Angie Stava

Job: Librarian II, Children & Teen Materials Selector, San Diego Public Library

She recommends: “Stepsister” by Jennifer Donnelly (Scholastic Press, 2019; 342 pages)

Like all good fairy tales, “Stepsister” shows us both the gorgeous and the gruesome parts of life. We meet ugly stepsister Isabelle as her mother cuts off her toes to fit in the glass slippers of Cinderella fame. But then we watch as Isabelle refuses to be broken. Ignoring the taunts of the villagers and her family’s increasingly desperate circumstances, Isabelle fights to recover the lost pieces of her heart before it’s too late. In doing so, she maps out a future that is truly hers, with a little help from the fairy queen that made Cinderella’s night out possible. And like all great fairy tales, this one holds a mirror to our own society’s struggles — questions of beauty, who has value, and who gets to determine our fate. A rebellious, raging tale that will inspire you to show ’em what you got with your chin held high.

Seth Marko

Job: Owner, The Book Catapult

He recommends: “Desert Notebooks: A Roadmap for the End of Time” by Ben Ehrenreich (Counterpoint, 2020; 336 pages)

Ben Ehrenreich’s unclassifiable, brilliant new book is a polymath’s mix of personal memoir, nature writing, micro-histories, Mayan mythologies, and how it all relates to the (outgoing) American president, the acceleration of climate change, the politics of race, and the nature of time itself. It’s a most unusual book, as you can tell, but one I can’t seem to shake — and it’s holding up as one of the best books I’ve read this year. Ehrenreich’s general theory is that “Trauma stops time. Catastrophe breaks all cycles. Whatever rhythm had once been attained collapses.” 2020 has definitely been such a massive, yearlong trauma point for most of us — whether racism, COVID, climate, Trump, or a heavy combination of all of the above. Now how do we deal with that trauma and move forward into the future? Through the desert, friends.

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Welcome to our literary circle, in which San Diegans pass the (printed) word on books

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