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Book reviews by library staff and guest contributors
The Macavity Awards are nominated and voted on by members of Mystery Readers International. The winners were announced at Bouchercon, an annual mystery convention which was held in Minneapolis this past weekend. The nominees were published in 2021, so here's your chance to find a great read that my not have a long waiting list.
"Sharks that walk, sharks that speed, sharks that glow, sharks in danger… and baby sharks! Meet these sharks–and many more–in The Shark Book!”
If you, like me, are feeling the end of summer doldrums a bit, then I've got the book for you. The Passengers by John Marrs takes you on a wild ride and sets you on a collision course with fun! Too much? One pun too many?
I'm always a little skeptical of books about libraries - maybe being a librarian has made me too jaded. But this story isn't really about libraries, and it's not even really about books, although there is a gorgeously illustrated spread celebrating the breadth of imagination and worlds to be found within the pages of a book and the walls of a library.
When describing this book to a friend, I summarized as the story of two women in Victorian England: Ruth, a seamstress who believes she can hurt and kill others through her sewing, and Dorothea, a member of the gentry who visits Ruth in prison, believing that phrenology (the study of the contours of the human skull to describe a person's personality) holds the clues to Ruth's innocence or guilt. It sounds a bit wacky, I'll admit, but the story is so much more complex than that.
In her stellar adult fiction novel debut Veronica Roth explores what happens when a totalitarian, dystopian regime falls and whether or not the society can rebuild without repeating the same patterns and mistakes. And she does all of this through the eyes of someone who was complicit in that regime's behavior.
This fictionalized biography of Artemisia Gentileschi is as beautiful, powerful, and haunting as the paintings its subject produced. Gentileschi is best known as a celebrated Italian Baroque painter, and for insisting on trying her rapist in a court of law-- two things that were near unheard of for women of her time.
Inspired by the author's critically acclaimed album Dirty Computer, this Afrofuturistic collection of five connected stories center around a woman named Jane 57821 who is looking for refuge from the world of the Dirty Computer. The Dirty Computer is what society views as human imperfection, tainted by memory, emotion, and time.
We've all got them. Books we think will make us smarter but that are just a bit too daunting every time you go to pick them up and read. Mine in recent times has been Yuval Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. I placed it on hold, had the hold come in, checked it out and then returned it unread. I think that probably happened a couple of times.
What is art? What attracts or repulses the viewer? The colors, setting, images, tactile feel of textiles/sculpture? Does knowledge of the artist or the subject influence the viewer? All these questions and more are addressed in this surprisingly slim and amazing new book by the French novelist Camille Laurens detailing her fascination of one artist, Edgar Degas, and one work, his now iconic sculpture of a young dancer.
