Staff Recommendations
Julie Huffman
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Homegoing
by Gyasi, Yaa
November 21, 2016
Call Number:
Two half sisters in 18th-century Africa have never met, yet their lives, and the lives of their descendants, are deeply enmeshed. Esi is abducted and taken as a slave to America; Effia "marries" a white slaver who conducts his trade in Cape Coast, Ghana. As time marches towards the present, we are immersed in the experiences of their children and their children's children, alternating between Africa and America. Each descendant's story is worthy of a book in itself, giving this novel the feel of interlinked novellas. The American descendants suffer through slavery, the... Read Full Review
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Far north
by Theroux, Marcel
June 4, 2012
Call Number: F
If Cormac McCarthy’s brutal western Blood Meridian were set in the dystopian future of The Road and then translated into homespun sentences by Larry McMurtry, you’d approach Far North by Marcel Theroux.Narrated by Makepeace, the constable of a barren, post-apocalyptic town in Siberia, this is a story about survival in a struggling world. A “broken age,” as Makepeace tells it, one in which human beings who are deprived of food and “unwatched” are rat cunning and will not just kill you, but will “come up with a hundred and one reasons why you deserve it... Read Full Review
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In Zanesville : a novel
by Beard, Jo Ann.
April 9, 2012
Call Number: F
This is the story of an unnamed 14-year-old girl growing up in the farm-implement capital of the world: Zanesville, Illinois. It’s a wry observation of the folly and seriousness surrounding a middle-class life in 1970s America, which includes first flirtations and overworked mothers, the melodrama of cheerleaders and the drama of corporal punishment, telepathy with best friends and feral kitten abduction.Many of the happenings in the book are, like adolescence, a combination of hilarity and pain, e.g., an alcoholic father who seems prone to suicide is obsessed with taming the neighbor... Read Full Review