in a way almost no one has. In a workday, she might swim below your home, through conduits in volcanoes or cracks in the world’s largest iceberg. She’s an explorer, a scientist’s eyes and hands underwater – discovering new species and examining our finite freshwater reserves-and a filmmaker documenting the wonders of underwater life. Often the lone woman in a male-dominated domain, she tests the limits of human endurance at every right turn, risking her life with each mission. To not only survive in this world but excel, Jill has had to learn how to master self-doubt like no other. With gripping storytelling that radiates intimacy Into the Planet will transport you deep into the most exquisite, untouched corners of the earth, where fear must be reconciled and the innermost parts of the human condition are revealed.
There is a missing chapter in the narrative of Canada’s Indigenous peoples—the story of the Métis Nation, a new Indigenous people descended from both First Nations and Europeans. Their story begins in the last decade of the eighteenth century in the Canadian North-West. Within twenty years the Métis proclaimed themselves a nation and won their first battle. Within forty years they were famous throughout North America for their military skills, their nomadic life and their buffalo hunts. The Métis Nation didn’t just drift slowly into the Canadian consciousness in the early 1800s; it burst onto the scene fully formed. The Métis were flamboyant, defiant, loud and definitely not noble savages. They were nomads with a very different way of being in the world—always on the move, very much in the moment, passionate and fierce. They were romantics and visionaries with big dreams. They battled continuously—for recognition, for their lands and for their rights and freedoms. In 1870 and 1885, led by the iconic Louis Riel, they fought back when Canada took their lands. These acts of resistance became defining moments in Canadian history, with implications that reverberate to this day: Western alienation, Indigenous rights and the French/English divide. After being defeated at the Battle of Batoche in 1885, the Métis lived in hiding for twenty years. But early in the twentieth century, they determined to hide no more and began a long, successful fight back into the Canadian consciousness. The Métis people are now recognized in Canada as a distinct Indigenous nation. Jean Teillet – herself a great-grandniece of Louis Riel – has composed The North-West is our Mother, a popular and engaging history of her “forgotten people” that brings the story into our own era of national reconciliation with Indigenous people.-