Tag: grandmothers

A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo

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“But here’s the important thing when it comes to art. This is what I’ve learned: The art is greater than you and your feelings. You have to serve it. It is not you…Whatever you’re creating may come from within you and your life, but then…it walks away and affects other people you don’t know and have never met. That’s the beauty of it.”
― Malinda Lo, A Scatter of Light

Discovering who you are can be a messy process. Malinda Lo tackles self-identity in A Scatter of Light. Set against the backdrop of the first major Supreme Court decisions legalizing gay marriage, Lo has created another queer coming-of age story that is bittersweet, romantic, and full of love and loss.

Rural California, 2013. Chinese-American teenager, Aria West, has big summer plans. After high school graduation, she plans on spending her summer with her two best friends in Martha’s Vineyard. After Aria becomes entangled in a scandal at a graduation party, she instead finds herself uninvited to Martha’s Vineyard and exiled to spend the summer with her grandmother, artist Joan West, in California. Aria isn’t sure what to do with herself until she meets her grandmother’s gardener, Steph Nichols. Aria quickly becomes friends with Steph and Steph’s group of friends, all of whom are queer. Aria finds herself second-guessing who she is when she develops a crush on Steph, throwing their friend group into turmoil. That summer in California points Aria down a life path that she didn’t think possible for herself. What she thought was going to be a boring and lost summer ends up becoming a summer of reflection, poetry, and self-discovery that changes her future.

Told from the viewpoint of adult Aria looking back at her eighteen-year-old self, readers relive her transition from leaving her school and childhood behind to her start towards independence. This is a  gloriously messy coming of age story all about how messy self-discovery can be. Lo wrote so beautifully that I felt my own teenage angst echoed through Aria’s actions.

A Scatter of Light is considered the companion novel to Last Night at the Telegraph Club. It’s not necessary for you to read one to understand the other, although A Scatter of Light ties up loose ends and answers questions I had after finishing Last Night at the Telegraph Club.

“…how we were only a small moment in time. In the scale of the universe, we’re just a blip.”
― Malinda Lo, A Scatter of Light

This title is also available in large print as well as an Libby eBook and Libby eAudiobook.

The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis

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Fiona Davis has written another masterful piece of historical fiction: The Lions of Fifth Avenue. What hooked me about this novel is that the New York Public Library plays a major part in each characters’ story. Told through the view points of New York in 1913/1914 and New York in 1993, Davis has managed to create a historical novel that weaves together two generations centered around similar themes: book thefts in the New York Public Library.

In 1913 New York, Laura Lyons seems to have the perfect life. Her husband has just been appointed the superintendent of the New York Public Library which means that her family now lives in the library. Tucked in an apartment hidden within the library, Laura, her husband, and their two children make their life together. While Laura should be happy with what she has, she wants more. Confident and sure of what she wants, Laura applies to the Columbia Journalism School and soon finds her respectable life blown apart. Her studies take her all across the city where she meets people she never would have met before.

She is introduced to the Heterodoxy Club, a radical group of all women who have found a safe space to share their opinions that society frowns upon: suffrage, women’s rights, birth control, among others. The beauty of the Heterodoxy Club is that it is a completely safe space for women to share their thoughts as they are not allowed to tell what is happening to people outside the group. The more Laura attends the Heterodoxy Club, the more she starts to question her life. She wants more than just being a wife and mother. Right as she seems to be getting what she wants, issues surface. Valuable books are stolen from the library. Her family is under scrutiny and their home is threatened, forcing Laura to figure out her priorities or she could lose it all.

Flash forward 80 years to 1993. Sadie Donovan works as a curator at the New York Public Library. Her grandmother is Laura Lyons, the famous essayist. That is an uncomfortable topic for Sadie to talk about given her job as curator. Life is going pretty well until books, notes, and rare manuscripts for the exhibit that Sadie is working on start disappearing from the Berg Collection. This famous collection has limited staff that run it, so the culprits have to be someone she knows. As the investigation ramps up, Sadie works with a private security expert to find the missing items and whoever is stealing. Sadie learns some uncomfortable secrets about her family the more she digs; things that could destroy her current life but that could also solve mysteries from the past.

This book is also available in the following formats: