Hi everyone, here are our recommended reads for the week!
*More information on the three catalogs and available formats is found at the end of the list of recommended reads*
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Weekly Suggested Reading postings are published on Wednesdays.
And the next Suggested Reading posting will be published on Wednesday, March 20, 2024.
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Becoming Madam Secretary by Stephanie Dray
Frances Perkins, born to well-off parents, arrives at the turn of the 20th century in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood with a fellowship to investigate childhood malnutrition. Enraged at the deplorable living and working conditions she encounters, she is soon ensconced with other powerful women, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, who are equally socially conscious. Shortly after she witnesses women falling to their deaths during the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, Frances is recommended by former president Theodore Roosevelt to a committee on safety in New York State seeking to prevent future workplace tragedies. As she begins to find success in her professional life, she is romantically pursued by fellow reformer Paul Wilson. They marry and face personal tragedies as Frances continues to work for the betterment of those who have less. She fights for workers’ rights, meets and becomes enthralled with a young lawyer named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and forms a partnership with him that will carry them all the way to the White House. VERDICT Dray (The Women of Chateau Lafayette) introduces readers to this real-life trailblazing woman who is the mother of Social Security and became the first woman appointed to a United States presidential cabinet. A fictionalized portrayal of a phenomenal woman who has largely been lost to history. – Library Journal
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A Grave Robbery by Deanna Raybourn
The Earl of Rosemorran, patron and employer for Veronica Speedwell and Stoker, brings Stoker a new project. The earl has purchased a crystal casket containing a life-size waxwork sleeping beauty, and he wants Stoker to install a clockwork mechanism to make the figure appear to breathe. When Stoker makes the first cut, he discovers that the sleeping beauty is an actual human body disguised as an anatomical waxwork. He wants to identify her and provide a proper burial, while Veronica wants to find out if the woman died by suicide or was murdered. Their misadventures take them from a Victorian circus to a mortuary and underground railroad. In order to catch a villain, the couple recruit allies, including a woman reporter, a Scotland Yard detective, a hermit, and an undertaker. The entire team is needed to launch Veronica’s audacious scheme to substitute herself for the waxen beauty. But Veronica makes a costly mistake when she underestimates her opponent.
VERDICT The ninth Veronica Speedwell book, following A Sinister Revenge, spins off Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s possibly the best in the series, with Raybourn’s trademark banter, innuendo, and outstanding lead characters, along with a fascinating plot and supporting cast. – Starred Library Journal Review
Reader’s Note: A Grave Robbery is the ninth book in the Veronica Speedwell Mystery series. If you’d like to start reading from the beginning, check out book one: A Curious Beginning.
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The Great Divide: A Novel by Cristina Henriquez
The enthralling latest from Henríquez (The Book of Unknown Americans) tells the stories of migrant laborers, locals, and others affected by the Panama Canal project in 1907. Born and bred in Panama City, Francisco Aquino is a proud fisherman. His headstrong teenage son Omar yearns for more than his father’s predictable life at sea, however, and gets hired at Culebra Cut, a notoriously difficult labor site, where he works to dig the canal alongside Barbadians, Jamaicans, and Haitians. Francisco, who calls the Americans “enemy invaders” for building the canal and harbors resentment over U.S. intervention in Panama’s 1903 separatist movement, disapproves. There’s also 16-year-old Ada Bunting, who arrives from Barbados to work as a washer woman so she can send money to help her sister, who has pneumonia. Her story is linked with that of Tennessee scientist John Oswald, who comes to Panama to study tropical diseases with his wife Marian, who contracts pneumonia and is cared for by Ada. Meanwhile, the residents of the southern town of Gatun learn that their community has been earmarked as the site of the canal’s dam. The author delves deeply into themes of colonialism and labor exploitation, showing how the men take quinine daily to ward off tropical diseases while an American foreman rules over their worksite with an iron fist. Henríquez’s pitch-perfect novel has the feel of a classic. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman
At a big-box retailer in upstate New York, a team of workers is energized by a secret plan. “‘Roaches’ was what other employees called the people who worked Movement, because they descended on the store in the dark of night, then scattered in the morning, when the customers arrived.” Waldman’s long-awaited follow-up to The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013) is set in a totally different world–bye-bye, literary Brooklyn; hello, blue-collar Potterstown, a forlorn small town with a view of the Catskills, stuck in a downward spiral ever since the local IBM plant closed. What remains the same is the author’s emotional intelligence, wry humor, and sensitivity to matters of money and class. Meanwhile, the details of daily operation and workplace culture at Town Square Store #1512 are evoked in fine and fascinating detail. The members of Team Movement (formerly “Logistics”) are introduced in the org chart that opens the book, and that org chart is the heart of the plot. Currently the nine “roaches” are managed by a guy they call Little Will. Everybody loves Little Will, but his self-absorbed boss, Meredith, a Fashion Institute of Technology dropout, is a nightmare. Now the top dog, Big Will, whose “nonthreatening air of diversity, combined with his good looks and his youth,” make him a corporate dreamboat, is getting his hoped-for transfer to his home state of Connecticut. Does that mean the hated Meredith will get his job? But if so, would Little Will move up and leave a management slot free for one of the roaches, who get no benefits whatsoever? This situation inspires a smart lesbian mom named Val to cook up a plot in which each of her sympathetically imagined Movement compadres plays a role. Even the coffeepot in the break room during a team meeting is a character: “hissing and sputtering wildly, like a small animal trying to scare off a larger predator.” The workplace dramedy of the year. – Starred Kirkus Review
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Listen for the Lie: A Novel by Amy Tintera
YA author Tintera (The Q, 2022) makes her adult debut with a twisty thriller featuring an appealingly unlikable narrator. Lucy Chase can’t remember the night her best friend, Savvy, was murdered. Though Lucy was never charged, most of the residents of Plumpton, Texas, think she did it. Lucy moves to L.A., where her alleged crimes are mostly forgotten until a true-crime podcast picks up the case. Then Lucy’s beloved grandmother calls her back to Plumpton; little does she know that her grandmother promised Ben, the podcast host, an interview with Lucy, who has never publicly spoken about Savvy’s murder. Oh, and Lucy is having severe murderous ideation, led by a mysterious voice in her head. As Lucy reluctantly works with Ben to piece together the night of Savvy’s murder, the case is complicated by Lucy’s picture-perfect ex-husband, who is just one of the people keeping secrets. The true-crime podcast hook will draw readers in, but it is Lucy’s unique voice that will keep them turning the pages. An excellent takedown of small-town life and toxic masculinity. – Booklist
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Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way by Rachel Slade
Journalist Slade (Into the Raging Sea) offers an incisive look at the history and current state of American manufacturing. Using as a lens the story of Ben and Whitney Waxman—a young couple with backgrounds in union organizing and working low-paid jobs who set out in 2015 to found an entirely American-made hoodie company in Portland, Maine—she charts the once stalwart American garment industry’s slow death, from billionaire attacks on the early unions in the 1930s, through international trade agreements such as NAFTA. She shows how the latter have allowed multinational corporations to move production to countries with fewer rights and protections for workers or the environment, thereby lowering their costs and undercutting American-based manufacturing with cheap imports. Tracking the Waxmans’ difficulties sourcing American-made cotton fleece, drawstrings, zippers, and grommets in this depleted manufacturing landscape, Slade delves into the histories of the companies they eventually find to supply them, some of which have been family owned for over 100 years. The Waxmans’ company, American Roots, has transformed their community, according to Slade, who writes that every hoodie made “supports one-hundred-plus Maine workers.” This galvanizing call for Americans “to start making things for themselves” serves as both a sweeping report on a globalized industry and a practical road map for aspiring small-scale manufacturers. Readers will feel invigorated. – Publishers Weekly Review
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Never Too Late by Danielle Steel
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel, a stirring novel about a woman striking out on her own after loss as her adult daughters try to find their own independent paths in life.
Kezia Cooper Hobson, recently widowed, arrives in New York from San Francisco. Determined to make a fresh start, she has just completed the sale of her Pacific Heights home, not to mention her husband’s venture capital firm, and in doing so, is also freed from her responsibility as a board member of the company. Bringing with her only a few personal treasures, she is excited to move into the blank slate of a beautiful midtown penthouse, in the city that she has always loved. It is also where her two adult daughters now live.
As Kezia settles into her new apartment, she meets her movie-star next-door neighbor, Sam Stewart, whose terrace borders hers. Just a couple of weeks after she arrives, however, a devastating crisis strikes New York City. Kezia and Sam find themselves connecting over their strong impulse to help those in need. As they share a life-changing experience of volunteering, a bond is sparked and a friendship is formed.
Kezia’s daughters, Kate and Felicity, are taken aback by their mother’s new friendship, both more focused on their own love lives than hers. But Kezia is learning that the changes she’s making are just what she needs to open new horizons.
In this powerful and moving new novel, Danielle Steel illuminates the importance of human connection and embracing brave change, proving it’s never too late for a brand-new start.
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Parasol Against the Axe: A Novel by Helen Oyeyemi
The bold, lucid, and experimental latest from Oyeyemi (Peaces) portrays Prague as a city of dreams and mysteries. The writer Hero Tojosoa, who publishes under the pen name Dorothea Gilman, accepts a last-minute invitation to a bachelorette party in Czechia hosted by two frenemies. She brings with her a copy of Paradoxical Undressing, a novel by mysterious Australian author Merlin Mwenda, which provides a different narrative each time it’s opened (Hero’s copy shifts overnight from a story of a love triangle in the court of King Rudolf III to one of a dyspeptic judge hoping to frame his own son for crimes against the Communist Party). Also in Prague is the real Dorothea Gilman, who has an axe to grind with Hero for using her name. Dorothea winds up with her own copy of Paradoxical Undressing, one that’s set in 1943 and concerns the perilous adventures of a dancer hoping to subvert the Nazi Protectorate from within. By the time Dorothea loses her copy of the Mwenda and tracks down a new one in a bookshop, the novel has changed into a madcap farce about rogue hairdresser Ataraxia “the Uglifier” Pham, who terrorized 2016 Prague by giving clients terrible hairdos. Bizarre doublings and subplots abound as Oyeyemi delightfully channels a Borgesian literary lunacy, revealing the connections between Hero and Dorothea and introducing the real Merlin Mwenda (now working as, of all things, an ersatz ice cream vendor). This is a metatextual masterpiece. Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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This Is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander
Poet Alexander’s (Why Fathers Cry at Night) anthology gathers an astonishing abundance of voices, introducing new poets and also offering a rich gathering of celebrated and familiar voices, beginning with Nikki Giovanni’s exhilarating and deliciously wild revelry about travelling to Mars. Readers will also find poems by Rita Dove, Elizabeth Alexander, Nikki Grimes, Ross Gay, Marilyn Nelson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jason Reynolds, and Natasha Tretheway, among others. The poems are organized thematically (joy, love, origin, race, resistance, praise) and make for rich browsing. Alexander’s introduction to the volume makes it clear he doesn’t want to pigeonhole Black writers but instead to celebrate the scope and individuality of their work. He refers to this book as an “unbridled selfie,” and here that term seems not self-indulgent or ridiculous but necessary and even thrilling.
VERDICT This amazing anthology may be the most important poetry collection of this decade. It is a book for poetry lovers, a book for the curious, a book of comfort, a book of prayer, a book of passion and a book of joy, a book of sorrow and a book of desire, but in the end, it is simply and wondrously a grand and glorious book. -Starred Library Journal Review
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The Year Of Second Chances: A Novel by Lara Avery
Avery debuts with a tender novel full of heart and healing. A year after her husband’s death, Robin Lindstrom wants to honor him with lasagna. It was Gabe’s recipe, special to both of them, and it’s all she needs to commemorate the anniversary. Yet Robin is thrown for a loop when she receives an email that night–from Gabe. He’d scheduled it to be sent a year after his death, and he’s even created a dating profile for her on the Fluttr app. In the message, he says he wants her to be happy. She’s had the time to grieve, so she should get herself out there. Robin begrudgingly follows his wishes and ends up on a few tragically bad dates. But as she continues to say yes to as many opportunities as she can, Robin makes connections she’d never dreamed possible. While there are love interests–Gabe’s best friend, plus a determined suitor from the app–this story is ultimately about Robin. After folding in on herself for a year, her new efforts result in a transformed life. Avery’s funny and engaging writing, plus Robin’s strong voice, will keep readers turning pages. Suggest to those who enjoyed Catherine Newman’s We All Want Impossible Things (2022). – Booklist Review
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Happy reading!
Linda Reimer, SSCL
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Have questions or want to request a book?
Feel free to call the library! Our telephone number is 607-936-3713.
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Note: Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
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Information on the three library catalogs
Digital Catalog: https://stls.overdrive.com/
The Digital Catalog, is an online catalog containing eBooks, eAudiobooks, and digital magazines. You can use your library card and checkout/download content to a PC; you can also use the companion app, Libby, to access titles on your mobile devices; so you can enjoy eBooks and eAudiobooks on the go!
All card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can check out items from the Digital Catalog.
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Hoopla Catalog: https://www.hoopladigital.com/
The Hoopla Catalog features instant checkouts of eBooks, eAudiobooks, comic books, albums, movies and TV shows. Patron check out limit is 10 items per month.
Hoopla is a Southeast Steuben County Library service available to all Southeast Steuben County Library card holders.
The Hoopla App is available for Android or Apple mobile devices, PCs, Macs*, smart TVs & media streaming players.
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StarCat: The catalog of physical/traditional library materials: https://starcat.stls.org
Card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can access StarCat to search for and request materials available at libraries through out the Southern Tier Library System.
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*You must have an active Internet connection to access Hoopla content on a Mac.
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