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Book reviews by library staff and guest contributors
October was LGBTQ+ history month, and it's not too late to celebrate by brushing up on your LGBTQ+ history with Stella Caldwell’s Pride: An Inspirational History of the LGBTQ+ Movement? Beginning thousands of years ago with LGBTQ+ figures from Ancient Greece, China, and Japan, Caldwell provides a comprehensive and accessible history of LGBTQ+ people, culture, and struggle for rights from ancient times all the way up to the present.
The Right Swipe tackles the intersection of technology and modern love, where an app developer and a rival company's spokesman end up filming a series of promotional videos and fall in love in the process. Rhiannon, Gabe's sister from Rai's Forbidden Hearts series, returns as the creator of Crush, an app that works similarly to Bumble. She had a brief fling with Samson, a spokesman for Matchmaker that ended with Samson ghosting Rhiannon. When Rhiannon attempts to buy Matchmaker, she ends up reuniting with Samson, to Samson's delight and Rhiannon's reluctance.
Tummy Time Friends is a delightfully interactive board book, full of beautiful baby faces and simple, gentle text. It is extra special because it unfolds, accordion-style, in a floor-standing arc and can be set up around a baby during tummy time. The photographs of baby faces will encourage babies to lift their heads to see. And toddlers will love to look at the faces even after they’ve outgrown tummy time!
Micaela Vargas is a police officer in Stockholm. She struggles to gain respect from her mostly white, male colleagues. First because she's a woman, second because she's a Chilean immigrant whose family came to Sweden as political refugees, and third because she grew up in the projects and has a brother who is operating on the other side of the law. None of that stops her from trying. She's determined to move up in the ranks and thus is happy to be assigned to the team investigating the death of an Afghani asylum-seeker who had become a popular youth soccer coach.
I picked up this book expecting something of a ghost story - which it is not. It is a story of trauma, grief, and overcoming loss with the support of community and friends.
Juna has a big imagination, and it runs wild, even while she's helping her Appa (father) at his dry cleaning business on Saturdays. While searching for one of her Appa's clients' lost jackets, her imagination takes her on a journey through nature where she meets animals who are also fathers that are spending time with their children.
Overdrive (Libby) has announced its next Big Library Read, A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger. From November 2-16 readers around the world will have simultaneous access to the title and can use the hashtag #biglibraryread on social media to share their thoughts with other readers.
A boy returns from school hurt that a friend drew a picture of their group and he has eyes like two lines stretched across his face. The others have big, round eyes with green, blue, brown or black irises. His Baba stood him in front of a mirror and said, “Your eyes rise to the skies and speak to the stars. The comets and constellations show you their secrets, and your eyes can foresee the future.
What if instead of canceling NASA's Apollo 18 mission, Nixon had instead turned the funding question over to the military? And what if that military had decided that the mission was critical in order to prevent Russia from beating the US? Not just to control of the moon, but to getting the first spy stations and satellite's into the skies above earth? Those are the questions former astronaut Chris Hadfield uses as a jumping off point for his debut thriller, The Apollo Murders.
Lucha libre, diner lingo, and digging for secrets in a historical archive - what's not to like?
