@ Your Library
Summer reading is slowly drawing to a close. Tomorrow, August 10th at 10:30 am is the last stories and more of the summer. Friday is the last day to visit the library to qualify for a summer reading t-shirt. Shirts will be order Friday evening, so if you haven’t given us your childrens’ shirt sizes after visiting the library five times this summer then NOW is the time to stop by the library or call and talk to us. Friday, August 11th is also the last day of teen and adult summer reading. Prizes will be drawn on Monday.
Tech Club still have two more weeks of Tuesday meetings at 1:30 for anyone under grade 3 and at 2:30 for those in grade 4 and up. The summer reading picnic will be Thursday, August 17th at 6:00 pm in Smokey Bear Park. Join us for hot dogs, sloppy joes, potato chips, pickles, kool-aid and ice cream. T-shirts will be available for pick-up and we’ll have sidewalk chalk and a story stroll available. But kids can still record each day they listen or read for at least twenty minutes for free books. The library will give out free books for each twenty days listened and read through September 9.
Christina Baker Kline, the author of the very popular Orphan Train has a new book called A Piece of the World. The story takes a few facts and weaves an entire tale with characters full of life and passion. Meet Christina, living in the same house her family had lived in for generations. Increasingly incapacitated by illness, life on the remote farm might have been small except for the fact that for over twenty years she was host and inspiration for Andrew Wyeth. She was the subject of the painting Christina’s World. This is a story about blessings and burdens, about family history and about artist and muse.
Another story of family and the impact it can have on both our past and our future is Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney Sullivan. Nora and Theresa Flynn are young adults when they leave their small Irish village for America. Nora is the responsible one and Theresa is gregarious and thrilled by her new life in Boston. After disaster strikes Nora comes up with a plan that they are both too young to understand. Fifty years later, a sudden death forces both sisters to confront those choices made so long ago.
Memory, fate, and our view of the past, seems to be my focus for this column, but shifting to look at memory from a psychological angle is Mister Memory by Marcus Sedgwick. A man with perfect memory is arrested for the crime of murdering his wife in 1899 Paris and transferred to the famous Salpetriere Asylum. The doctor and detective assigned to the patient and the case soon realize that something else is at stake, why has this man been shipped off to an asylum rather than prison?