Check this out, at the library this week
This week the library will be closed Friday, Jan. 1 for the New Year Holiday, we will reopen Monday, Jan. 4 at 9 a.m. Howard County Library wishes everyone a joyous and prosperous New Year!
This week's reviews are all fiction titles. England, May 1536 in “The Mirror & the Light” (F MAN H) by Hilary Mantel, Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors.
The blacksmith's son from Putney emerges from the spring's bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen Jane Seymour. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry's regime to the breaking point, Cromwell's robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future.
But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?
In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing projects in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range in “Deacon King Kong” (F MCB J) by James McBride. Mcbride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the AfricanAmerican and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local NYPD cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood's Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.
As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters, caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York, overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.
One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles in “Dear Edward” (F NAP A) by Ann Napolitano. Among them is a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured vet returning from Afghanistan, a business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. Halfway across the country, the plane crashes.
Edward is the sole survivor. Edward's story captures the attention of the nation, but he struggles to find a place for himself in a world without his family.
He continues to feel that a piece of him has been left in the sky, forever tied to the plane and all of his fellow passengers.
But then he makes an unexpected discovery, one that will lead him to the answers of some of life's most profound questions: When you've lost everything, how do find the strength to put one foot in front of the other? How do you learn to feel safe again? How do you find meaning in your life?
Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student in “Weather” (F OFF J) by Jenny Offill. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor.
At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink. She has always played this role to her divorced mother and her recovering addict brother. But everyone who writes in to the show is either crazy or depressed, and soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grow.
“For last year's words belong to last year's language/ And next year's words await another voice.” T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Howard County Library is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, for Grab & Go access to the library.
Customers have 30 minutes to browse the shelves, checkout items, make copies and send a fax, an appointment is still required to use a computer.
Please visit our website at http://howard-county. ploud.net and our Facebook page at www.facebook. com/howardcolibrary for more information.
You may reach us at 432-264-2260 and our fax number is 432-264-2263.