FICTION
Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang
Best friends Anita and Rainie find refuge by an old sycamore tree with its neighboring lot of stray dogs that have a mysterious ability to communicate with humans. The girls learn that they are preceded by generations of dog-headed women and woman-headed dogs whose bloodlines bind them together. Anita convinces Rainie to become a dog with her, tying a collar of red string around each of their necks to preserve their kinship forever. But when the two girls are separated, Anita sinks into a dreamworld that only Rainie knows how to rescue her from. As Anita’s body begins to rot, it is up to Rainie to rebuild Anita’s body and keep her friend from being lost forever.
Dead Eleven by Jimmy Juliano
Clifford Island. When Willow Stone finds these words written on the floor of her deceased son’s bedroom, she’s perplexed. She’s never heard of it before, but soon learns it’s a tiny island off Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula. Why would her son write this on his floor? Determined to find answers, Willow sets out for the island. After a few days on Clifford, Willow realizes: This place is not normal. Everyone seems to be stuck in a particular day in 1994: They wear outdated clothing, avoid modern technology, and, perhaps most mystifyingly, watch the OJ Simpson car chase every evening. When she asks questions, people are evasive, but she learns one thing: Close your curtains at night.
Past Lying by Val McDermid
It’s April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot, but a mere pandemic doesn’t mean crime takes a holiday. When a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie’s team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it’s game on again. At the center of it, a novel: two crime novelists facing off over a chessboard. But it quickly emerges that their real-life competition is drawing blood. What unspools is a twisted game of betrayal and revenge, and as Karen and her team attempt to disentangle fact from fiction, it becomes clear that their investigation is more complicated than they ever imagined.
Secondhand Daylight by Eugen Bacon and Andrew Hook
Something is happening to Green. He is an ordinary guy, time-jumping forward at a startling, uncontainable rate. He is grappling to understand his present; his relationship is wholly tattered; his ultimate destination is a colossal question mark. Zada is a scientist in the future. She is mindful of Green’s conundrum and seeks to unravel it by going backward in time. Can she stop him from jumping to infinity? Their point of intersection is fleeting but memorable, each one’s travel impacting the other’s past or future. And one of them doesn’t even know it yet. Secondhand Daylight is a reverse story in alternate timelines between two protagonists whose lives must one day intersect.
NONFICTION
Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality by Angus Deaton
Deaton is witty and pulls no punches. In this incisive, candid, and funny book, he describes the everyday lives of working economists, recounting the triumphs as well as the disasters, and tells the inside story of the Nobel Prize in economics and the journey that led him to Stockholm to receive one. He discusses the ongoing tensions between economics and politics—and the extent to which economics has any content beyond the political prejudices of economists—and reflects on whether economists bear at least some responsibility for the growing despair and rising populism in America.
From the South Pacific to the New River: A West Virginia love story by John Emerson Campbell
This book is a unique love story between our Father and Mother, during WWII when the death of one of his brothers serving in Hawaii, was killed in a friendly fire accident, started what would become a great love story between the two of them. The first letter was written to this young girl of 15 years of age, expressing his and his family’s condolences on the loss of her boyfriend (his brother) which then turned into a letter-writing campaign between the two of them which shows how their love grew over time. Both people are now deceased, but these letters were kept by our mother for over 50 years and we, being their children, feel they need to be shared with the world.
Hell if We Don’t Change Our Ways by Brittany Means
Brittany Means’s childhood was a blur of highways and traumas that collapsed any effort to track time. As her mother struggled to escape abusive relationships, Brittany didn’t care where they were going if they were together. But every so often, her mom would surprise her — and leave. As Brittany grew older and questioned her own complicated relationships and the poverty, abuse, and instability that enveloped her, she began to recognize that hell wasn’t only the place she read about in the Bible; it was the cycle of violence that entrapped her family. Through footholds such as horror movies, neuropsychology, and strong bonds, Brittany makes sense of this cycle and finds a way to leave it.
Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal by Bettina L. Love
In Punished for Dreaming, Dr. Bettina Love argues forcefully that Reagan’s presidency ushered in a War on Black Children, pathologizing and penalizing them in concert with the War on Drugs. New policies punished schools with policing, closure, and loss of funding shaded as reform, egalitarian efforts increasingly allowed private interests to infiltrate the system. These changes implicated children of color, and Black children, specifically, as low performing, making it all too easy to turn a blind eye to their disproportionate conviction and incarceration. Today, there is little national conversation about a structural overhaul of American schools; cosmetic changes, rooted in anti-Blackness, are now passed off as justice.
CHILDREN’S
Real to Me by Minh Le
When you have a great friend, the rest of the world can seem to disappear. Sometimes our first best friends are ones that we create out of our imaginations. A little girl explains the relationship she has with her own private friend, who is a fluffy green monster with a yellow belly and a plumy tail. Others have told her that her friend is only imaginary, but to the little girl she is very real. They share all kinds of adventures together, but one day the little girl wakes up and her friend isn’t there. Where could she have gone? The sense of missing her friend is very real, too. The little girl eventually makes new friends that everyone can see, and realizes that she can carry the good memories of her first friend with her always. This lyrical tribute to a milestone of childhood is a beautifully illustrated comfort read.
Ages: 4-8
LIBRARY OPEN
Lima Public Library is open to the public six days a week. Hours for the Main Library in Lima are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Our Cairo, Elida and Spencerville branch libraries are open 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Our Lafayette branch is open from 12 noon to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Friday.
