Press enter after choosing selection
Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Waiting on the White Covered Book...

by LibraryLiz

Sooo, this OTHER time at the library...there was that book you saw on a shelf, with a WHITE cover, that caught your eye - but, for whatever reason, you had to pass it by. Now, if you should find yourself whimpering for that long lost spark of interest, I may have the book for you! I've recently created a list of books that have, or have had, white covers - whether or not their most recent editions have that snowy hue, they did at some point! Plus, this list is welcome to all kinds of white covered books...

Whether it be a musty white of the novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a white with multi-colored dots - like the self-help book The Bright Hour, or perhaps a stark-white of the Ypsi Reads choice book, $2.00 A Day, all white covers are welcome on this compilation list. But this list isn't just for the adults! There's also a wide age range available for the younger reader waiting on the white...

Be it from the Teen section like The Hate You Give, Everything, Everything, or maybe Red Queen this list has many pearly-covered pages that you might have left on the shelf for a later date. Even the youth may have left a book resting on it's display, such as The Book of Mistakes or The Very Busy Spider. This list also provides you with options from every genre in the library...

Maybe you were browsing through the thrillers and found Enemy of the State or Dragon Teeth by Jurrasic Park author Michael Crichton? Could you have been possibly perusing the Express Shelf and seen Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body on the shelf? What about the non-fiction readers, who may have browsed through the stacks seeing covers that advertised payment via internet or staying healthy as you age!

This list has ALL THE THINGS (or would like to have) and is growing each day! Please feel free to take a look, and make comments of other white-covered books you think others may be searching for, so the list can continue to grow. Just think: someone out there could be looking for a white book jacket that you've read before - maybe you have the answer they've been looking for as they search the numerous volumes we have here at AADL. Or perhaps you yourself have been searching, and the book is in this list already!!! Only one way to find out...

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Lucy S

“Read Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing and you’ll feel the immense weight of history—and the immense strength it takes to persevere in the face of it. This novel is a searing, urgent read for anyone who thinks the shadows of slavery and Jim Crow have passed, and anyone who assumes the ghosts of the past are easy to placate. It’s hard to imagine a more necessary book for this political era.”
Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere

Jesmyn Ward returns with her first piece of full-length fiction since her National Book Award winner, Salvage the Bones (2011). Her new novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, has already been placed in some high company. Ward’s fictional Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage has been compared to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County in As I Lay Dying, its haunting spirits likened to those in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Sing, Unburied, Sing and its characters share a multi-generational memory and an understanding the of journey and toils of those who came before. Ghosts create a connection between the living, mourning with them.

Ward’s characters belong to three generations of a Mississippi family. Jojo and his little sister, Kayla, are being mostly raised by their grandparents. Their mother, Leonie, drifts in and out of the picture in a drug-induced haze, their father, Michael, is serving time in the Mississippi State Penitentiary, a prison farm known as Parchman. When Michael is released, Leonie brings Jojo and Kayla to pick him up. Their journey is not an easy one, their bodies crammed in a dirty, hot car, always hungry and thirsty, traveling dangerous terrain. Three narrative voices relay the details of the trip to Parchman and back; Jojo, Leonie, and Richie, a young boy whom Jojo’s grandfather had served time with in Parchman. Richie died when he was 15. That his voice not only shares in the telling of this story, but speaks to Jojo directly, shows how masterfully Ward can weave magical realism into her storytelling. These supernatural elements feel at home here, in the swampy, steamy, deep south of the Mississippi Gulf. Richie is not the only spirit who appears on these pages. Leonie is often visited by her deceased brother Given. Jojo hears not only from Richie, but is highly attuned to the sounds of the natural world, truly as if the earth’s song has been unburied for him. “Home ain’t always about a place...home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time.”

Ward’s story retells the hardships of past racism in the south and outlines the brutality of it in the present day. She illuminates this country’s struggle with race relations, police brutality, mass incarceration, by using the voices of the past and the present in conversation. Though her characters, both living and dead, speak often of cruelty and inhumanity, Ward’s matter-of-fact tone and presentation, coupled with her use of magical realism, imbues her words with an inflection that is calm and lyrical. Sing, Unburied, Sing is a moving and important work.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Refuge: A Novel

by Lucy S

At the beginning of Dina Nayeri’s expressive, well-crafted, second novel, Refuge, Dr. Bahman Hamidi sits outside a courtroom and watches the proceedings of the twelve divorce cases that proceed his. During this time, he reflects back on how he arrived at this point, the verge of ending his third marriage. He thinks of his first wife, and his son and daughter, who fled from Iran in 1987 to escape religious persecution after his wife converted to Christianity. Bahman is still plagued, in 2009, by the question of whether he did the right thing in letting them go, and in not joining them. He has only seen his family four times since they left. His daughter Niloo lives in Amsterdam with her husband, and it is her voice that narrates the alternating chapters of this book. We begin to understand her perspective on leaving Iran and her relationship to her father, on her vague memories of her early refugee years that instilled in her a “forever refugee feeling.” As the novel progresses, the story continues to jump back and forth between these decades and the points of view of Bahman and Niloo.

Refuge, rooted in the Arab Spring uprisings and the European migrant crisis, emphasises the ways in which being a refugee has marked Niloo for life. For example, when her debit card is declined while shopping for groceries in Amsterdam, due to bank error, she is shamed by the memory of her mother’s card being declined, of watching her mother put back all her food until she had only what she could pay for. “What Niloo feels is animal panic, the sensation of a world spitting her into another tier, one she has occupied before and that awaits her, that has missed her and knows she will be back.” This notion of having a foot in two worlds is a central theme in Nayeri’s book. One way Niloo manages this push and pull is to set up and live by a strict set of rules, going so far as to compose a list of written guidelines for marriage that she shares with her husband. Through this order, she strives to define and know herself, her exploration underscoring a merging of identities and cultures that may be crucial for many exiles. She meets a group Persian activists and asylum seekers, and finds herself beginning to investigate some of the choices she has made about her tightly structured life. Niloo is able to re-frame the complicated way in which she has seen her father, to realize that he has had his own struggles. The chapters that focus on Bahman provide us with a picture of a man whose life is complicated by his opium addiction, his politics, his ex-wives and his desire to see his grown children. Like Niloo, he is attempting to reconcile these disparate aspects of his reality.

The idea that one must look past the flaws of family members to seek some harmony lies at the heart of this father/daughter story. Refuge speaks to reinvention, finding new roots after being so uprooted, and to finding, perhaps embracing, the exiled parts of oneself.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Saints for All Occasions: the best of the best in Irish-Catholic family sagas

by eapearce

J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Maine, Commencement and The Engagements, again returns to Boston (where at least a portion of all of her books take place) in her latest family saga, Saints for All Occasions. A master of depicting tight-knight Irish-American families full of secrets, Sullivan possesses the rare ability to tell stories that span decades without losing the reader in time. Saints for All Occasions technically begins twice: first in 2009 when Nora Rafferty’s oldest son Patrick dies in a car crash and again in 1957 when Nora and her sister Theresa make the voyage from Ireland to America to join Nora’s fiancé, Charlie, in Boston.

What transpires between 1957 and 2009 seems at first simple: Theresa gets pregnant out of wedlock—at the time a particularly terrible fate for a young Irish Catholic girl—and goes reluctantly to a nunnery for the duration of her pregnancy and to have the baby. She doesn’t want to give her child up, but is forced to by the nuns. Nora—recently married to Charlie—agrees to take the boy in and raise him as her own. The effects of this choice drive the rest of the story, which introduces us to Nora’s other three children and to the path that Theresa followed after her pregnancy. Anyone who is familiar with Boston, with Irish-Catholic families, or with both will connect immediately to the portrait of the Raffertys that Sullivan paints in Saints for All Occasions. Her characters and their choices are believable and well-formed, and she travels between time periods deftly, revealing the secrets of the story to readers at the exact right moments.

Saints for All Occasions is a wonderful read to sneak in on your summer reading list.

Graphic for events post

Writing & Publishing

Fifth Avenue Press Book Release Reception: AADL's Local Publishing Imprint

Sunday November 5, 2017: 1:00pm to 3:00pm
Downtown Library: 3rd Floor Open Area
Grade 6 - Adult

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Margaret Atwood's Prize Winner

by Lucy S

“Then I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you this story; the story of how you came to be here, sitting in my kitchen, listening to the story I’ve been telling you...What is it I want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn’t yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me.”

Margaret Atwood is a remarkably prolific author whose works include 16 novels, 8 collections of short fiction, children’s books, collections of poetry, non-fiction works, television scripts, a graphic novel and a play. In 2000 she won The Man Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin. This multi-layered novel contain books within books, plots stacking up and overlapping. Atwood masterfully uses her characters as storytellers to create an expansive and complex narrative.

The Blind Assassin defies an orderly summary. Using multiple literary devices, Atwood deftly braids together three main threads to create this textured tale. Though the plot is complicated, at times confounding, it is also highly compelling. Iris Chase Griffen is at the end of her life as she chronicles, in writing, how she fills her days. While she is detailing this, she is also writing about her childhood spent with her sister, Laura. The third main thread of the story is “The Blind Assassin,” a novel published posthumously by Laura. These independent episodes create a whole which reads like a gothic mystery blended with speculative fiction. We learn of Laura Chase’s death in the opening line of the novel, and we know how she died, but Atwood leads us on a long, twisted path to deliver the why. “From here on in, things take a darker turn. But then, you knew they would. You knew it, because you already know what happened to Laura.”

For those of you on the long hold list for her extremely popular, and timely The Handmaid’s Tale, or those looking for more Atwood, Margaret post-The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin is definitely worth delving into.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Fabulous Fiction Firsts #646 “Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.” ~ Joe Hill

by muffy

World Fantasy Award–winner Theodora Goss's debut The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter * is reworked from an earlier short story, bringing her "Gothic-inflected fantasies roaring into the steampunk era." (Publishers Weekly)

Mary Jekyll, alone and penniless after her mother's death, found among her mother's ledger monthly payment to the Magdalen Society for the upkeep of "Hyde". Curious and eager to claim the reward for the capture of Edward Hyde, her father’s former friend and a murderer, Mary enlisted the help of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who were somewhat distracted in consulting for Inspector Lestrade in a series of gruesome murders of Whitechapel prostitutes.

Their hunt led them to Hyde’s daughter, Diana, and soon to Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein - other “monstrous” daughters of infamous scientists. This quintet of remarkable women took us on "a delightful romp through Victorian gothic literature, with a decidedly feminist slant", (Library Journal) and eventually to the Société des Alchimistes, a secret society of power-crazed scientists.

Winner of Best Horror Novel at the British Fantasy Awards 2016 The Girl from Rawblood * by Catriona Ward is set in an isolated mansion on Dartmoor called Rawblood (raw from sraw means the 'flowing' Dart River, blood from bont, a bridge), home to the only surviving members of the Villarca family - Iris and her father, Alonso.

For generations, the Villarcas have been haunted. When a Villarca marries, when they love, when they have a child, death follows. Thus Alonso made Iris promise to remain alone all her life. But at 15, Iris breaks that promise by falling in love, and the consequences of her choice are immediate and devastating. The narrative opens in 1910 with young Iris Villarca recounting "This is how I come to kill my father."

"Ward's layered and skillfully crafted novel weaves elements of classic gothic and horror into a remarkable story populated by unforgettable characters, palpable atmosphere, and rich lyricism. Imagine the darkest and goriest undertones of Edgar Allan Poe, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, and Shirley Jackson, and you'll have an idea of what Ward offers here." (Library Journal)

* = Starred review

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Happy Birthday Gustav Klimt!

by PhoebeH

Today is artist Gustav Klimt’s 155th birthday! What better way to celebrate, than to appreciate some of his incredible work. We have a selection of his paintings in our art print collection available to check out, including my favorite, and one of his most popular pieces, The Kiss. The Kiss is a glowing portrait of two lovers in a tight embrace, painted using oil paints and layers of gold leaf - actual gold that has been hammered down into thin, delicate sheets used for gilding.

Also available for check out is The Woman in Gold, a 2014 film starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds, that tells the story of Klimt’s famous Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which was stolen by Nazi’s during the second World War, and Adele's niece, Maria Altmann's decade long fight to reclaim the precious artwork. To read more about the true story, you can check out The Lady in Gold, or for a fictionalized version, be sure to read the novel Stolen Beauty.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Fabulous Fiction Firsts #645 “...we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.” ~ Michelle Moran

by muffy

The Reminders *, a debut novel by writer, singer-songwriter, and actor Val Emmich (Vinyl and Ugly Betty) is the unlikely friendship between a gifted child who remembers everything and a grieving man who is trying to forget.

10 year-old Joan Lennon (her father's favorite songwriter) Scully has HSAM (highly superior autobiographical memory). While she can recall every minute detail of her life, she is frustrated that everyone else forgets, even the most important things and people in their lives. She thinks winning a local songwriting contest might make her unforgettable.

Their house guest Gavin Winters is a grief-stricken TV actor who recently lost his partner Sydney. Caught on a neighbor's camera (the video went viral) setting fire to everything the couple own, Gavin, embarrassed and humiliated, accepts Paige and Ollie's invitation to visit New Jersey. Gavin and Ollie were college band-mates while Paige grew up with Sydney, and introduced the two. Gradually, Gavin is comforted by Joan's many cinematic and precise memories of Uncle Sydney through the years. As a trade-off, Gavin agrees to help Joan write the "perfect song" for the contest.

Told in the alternating voices of Joan and Gavin, we witness how this quirky friendship takes them on a few wild adventures, and eventually heals them both in heartfelt and unusual ways. "(A)chingly sweet, and unexpectedly nuanced. " (Kirkus Reviews)

In Rabbit Cake * * by Annie Hartnett, Elvis (she shares the king's birthday) Babbitt's Mom marked every milestone and holiday by baking a rabbit-shaped cake. According to the Chinese zodiac, rabbit represents longevity and good luck. Thinking back, Elvis thought the first sign of danger was when her mother burned the ears of the rabbit cake for Elvis's 10th birthday. Six months later, her Mom, an accomplished swimmer, sleepwalked into a river and drowned.

Before she could get on with grieving her mother (she was told it would take 18 months), Elvis seemed to be the only one in the family concerned with 15 year-old Lizzie's increasingly bizarre and dangerous sleep-eating behavior. Her father was no help - taking to walking around the house in her mother's silk kimono, wearing lipstick, and adopting a pet parrot that talks like her mother.

Like her mother, a biologist, Elvis finds comfort in facts and figures. She continues to investigate the strange circumstances of her mother's death, and tries to complete the research for the book her mother was writing on the sleep habits of animals, while coming to terms with her fractured family.

"This is the moving and often funny story of a family trying to figure out what to do next now that their touchstone is gone. The narrator’s voice is a stunning combination of youthful and astute....How a whip-smart young girl handles the loss of her mother and the reorientation of her family; charming and beautifully written." (Kirkus Reviews)

Suggested read-alikes: Carol Rifka Brunt's debut Tell the Wolves I'm Home; The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender; and Invincible Summers, Ann Arbor area author Robin Gaines' debut.

A friend also suggests Option B: facing adversity, building resilience, and finding joy * by Sheryl Sandberg that "explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships... Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere and to rediscover joy."

* = Starred review
* * = 2 starred reviews

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Fabulous Fiction Firsts #644

by muffy

Michigan author Karen Dionne's hardcover debut The Marsh King's Daughter * transports her readers to the wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula where a woman must risk everything she has and use every skill she learned to hunt down the dangerous criminal who taught her everything she knew - her father.

When Helena Pelletier heard on the news that the notorious murderer/kidnapper known as "The Marsh King" has killed two guards and escaped from Marquette maximum security prison, she knew she could no longer outrun her past.

Born in a primitive cabin to a 14 year-old kidnapped victim, Helena grew up without modern conveniences or human contact except for her aloof mother and Jacob, who held them captive. Despite his brutal behavior, Helene loved him, loved their life together, governed only by the seasons - farming, fishing, tracking, and hunting. But it was also a 13 year-old Helena who facilitated their rescue and put Jacob behind bars.

Twenty years later, married with two young daughters and a thriving business, Helena faces the daunting task of explaining to her husband why their family is at risk; why the police considers her a person of interest; and even more incredulous, why she is the only one with survivalist skills to track her father in the wild.

"Echoing Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of the same title, Dionne's latest is a well-crafted, eerie, and unnerving psychological thriller." (Library Journal)

For fans of Still Missing by Chevy Stevens; Room by Emma Donoghue; and Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller.

* = starred review