Check this out, at the library this week
There is still time to join us for Virtual Summer Reading Program-imagine Your Story! Visit our website and click on the “Summer Reading June 1-Aug 5” section for more information. Enjoy stories on Tuesdays, tune in to view some great performers on Wednesdays, join us for Code Club on Thursdays and follow along with Kids Camp on Fridays. This week's performer is Carolina Storyteller, who is returning virtually to do two story times, one in English on Wednesday at 10 a.m. and one in Spanish on Thursday at 10 a.m. Also, come by the library to pick up weekly craft kits. Registration is ongoing throughout the summer, you can register online or in person, we also have paper reading logs and this year we also have an online reading log watch out for the link on our websites and Facebook. Visit us often on Facebook, Youtube and our websites to stay up to date on all our virtual events.
This week's reviews are fiction titles.
Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America in “Dominicana” (F CRU A) By Angie Cruz, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn't matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire closeknit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year's Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by Cesar, Juan's free-spirited younger brother, who convinces her to stay. As the Dominican Republic slides into political turmoil, Juan returns to protect his family's assets, leaving Cesar to take care of Ana. Suddenly, Ana is free to take English lessons at a local church, lie on the beach at Coney Island, dance with Cesar at the Audubon Ballroom, and imagine the possibility of a different kind of life in America. When Juan returns, Ana must decide once again between her heart and her duty to her family.
Galaxy "Alex" Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale's freshman class in “Ninth House” (F BAR L) By Leigh Bardugo. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she's thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world's most prestigious universities on a full ride. What's the catch, and why her? Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale's secret societies. Their eight windowless "tombs" are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street's biggest players. But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living.
In the city of Houston, a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America, the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age in “Lot Stories” (F WAS B) By Bryan Washington. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence and discovering himself. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing. Lot Stories explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.
Keeping people at arm's length had worked well as a life strategy for Sam Schrock in “Stitches In Time” (F FIS S) By Suzanne Woods Fisher. Until he met Mollie Graber. Schoolteacher Mollie Graber has come to Stoney Ridge for a fresh start. Aware of how fleeting and fragile life is, she wants to live it boldly and bravely. When Luke Schrock, new to his role as deacon, asks the church to take in foster girls from a group home, she's the first to raise her hand. The power of love, she believes, can pick up the dropped stitches in a child's heart and knit them back together. Mollie envisions sleepovers and pillow fights. What she gets are sleepless nights and police at her door. There's only one thing that breaks through the girls' hard shells – an interest in horses. Reluctantly and skeptically, horse trainer Sam Schrock gets drawn into Mollie's chaotic life and unexpected love.
“Read a book, and broaden your perspective on life.” Marcia Carrington
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.