Hi everyone, here are our five suggested reads of the week!
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Blonde Dust by Tatiana de Rosnay
The chances of one of the newest members of the cleaning staff at Reno’s Mapes Hotel being assigned to anything other than basic restroom duty are between zero and none, yet Pauline Hammond gets the break of her young life when she’s reassigned to swanky Suite 614 and the care of its erratic and enigmatic resident, Mrs. Miller. Concentrating all her energy on her three-year-old daughter and spending any remaining free time tending to wild horses at her friend’s ranch, Pauline is naively unconcerned about the Hollywood crew in town filming an upcoming movie titled The Misfits. It takes her a while to realize that the fragile yet charming blonde occupant of Suite 614 is none other than Marilyn Monroe. An unlikely camaraderie blossoms quickly and should be destined to fade just as fast, yet Marilyn recognizes in Pauline a kindred spirit and uses her fame in ways that will alter Pauline’s life forever. Historical fiction master de Rosnay (Flowers of Darkness, 2021) treats Monroe fans to a seldom-seen side of her tragic life. – Booklist Review
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The Catch: A Novel by Yrsa Daley-Ward
There isn’t a box big enough to contain this debut novel. Poet, writer, and actress Daley-Ward ventured into the world of fiction and created a genre of her own. Twins Clara and Dempsey, allegedly identical but as different as two people can be, lost their mother when they were infants. Thirty years later, Clara meets a woman in a department store who shares their mother’s name, looks, and history. It doesn’t matter that this woman seems to be the same age as Clara and Dempsey–Clara is convinced she is their mother. Dempsey believes she is a con artist. In the same way that Queen’s “”Bohemian Rhapsody”” cycles through a ballad, opera, and hard rock, Daley-Ward melds surrealism and sf with contemporary fiction and a sprinkling of titillating romance. Along the way, she explores the many dimensions of Black female identity, with a special focus on how Black female mental health is often ignored or mistreated. In the first title in Liveright’s Well-Read Black Girls Books series, chosen by WRBG founder Glory Edim, Daley-Ward illuminates the complex workings of the mind in a tale filled with intrigue and speculation that will leaves readers guessing long after the final pages. – Starred Booklist Review
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Flashlight by Susan Choi
Choi’s (Trust Exercise, 2019) latest novel feels leisurely as she brilliantly shines the titular flashlight on each of her characters, catching their habits and quirks, exposing their intimacies. That flashlight (as both leitmotif and physical object) appears in the prologue as 10-year-old Louisa and her father, carrying the light as precaution, take a walk along a coastal breakwater in Japan, where the family–Louisa, her white mother Anne, and her ethnic-Korean, Japanese born and raised father with his multiple appellations (Seok to his birth family, Hiroshi to the Japanese, and Serk in the U.S.)–is temporarily living. That night, he disappears, and Louisa is found alone, washed up on shore. Mother and daughter return to the U.S. to pick up their lives, but Louisa was mostly Serk’s child and can barely tolerate being tethered to Anne. After falling mysteriously ill, Anne is diagnosed with MS and slowly disintegrates. Her estranged firstborn child, Tobias, with whom she briefly reunited when he was a teen, sporadically appears and disappears through the decades but proves remarkably pivotal in addressing dysfunctional, multigenerational needs and losses. Choi, also the progeny of a Korean father and white American mother, pushes the boundaries of family, ethnicity, society, country, and history by challenging, parsing, and piecing together the complicated multitudes of tangled identities.
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Choi’s first novel since the National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise (2019) is already racking up high ratings on Goodreads and NetGalley. Prepare for demand! Starred Booklist Review
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How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Jong-Fast
Political writer, commentator, and podcaster Jong-Fast identifies herself as “the only child of a once-famous woman,” then launches a spiraling account of her “wildly conflicted” relationship with her mother, the writer Erica Jong. As she chronicles her beyond-unconventional childhood with the celebrity author of Fear of Flying, a 1973 novel that shocked the public with its frank depiction of female sexuality, Jong-Fast is bitingly candid about how her “glamorous and inaccessible” divorced mother, “a world-class narcissist,” led a jet-setting, fame-focused life, leaving her lonely daughter with a nanny. Jong drank heavily and dated incessantly, while her daughter, whose grandfather, Howard Fast, and father, Jonathan Fast, were also writers, was unable to read due to dyslexia. Jong-Fast developed her own substance abuse problem as a teenager, but she got sober and stayed sober. Jong happily remarried, but her alcoholism worsened and was eventually compounded by dementia while her husband had Parkinson’s, and Jong-Fast’s husband faced cancer. This collision of crises spurred this edgy, angry, painful, and caustically funny memoir, in which Jong-Fast is almost as critical of herself as she is of her mother. – Booklist Review
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When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy
When diner waitress and struggling actress Jess finds a five-year-old boy alone and frightened outside her apartment one night, she brings him inside and feeds him leftover pizza while she tries to find out his name. When the boy’s father shows up not long after, the child is clearly terrified of him. A bloodbath ensues, and Jess and the boy go on the run. Violence follows unrelentingly in their wake as Jess tries to keep the boy safe while also trying to unravel how she feels about the recent death of her estranged father and deal with the fact that she recently pricked her finger on a used needle while cleaning the diner bathroom. Cassidy plays with and subverts readers’ expectations in delightful and surprising ways in this twisty, gory horror thriller that’s also a moving, insightful examination of grief and obligation and the nature of fear. Recommend to readers who enjoyed the twists and emotional resonance of Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street (2021) or the chase-based plots of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt (2022) or Blake Crouch’s Run (2024). – Starred Booklist Review
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Happy reading!
Linda Reimer, SSCL
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Weekly Suggested Reading Five postings are usually published on Wednesdays, unless Monday is a holiday and then they are published later in the week.
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Note: Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
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Information on the four library catalogs
The Digital Catalog aka Libby: 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 content on 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 on demand 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 companion app, also called Hoopla is available for mobile devices, smart TVs & media streaming players.
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Kanopy Catalog: https://www.kanopy.com/en
The Kanopy Catalog features thousands of streaming videos available on demand.
The Kanopy Catalog is available for all Southern Tier Library System member library card holders, including all Southeast Steuben County Library card holders!
You can access the Kanopy Catalog through a web browser, or download the app to your phone, tablet or media streaming player (i.e. Roku, Google or Fire TV).
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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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Have questions about how to access Internet based content (i.e. eBooks, eAudios)? Feel free to drop by the Reference Desk or call the library and we will assist you! The library’s telephone number is: 607-936-3713.
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Tech & Book Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 