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Recommended for Adults

A Season on the Wind

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Title: A Season on the Wind by Suzanne Woods Fisher
Format: Book
Who’s It For: Teens and Adults

Penny Weaver remembered Ben Zook from her childhood. She met him in the meadow near his family’s farm. She taught him about birding while visiting her grandmother. Together, they traversed the countryside and spotted an eagle’s nest.  They became friends.  However, decades later, Ben did not remember Penny.

Ben Zook left Stoney Ridge and his Amish faith long ago. He had become a world-renown photographer. One day, Ben returned with his cousin Natalie to rent Penny’s guest house. And they hired Penny’s brother Micah for his keen birding skills. Micah had spotted the elusive White-winged Tern.  Ben wanted Micah to help him to spot it to photograph it. It was actually Micah’s pesky neighbor Trudy Yoder who’d seen the bird.  Could Micah find it?

Penny provided a meal daily for Ben’s father, Zeke Zook.  The poor man suffered from Alzheimer’s and, she suspected, loneliness.  He was gruff to most people, yet he trusted Penny.  Why hadn’t Ben returned home when his mother passed?  Were there unresolved issues between Ben and his father?

An Amish widower named Roy King brought flowers for Penny.  Roy liked Penny, and yet Penny couldn’t get Ben out of her heart and mind.  Micah liked Shelley, Trudy Yoder’s beautiful older sister.  And Trudy liked Micah.  What a pickle!

Penny loved birds and privately kept a collection of drawings of them in her home.  In her last church, she had been told that drawing was prideful. Penny didn’t want to draw attention to herself.  She simply loved birds.  So, when she moved to Stoney Ridge and a new church, she didn’t show her drawings to anyone.  Yet Natalie snooped and found some.  She loved them!  As an interior decorator, she knew she could sell them for Penny.  What if she just took one to look into it for Penny?

A Season on the Wind is a touching tale of wounded hearts, flawed individuals, and restoration.  I enjoyed the context of birding and Micah’s humorous birding notes.  Penny was clearly the heroine, yet the surrounding cast was personable and realistic, with their own issues to overcome too.  If you enjoy an inspirational story of love and faith and character, I recommend this book to you.  

And you can find A Season on the Wind in our catalog.

 

 

 

 

 

The Last Dragonslayer

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The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde
Format: Book
Who it’s for: Young Adults, Adults

Jennifer Strange is acting manager of Kazam, an employment agency for sorcerers. Nearly 16 and a foundling, Jennifer spends her days arranging pizza delivery via magic carpet, overseeing rewiring of homes without ripping out walls, and completing the required paperwork for every bit of magic the sorcerers perform, intentional or not. Her Quarkbeast, a terrifying, yet relatively placid beast, tags along for these adventures. Magic has been fading for years, but recently, some of the sorcerers have noticed a surge in their power. And pre-cogs (wizards who see versions of the future) begin to have visions of the death of the last dragon at the hands of the Dragonslayer. But who is the Dragonslayer and why does the dragon have to die?

The Last Dragonslayer is the first of a four-part series, with the final installment set for release in the US in May of 2022. For fans of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men, and Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series.

Find The Last Dragonslayer in the catalog.

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”

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Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” by Miles Hyman
Format: Graphic novel
Who’s it for: adults

Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” continues to thrill and disturb readers even after it was first published. “The Lottery” introduces upsetting questions about conformity, customs and traditions, and the ritualized violence that may besiege even the most rural, passive community.

This graphic adaptation by Jackson’s grandson, Miles Hyman, allows readers to experience “The Lottery” in a new format. In a small American community, the current residents are alive with eagerness and anxiety when they wake on the morning of the twenty-seventh of June. Everything has been organized for the town’s yearly ritual—a lottery in which all families must partake, and nobody desires to win.

 

Find Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” in the catalog! 

Bigfoot and the Librarian

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Bigfoot and the Librarian by Linda Winstead Jones
Format: Digital Audiobook
Who it’s for: Adults

Marnie Somerset needs a fresh start; a new beginning, away from her dysfunctional family, and a worrying string of unsuitable ex-lovers. She accepts the position of Librarian for a charming little town she’s never heard of before: Mystic Springs, Alabama. Upon arriving, she finds the long-time citizens, who call themselves “Springers,” are a bit… stand-off-ish. Well, she supposes that’s to be expected. After all, Mystic Springs is a very small town, with a very insular community. At least the local author, Clint Maxwell, is helpful, and not hard on the eyes!

Clint knows the truth: Mystic Springs isn’t an ordinary town, and the people who’ve lived there for generations aren’t ordinary people. There is magic in Mystic Springs; witches, werewolves, fairies, fortune-tellers, and more. Clint himself is a shape-shifter who turns into Bigfoot whenever the mood strikes him! And Springers don’t take kindly to strangers. This Librarian is an outsider! It could be dangerous for her to stay, and much better for everyone if she left… too bad he can’t stop thinking about her!

This cute paranormal romance about a small southern town is the first in the Mystic Springs series by Linda Winstead Jones, and is available to listen to via Hoopla.

The Magician

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Title of novel, The MagicianTitle: The Magician by Colm Toíbín
Format: Novel
Audience: Adults

The Magician is a sweeping novel of unrequited love and exile, war and family, and a conflict between one’s own selfhood and deep, hidden emotions. A blend of personal struggles with global events, this is a fictional account of the German novelist, Thomas Mann, and his fascinating life, told by one of the greatest living writers of our time, Colm Toíbín.

Mann, a supporter of Germany’s ambitions in the year of 1914, soon finds his vision of a county on the eve of becoming a progressive nation built upon a platform of social reform divulge into disillusionment. A man who found himself on the wrong side of history in the First World War in his encouragement of a better, more expansive Germany, only to then witness the devolution of his nation in the hands of the Nazis, Mann was constantly at war with himself as he fought to not only understand the world around him, but who he was as well. Mann, who would write some of Europe’s greatest pieces of literature, was forever embattled with acclaim and contradiction, as he surrounded himself with a life that portrayed something entirely different than who he truly was.

Toíbín has created a breathtaking recounting of Thomas Mann’s life – a Nobel Prize and Goethe Prize winning author – in which should be viewed as a celebration of what a novel is able to accomplish and express.

Find The Magician in the catalog.

Murder at the Breakers

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Murder at the Breakers by Alyssa Maxwell
Who’s it For: Adults
Format: Book

One might assume that all was well among the elite of Newport, Rhode Island in 1895. Emma Cross discovered differently. When stepping out into the damp gardens, Emma padded to the front of the Vanderbilt mansion.  Where was her half-brother, Brady? Hearing a voice and a scuffle on the balcony, Emma looked up.  A man tumbled over the stone balustrade and plummeted to his death.  Was it Brady?  Or Uncle Cornelius?  Emma ran to the prone body.  She peered into the unseeing eyes of…Mr. Goddard?? Alvin Goddard was the financial secretary to Emma’s Uncle Cornelius.  Earlier that evening, he had pawed her hand and gushed over her Vanderbilt connection.  As a poor relation, she was at the ball as a fashion reporter for the Newport Observer.  She needed or, at least, preferred to earn her living rather than rely on the largesse of her relatives.  At any rate, with a dead body at her feet, she needed help.  Dazed, Emma wandered back indoors to the ball.  “Emma!” Her father’s friend Jack Parsons and her cousin Neily Vanderbilt, seeing her bedraggled state, rushed to her side.  “What happened?”  After a hasty explanation, the trio left to cover Mr. Goddard with a sheet.  While Neily and Jack discussed contacting the police, Emma returned to the mansion and quietly ascended the stairs.  “Brady?” Where was her scamp of a brother?

Upstairs, Emma made her way into her uncle’s bedroom where the doors still stood open to the balcony.  Her cousin Neily soon followed.  Emma spotted a pair of feet on the floor beyond Uncle Cornelius’ bed.  “Brady!” There was her wayward sibling, passed out, a large bump on his head, and, from the smell of things, drunk.  “What in thunder is going on in here!?” demanded Emma’s uncle as he stormed into the room with a police officer.  Scattered near her brother were railroad plans that had been stolen.  Emma could imagine her brother as a thief, but also as a murderer? No.  Now Emma just had to prove it.

I enjoyed this tale of mystery and romance.  Author Alyssa Maxwell wove a light yet intriguing story around Newport historical figures of the Golden Age.  This is the first book in a series.  Find Murder at the Breakers in our catalog.