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Escape

In Order to Live

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In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park with Maryanne Vollers
Format: Book and Audio Book
Who It’s for: Adults, Young Adults

Life in North Korea was brutal.  People in North Korea under the the country’s dictator Kim Jong Il endured a regime that was repressive and subjects its citizens to rigid controls.

Yeonmi Park was born in Hyesan, North Korea in 1993. Her family was a close-knit family where her father took the risk of trading on the black market in order to have enough to provide for them. Eventually he was imprisoned and branded as a criminal and sent to a prison camp. In order to escape her famine struck childhood with fear that her family would most likely die, she and her mother fled and were smuggled across the border into China where they became victims of human trafficker’s and were sold into slavery. She was thirteen years old.

This is her story about her escape from North Korea and the devastating details and horrors she endured both physically and psychologically before finally making it to South Korea and freedom.

Yeonmi Park’s inspiring memoir is a remarkable and horrific personal account of her journey, while fleeing a country whose inhabitants live in starvation, hardships and suffering. Today she is a human rights activist and author who is determined to bring attention to the oppression in her home country.

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What Rose Forgot

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What Rose Forgot by Nevada Barr
Format: Book
Who It’s For: Adults

 

Rose is a widow in her sixties who awakens in a nursing home, in the ward for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. She does not know how she got there or when. She does know she should not be in this unit and she does not have a memory problem or maybe she does but not Alzheimer’!  What has happened and where is her family? Why would they admit her here? After overhearing a nurse say she will not make it through the week, Rose decides she must escape. She only pretends to take the pills they bring her each day. She is finding that her head is less fuzzy and she is beginning to remember some things. Rose plans a daring escape.

Once outside of the facility, Rose makes her way to her Granddaughters old playhouse, the only place she thinks she will be safe and waits to get Melanie’s attention.

As soon as 13-year-old Mel finds her GG there, she gets her safely back to her own home.  Rose is laying low and only contacts her recluse computer savvy sister for help. Rose begins her investigation into the mystery of her incarceration at the nursing home. How does she convince anyone that she’s not actually demented? Her relatives were the ones to commit her, all the legal papers are drawn up and the authorities are on the side of the nursing home.

Then a would-be killer shows up at Rose’s home in the middle of the night, Rose knows someone is out to kill her. With the help of her sister Marion, her granddaughter Mel and Mel’s friend Royal, a few harebrained stunts on Rose’s part and then the unlikely but blackmailed would-be killers help, Rose begins to unravel the chain of events.

This mystery is a serious, yet funny adventure of What Rose Forgot. A clever novel of action and suspense yet quite witty and entertaining. I laughed out loud while reading this novel.

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Year One

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Year One by Nora Roberts 
Audio Book                         
Who its for: Adults

Lana and Max live in a New York apartment. They are learning how to practice and manage the magic they have discovered they possess. Their passionate relationship and practice of “witch craft” is emerging and evolving when the plaque began.

The virus hit on New Year’s Eve taking out almost 80 percent of the human population within a matter of weeks and months. Survivors must figure out how to live. Where to go to be safe. How to manage survival in the post-apocalyptic city, where a new magical paradigm exists and how to get out.

They along with some of the others who did not succumb to the plaque have made it out of the dangerous cities where much evil and bad magic is in control. The appearance of varied sets of magical abilities in a large part of the surviving population can be good or evil.

Along the way, Max and Lana eventually form a band with others like them, looking for refuge and a new place to live. Eventually they come upon a place where a new beginning is underway.

Lana is carrying Max’s child who she learns early on has magical abilities, and a special destiny.

After an attack on their new community, Lana realizes that she and her unborn child are hunted. She must find sanctuary away from the community, which eventually comes in the form of a remote farm.

This fast-paced thought provoking novel will keep you enthralled where survival, human kindness and evil exist along with magical abilities. Where good people combat evil.

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