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Book reviews by library staff and guest contributors
White Bird is a stunning graphic novel about one of the ugliest events in history. Set in France during World War II, White Bird tells the story of Sara and Julien, classmates at a rural school in a Nazi occupied village. Sara doesn't want to get her beautiful red shoes wet when all of the Jewish students are rounded up and marched to the woods one day. She's able to sneak away and hide without understanding what's happening.
The 1960s was an especially rife period for political assassinations, but for years, one of the most famous deaths of the decade—the killing of United Nations General Secretary Dag Hammarskjold—was officially an accident. The downing of the general secretary’s plane in the skies of Rhodesia (modern Zambia) in the early hours of September 18, 1961, has long been cast in doubt, almost from the moment the burnt out remains of the plane and its fifteen crash victims were discovered in the sweltering jungle (the sole survivor would later die in hospital after making some intriguing comments).
This isn't your typical mysterious death mystery. The death that starts the book off is explained in the first chapter, so now what? Turns out the now what is quite a lot and all of it good.
This is a tribute to one of society's most enduring yet under-recognized relationships: female best friends. Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman met at a Gossip Girl viewing party when they were in their mid-twenties and struggling to start their careers. They've seen each other through heartaches and heartbreaks, job triumphs and disasters, health scares and holidays. More than a decade later, these are their stories of real-life and recognizable female friendship. I saw myself in their stories and if you've been nurturing your own big friendships, you will, too.
I knew nothing about Ruocchio's debut, first in the Sun Eater series, other than it's pretty long, it's going to take a long time to read. If I say I finished it in a couple days, you'll get an idea as to how exhilarating it was and how much I loved it.
Is there any guilty pleasure quite as satisfying as royal watching? We all love to tune into the elaborate weddings, analyze sartorial choices and coo when a royal baby arrives on the scene. But as basically every generation of royalty throughout history has shown, the happy ever after surface doesn’t always match what’s happening behind palace walls, and occasionally that unhappiness breaks into the public.
I've been delving into Overdrive for titles that are a little older (so they don't have a long wait list) and re-discovered Amanda Kyle Williams and her Keye Street series. And a happy discovery it was! Keye is an investigator/consultant running her own office in Atlanta. She does a little bit of everything; including background checks, catching bail jumpers, and because of her former job as an FBI profiler, sometimes consulting with local police when a serial killer may be working. The most recent request comes from the small town of Whisper, Georgia.
I've been super motivated this summer to read political memoirs and manifestos, starting with Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's life story, This is What America Looks Like.
Alyssa Cole has become an auto-read for me since I discovered her Reluctant Royals series and this start to a new, tangential series, Runaway Royals, keeps the streak going. Though How to Catch a Queen isn't my very favorite of her books (A Princess in Theory), it has two great things going for it.
Laura Lee Guhrke continues her American Heiress in London series with another delightful love story, How to Lose a Duke in Ten Days. This story of an arranged marriage that turns into a true love match follows When the Marquess Met His Match.
