Category: Book Review

Your Library Card, Your Ticket to the World: Japan

Our library theme for 2020 is Your Library Card, Your Ticket to the World–because with the library, you truly can travel around the world without ever leaving the comfort of your own home. Every month in 2020, we’ll be landing at a new place on the globe. We’re in Japan for March.

Japan, with its fascinating culture and stunning landscapes, is a favorite destination in fiction for readers and writers alike–and for good reason! We’ve got a wide-ranging collection of books (and movies) set in Japan, many of them from Japanese authors/creators. It’s a little something for everyone.

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Book Buzz: The Overland Trail, Royal Rebels, and Mr. Rogers

Every month, we’re profiling new-ish releases that are getting critical and commercial buzz. For February, we’re looking at a 19th century tale of adventure on the road out West, a fictional look at one of the more infamous members of the British Royal Family, and a biography of a beloved TV star.

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Drew Smith’s Organize Your Genealogy (2016)

Organize Your Genealogy

We have a pretty good collection of local history and local genealogy material for those interested in researching their Carroll County roots. However, it’s not always easy to navigate, and we’re hoping to add more current resources on genealogy in general. One of the library goals for 2020 (because it’s one of my goals as a staff member 🙂 ) is to work on updating this collection and ensuring the resources we do have are more accessible and easier to use. To that end, I thought I’d review one of the items we already have in this collection.

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Your Library Card, Your Ticket to the World: Oceania

Our library theme for 2020 is Your Library Card, Your Ticket to the World–because with the library, you truly can travel around the world without ever leaving the comfort of your own home. Every month in 2020, we’ll be landing at a new place on the globe. We’re in Oceania for February.

Oceania is a vast region that encompasses many countries and cultures and the waterway that is the Pacific Ocean. But I wanted to focus specifically on one place that is very significant to many of our local residents—the Marshall Islands, or Aelõñ Kein Ad (our atolls) as many Marshallese actually call their country. Berryville and Carroll County (and Northwest Arkansas in general) have a growing number of Marshallese residents. In fact, nearby Springdale has the largest population of Marshallese in the continental United States.

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Book Buzz: Bollywood-Style Pride and Prejudice, Gritty British Mysteries, and the Rough Riders

Every month, we’re profiling new-ish releases that are getting critical and commercial buzz. For January, we’re looking at a gender and culture-swapped retelling of Pride and Prejudice, a series of intense crime thrillers, and a history of the Rough Riders, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Spanish-American War.

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Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star

Son of the Morning Star.jpg

Last year, I was helping a patron with reference request for the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I was a bit surprised we didn’t have the classic Son of the Morning Star. I talked to Julie about it, and she bought it to add to the collection. Thanks so much, Julie!

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Your Library Card, Your Ticket To The World: Alaska

Our library theme for 2020 is Your Library Card, Your Ticket to the World–because with the library, you truly can travel around the world without ever leaving the comfort of your own home. Every month in 2020, we’ll be landing at a new place on the globe, but we’re starting off in Alaska.

The rugged beauty of Alaska has long inspired writers (and readers!), so it is not surprising how many books set in Alaska are in our system. And there’s a little something for every reader, regardless of preferred genre.

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Jojo Moyes’s The Giver of Stars

The Giver of Stars

Alice seems to have jumped from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. In her native England during the Great Depression, she is bored and unhappy, and when she meets a handsome American man named Bennett, she quickly marries him to escape. When they relocate to his home state of Kentucky, she expects a well-to-do urban life, centered perhaps in Lexington. Instead, she finds herself in remote Eastern Kentucky, in impoverished coal country, trapped in an unhappy marriage. When the local pack horse library needs volunteers, Alice signs up, mainly as an excuse to get out of her house and away from her husband and father-in-law. At first, Alice is horrified by the rough people she encounters on her route, but she soon falls in love with her work, the people, and the mountains. Still, the solace she finds in work does nothing to ease her troubles at home. Complications ensue. . . .

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Louise Penny’s The Hangman (2010)

The Hangman

Carol Ann recommended Louise Penny’s Quebec-set Armand Gamache detective series a few months ago. We like a lot of the same authors and books, so I immediately was intrigued. Since then, I’ve noticed we circulate a lot of Louise Penny books, and I’ve had even more folks gush about how much they love the books. I only got around to trying a Gamache book recently, and I am so glad I did! (As always, thanks for the great recommendation, Carol Ann! 🙂 )

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Casey Cep’s Furious Hours (2019)

Furious Hours

Harper Lee is famous for her beloved classic To Kill A Mockingbird-–just last year it won The Great American Read and was so universally popular that it always led the public’s voting for favorite book by a wide margin for the entire duration of the vote.

However, Lee is perhaps just as famous for the fact that To Kill A Mockingbird is her only book. Sure, publishers released her Go Set a Watchman a few years ago, but in truth, that was just the very early draft of To Kill A Mockingbird and not a new book.

That’s not to say that Lee never tried to write another book, however.

According to Casey Cep’s debut Furious Hours, Lee worked for years on a true crime manuscript about a bizarre case of murder and insurance fraud in 1960s/1970s Alabama. . . .

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