Category: Reference

One Day in December by Josie Silver

- Stephanie Leave a comment

This book caught my eye when it popped up as a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine Book Club Pick. Seeing that there was a wait list, I decided to hold out and wait until it came out on OverDrive. Just this last week, I stumbled upon this title again as available. I hurriedly checked it out and started reading. I devoured this title in less than two days!

One Day in December by Josie Silver may be in the fiction section, but it definitely is full of romance as two of the main characters feel the constant push and pull of attraction throughout their lives over a ten year history.

Laurie is on her way home when she spots a mysterious man at a bus stop. Through the foggy and misty window on the blustery snowy December day, Laurie is floored by the instant attraction that courses through her. When he lifts his head up and their eyes meet, something jolts through her body and she knows that he is the one for her. Stymied by indecision, Laurie is at a loss of what to do. Just as she’s gathering her courage, her bus drives away.

Thoroughly believing that she and bus boy are fated to find each other again, Laurie and her best friend Sarah spend the next year scouring every conceivable place in London looking for him. She becomes even more obsessed thinking that she sees him in crowds, in cafes, at different bus stops, anywhere and everywhere. Her journey to find bus boy comes to a screeching halt at their annual Christmas party when Sarah finally brings her new boyfriend to show off for Laurie. As they are introduced, Laurie feels that jolt pass through her again. The man that Sarah has been gushing about for months is Jack. Jack is bus boy. Laurie is understandably devastated.

Not wanting to destroy Sarah’s happiness, Laurie and Jack enter into an unspeaking pact to never tell Sarah that the two have met before. As a result, Laurie, Sarah, and Jack live the next ten years somewhat normally. They go through heartbreaks, intense friendships, new romances, family troubles, and new careers, all while fate works behind the scenes to guide them where they need to be.

Told through snippets of different days throughout the ten years that pass after Laurie first saw Jack, One Day in December tells the story of how love changes and morphs as we grow older. While Laurie may not believe in love at first sight, this novel works to prove that fate has a hand in every decision that we make and ultimately will lead us towards happiness in many different forms.

This book is also available in the following format:

The Fairmount Gardening Club

- Ann 1 Comment

Have you noticed the garden in front of the Fairmount Library lately? You really should take some time to walk through it the next time you stop by – it’s beautiful! And there’s a lot to admire and appreciate – it’s filled in with a lots of perennials and annuals and attracts and supports a variety of important pollinators, especially butterflies. There’s even a bench where you can sit and relax.

Here’s something you may not know about the Fairmount Garden – it is dedicated to the memory of a former Davenport Library Reference Librarian. Margaret Z Henry (we called her MZH) was the epitome of a professional librarian – meticulous with her research (long before the internet and google!), open and helpful to all no matter the request and generous with her knowledge and support, Margaret also had a wicked sense of humor and never hesitated to lend a helping hand to her friends and colleagues. When she died, far too young, the money collected for her memorial was given to the library to help establish the Fairmount garden. A stone engraved with a Jane Austen quote near the front entrance of the garden is dedicated to her memory.

The garden wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of our Garden Volunteers, headed up by Mary Davidsaver who has done an incredible job! Here’s her story:

I volunteered for gardening duty at Fairmount Library last year because I had a two-pronged mission. First, I wanted things to look nicer. Second, I wanted to save the milkweed for Monarch butterflies and their annual migration. Sometimes when you want something it’s up to you to step forward and make it happen.

So, I and two others volunteered our time to weed, plant, and water. We made progress through last summer’s hot, dry spell, but our numbers diminished. One of us had to relocate. One lost the extra time to volunteer due to a shift in her work schedule. By the end of the growing season, I was it.

Sadly, a lot of our efforts were erased by a winter with subzero temps and a wet spring that set its own records. But the plantings of the main flower beds came through and offered hope. And isn’t that what keeps a gardener going: New hope for a better year?

Inspiration for me was the return of the milkweed and the Monarchs. For other gardeners the calling could be tending to the roses, or to planting herbs and vegetables outside the children’s area. The grounds of Fairmount Library offer opportunity as well as need and volunteering is time well spent.

Mary also sent along some pictures of butterflies in the Fairmount garden. And you can follow more of Mary’s adventures at her blog.

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Special thank you to Mary for this great write-up as well as her dedication to the Fairmount garden (and butterflies!) If you’d like to lend Mary a hand and volunteer with the Fairmount Garden Club, just stop by the customer service desk at Fairmount to sign up.

Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

- Stephanie 2 Comments

What are your feelings about fiction that reads like a documentary or a piece of nonfiction? I wasn’t sure how I felt about this until I picked up Taylor Jenkins Reid’s latest book, Daisy Jones & the Six.

I had previously read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by the same author, so when I saw that Jenkins Reid was putting out a new book, I was excited. While I was waiting for my hold to come in, I carefully looked at reviews while avoiding the spoilers. What I read mentioned that if you have the chance, listen to this book on audiobook first. I took this advice and I’m glad I did! Doing so added a level of closeness to each character and depth to their lives that I felt like I would have missed if I had read the print book only. To each their own though! I will tell you that this audiobook is read by a cast of 21 different narrators, so telling each character apart was fairly easy and very entertaining.

Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid tells the story of the iconic 1970s rock band, Daisy Jones & the Six. This book will grab you by the heart(and ears) while keeping you invested in the rise and fall of Daisy Jones & the Six. Told as an oral history of this band’s journey, readers are privy to behind-the-scenes insiders knowledge as to the reason behind their split when the band was at the height of their popularity.

The Six and Daisy were initially two separate groups. The Six is a rock band of their own accord, led by Billy Dunne. While the group is getting ready for their first tour, the habits that Billy has picked up over the years start to come to a head when his girlfriend Camila tells him that she is pregnant. Reeling from this news, Billy goes even more off the rails, leading different members of the band to deal with his actions.

Daisy is a club girl growing up and coming of age in LA in the late sixties. With parents who take a hands-off approach to parenting, Daisy leaves their house to pursue her dream of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. She begins sneaking into clubs, sleeping with rock stars, and getting high off of all the drugs, alcohol, and sex she can get her hands on. While she loves the party scene, nothing holds a candle to her love of rock and roll. By the time Daisy hits twenty, Daisy’s intriguing voice is pulling in attention from people all over the city and her beauty begins to make her even more alluring.

When a music producer who works with and knows both Billy and Daisy begins toying with the idea of having them work together, he quickly realizes that he is on to something. While they are famous in their own right without each other, he begins to see that combining Daisy Jones & the Six has the ability to raise their stardom to unspeakable new heights.

Merging the two groups together proves messy, disheartening, challenging, and immensely rewarding as both Daisy and Billy have egos that refuse to be ignored. Taylor Jenkins Reid follows the group as they work on merging together, creating hits that rocket them to the top of the charts, and ultimately breaking apart at the peak of their popularity.

This book is available in the following formats:

Sadie by Courtney Summers

- Stephanie Leave a comment

I spend a lot of time in the car either driving to work or driving to explore. This means that I have so many hours to fill that the music on the radio starts to repeat itself. I have learned to spend this time listening to podcasts and audiobooks instead. Looking at award-winning book lists, I found Sadie by Courtney Summers: a book that is presented like a true crime podcast. This sounded perfect to me.

Sadie by Courtney Summers highlights the story of Sadie and her sister Mattie. When thirteen-year-old Mattie goes missing from her small Colorado town and is eventually found murdered, her nineteen-year-old sister Sadie is devastated. Sadie has been raising Mattie by herself for years ever since their mother left. While she had some help from her surrogate grandma, Sadie took on the bulk of the responsibilities associated with her and Mattie’s welfare. When Sadie all of a sudden disappears about a year after Mattie is found, her surrogate grandma reaches out for help.

West McCray is a radio personality who has been slowly making his way across the country to work on a segment about small, forgotten towns in America. While stopped in one such town, he overhears a local talking about Sadie’s disappearance. Shortly after, West is contacted by Sadie’s surrogate grandma and finds himself drawn into the case. West decides to turn his examination into the disappearance of Sadie and the murder of Mattie into a true crime podcast called ‘The Girls’.

When Sadie runs away, rumors abound about why she left and where she’s going. Told in the alternating perspectives of both Sadie as she runs away and West’s podcast about her disappearance, readers are able to follow this story from both points of view. While Sadie has run away in order to track down her younger sister Mattie’s killer, West and the rest of her family don’t have access to that information and struggle to find out why she’s gone, where she is, and what has happened to her.

I enjoyed this book as it combines three of my favorite things: true crime, podcasts, and audiobooks. After looking at different reviews, flipping through the print book, and listening to the audiobook, I agree with others when they say that, if given the option, you should listen to the audiobook. By doing so, you are privy to the little audio clues present in the podcast sections that you would miss out on if you only read the book. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

This book is also available in the following format:

Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos by Lucy Knisley

- Stephanie Leave a comment

I’ll admit this right now: Lucy Knisley is one of my go-to graphic novel writers. I have yet to be disappointed by her delightful drawings and keen insights into the various stages of life that she writes about in each of her graphic novels. I have enjoyed following Lucy as she documents her journey through traveling adventures, food, family, and planning a wedding. When she posted on her Instagram that she was writing and drawing a new book, I was excited and made a note to check it out when it was published. Well…. I found it!

Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos is Lucy’s latest graphic novel. This graphic memoir details Lucy’s desire to become a mother and her struggle to do so. Lucy was told throughout her entire life that anything is possible as long as you work hard enough and want it enough. What she found is that this isn’t true when you’re trying to get pregnant.

Lucy details, for all the world to see, the struggles that she and her partner went through in order to have a baby. She documents her fertility problems, miscarriages, and her eventual pregnancy that was chockful of health issues. This book ends with the birth of her son, Pal, but the information presented in it spans decades (even centuries).

Lucy talks about her own interest in birth starting when she was a young child and then moves through a very intense period where she was trying to find a birth control option that worked for her. When she and her partner decided to try but not try for a baby, Lucy talks about how she began the transition into potential motherhood. In addition to talking about her personal journey, Lucy also talks about the science and history of reproductive health. In her illustrations, Lucy details the positive and negative aspects(and people) surrounding medicine and midwifery.  The history she added brought a necessary higher level to her own personal pregnancy story.

This book is a lovely addition to Lucy’s graphic novel repertoire. It clearly and beautifully illustrates Lucy’s journey to motherhood as well as the history of pregnancy. Check this book out whether you are on any stage of wanting kids, having kids, or avoiding kids at all cost. Let me know what you think!

If you haven’t read Lucy Knisley’s previous books, I highly recommend that you check them out:

 

The Farm by Joanne Ramos

- Stephanie Leave a comment

Pregnancy is a taboo subject alongside conception in today’s society. Even though this is something that people go through on a daily basis, anything surrounding pregnancy is seen as something to be kept hidden and not talked about. Joanne Ramos takes this topic and expands upon it in her debut novel.

The Farm by Joanne Ramos feeds upon the desire of wealthy women to have a baby, but still be able to keep their figure, work full time, and not have to rely on a partner to have a baby. Mae Yu, an ambitious businesswoman looking to find her way in the business world, proposes a new plan to give these women what they want: Golden Oaks. Golden Oaks is a luxury retreat nestled, and somewhat hidden away, in New York’s Hudson Valley. This retreat caters to basically every woman’s pregnancy need: massages, personal trainers, meals catered to their exact nutritional needs, and a community of pregnant women going through the exact same process that they are. Sounds perfect, right? There has to be a hidden secretive side at Golden Oaks and sure enough it starts to surface.

The women at Golden Oaks aren’t just regular surrogates: they are ‘Hosts’ at ‘The Farm’ as they call themselves and Golden Oaks. These hosts are promised a very large, lucrative payday when they deliver their children for the clients. The downside: they are trapped at Golden Oaks for the full nine months, they cannot leave the grounds, their movements are monitored 24/7, and they are completely cut off from their former lives. Sure, they have access to computers and video chats with their families and friends, but those calls are monitored and visitors are not allowed. Despite all these restrictions, and partly because they are not disclosed up front when hosts are brought to Golden Oaks, some residents choose to dedicate their lives to the Farm and carry multiple babies for the same women.

Struggling to provide for her daughter, Jane is having trouble holding down a job. When she hears of Golden Oaks through another family member, Jane soon finds herself signing up to carry someone else’s baby, despite the fact that she has a very young daughter at home. Jane, a young immigrant from the Philippines just trying to find a better life, commits to being a ‘Host’ at Golden Oaks and finds her new life to be structured in a way that makes her uncomfortable. As she begins to doubt her choices and wants to go back to her former life, Jane realizes that she must reconnect with her family on the outside. Facing the possibility that she could lose the fee she was promised with the safe and healthy delivery of the child she is carrying, Jane is forced to go to the extremes to get what she wants.

This novel forces readers to question what we consider to be motherhood and all the messy moral, monetary, and reproductive questions that circle the ability to get pregnant. The topic of what women are willing to do to become mothers and how far businesses are willing to go in order to help them happily fulfill their futures is a major component of this book. Give this book a read (or listen) and let me know what you think!

This book is also available in the following formats:

Cannabis : The Illegalization of Weed in America by Box Brown

- Brenda Leave a comment

I recently saw a local news story in which Illinois state senator Toi Hutchinson said that the legalization of cannabis in her state came as a result of the differing sides “hashing it out” to come to agreement. I don’t know whether or not the pun was intended, but as a librarian interested in languages, I appreciated it.

Soon after, I spotted the graphic novel Cannabis: The Illegalization of Weed in America on display at the library and figured it would be a good way to better educate myself on the topic right at our doorstep. I was not disappointed. This graphic novel has four pages of sources cited at the end! It is equal parts interesting and informative.

It starts with what is known about early humans’ use of cannabis sativa from biology and mythology. It outlines how the plant has been cultivated for its various uses across the world (think: textiles & oils too). It traces the etymology of the many different words we use for it: hash, Mary Jane, reefer, weed, to name just a few. I learned that the word marijuana is believed to be derived from slang usage in Mexico near Catholic missionaries, where the priests condemned its use. Locals would tell the priest they were just spending time with Maria Juana!

The graphic novel delves into the “Reefer Madness” era during which commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics Harry Anslinger worked to criminalize its use by making false, racist claims about its use and users. It discusses how cannabis has been regulated through legislation and how its reputation has been manipulated. The graphic novel concludes with present-day uses and a bibliography listing sixty sources readers can seek out for further learning on the subject.

I highly recommend this book and I look forward to reading Box Brown’s other titles, including Is This Guy for Real? The Unbelievable Andy Kaufman and Tetris: The Games People Play.

You can also learn more on this topic from Illinois Policy, an independent organization that seeks to educate and engage Illinois citizens.

 

Announcing Acorn TV !

- Valerie Leave a comment

The Davenport Public Library now offers Acorn TV !  Davenport library cardholders now have unlimited, streaming access to British TV and films.  Acorn TV streams world-class mysteries, dramas, and comedies from Britain and beyond. You can binge-watch a full slate of original and exclusive programming.

This digital resource can be enjoyed via the RBdigital app, accessed from the library’s    Online Resources page or you may browse available content.  To get started register for an RBdigital account or login with your existing.   When you are ready to watch a show, check out a 7-day license to enjoy unlimited, streaming content. Check out another week-long license when you are ready to watch more.

With thousands of hours of commercial-free programming and new shows added weekly, there’s always something to watch!

Can’t Get Enough Game of Thrones?

- Atticus Leave a comment

The final season of HBO’s hit show Game of Thrones has finally concluded. The ending of this show has left some craving for more from this universe. If you are one of those people, fear not! Your Davenport Public Library has just the thing for you no matter what your desired method for consuming entertainment is. If you have not read the books that the show is based on, I recommend starting there. The Davenport Public Library offers a number of ways to read the books.

You can check them out as ebooks through the Overdrive app here. If reading on a device isn’t your thing, we also have all of the A Song of Ice and Fire books available in their physical forms as well. If reading over 5,000 pages doesn’t sound like your idea of a fun leisurely time, fret not, we also offer the books in the form of audiobooks that you can also find in our catalog. These audiobooks come in both a CD format that you can come to the library and check out or on the Overdrive app where you just download the file to listen to on your device.

If you have already read the books and are looking for something else to read that satiates your love for Westeros and beyond, there are also books that Martin has published that tell  stories beyond the scope of what is covered in the books and the show. Fire and Blood follows the story of the Targaryen house centuries before the events of Game of Thrones. This story informs on the beginnings of house Targaryen and what Westeros looked like years before we get to experience it with the books and show.

Finally, if you just cancelled your HBO subscription at the end of the season and are feeling the itch to rewatch it, we have you covered there as well. All seven seasons that are currently available to commercially purchase are available to check out at the library as well. We have all of these resources and more to check out to get more from your favorite fantasy epic.Just because the show has ended doesn’t mean that your watch has to!

The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye

- Christine Leave a comment

The daughter of a Palestinian immigrant to the US, Naomi Shihab Nye, latest collection of poetry delves into the heavy topic of the the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the real disparage of land, power, culture, and control. The poems can each stand on their own but as an inter-woven tapestry are reminding the reader of the brutality of borders, walls, occupied lands and conflict.

In one of her poems from the collection:

“Losing as Its Own Flower,”

“Truth unfolds in the gardens,

massive cabbages, succulent tomatoes,

orange petals billowing,

even when the drought is long. . . .

In a way, we did lose. Where is everybody?

Scattered around the world like pollen.”

The reader is reminded of the beauty of life and the simplicity of the earth’s nourishment in contrast to boundaries – mental, physical, emotional, and the tragedies of war, death and fighting created by man.

The Tiny Journalist focuses on the struggles for all humans not just those in Palestine or Israel, but more on the elements of the disparities of war and the nonjudgmental hand of destruction.