@ Your Library
Winter hit! I hope you all had plenty of reading material the last week or so. We are open regular hours for masked community members to stop by and stock up. Hours are Monday – Wednesday 10am – 8pm, Thursday and Friday 10am – 6pm and Saturday 10am – 3pm. You can also call, 218-283-8051 or email, ifallslibrary@gmail.com and we will pull material and have it available for you at the desk.
As winter begins to wind down, at least according to the calendar, the thought of travel begins to seem attractive, but I’m not sure I am ready to travel yet, so I am engaging in some armchair traveling with Leave Only Footprints by Conor Knighton. It chronicles his ‘Acadia-to-Zion journey through every national park’ over the course of a year. Reading it with the Naitonal Geographic “Secrets of the National Parks” guidebook makes me want to take a similar trip. We also have new Fodor’s travel guides for Maui and the big island of Hawaii. Given the first part of February, Hawaii sounds like a very nice trip to take in the next month or so. I guess I will keep dreaming.
D-Day Girls by Sarah Rose draws on recently declassified files, diaries and oral histories to tell the story of three women who joined the Special Operations Executive. They along with thirty-six other women left their lives and families to become saboteurs in France beginning in 1942. They were an important part of the lead-up to D-Day. They destroyed train lines, ambushed Nazis, plotted prison breaks and gathered intelligence.
I had very young children in the early 1990’s so didn’t pay much attention to the war in Bosnia. The Cat I Never Named by Amra Sabic-El-Rayess with Laura L. Sullivan was an eye-opening look at that war through the eyes of Amra, was a teen in 1992 when her best friend tells her they couldn’t speak anymore. Amra was determined however to get an education, have friends, and find a first love in the brutality of war.
Winter reading can include new authors, but sometimes reading familiar authors with familiar characters can be very comforting. Here are some new titles in well-known series. ‘The Lady Sherlock Series’ by Sherry Thomas which began with A Study in Scarlet Women and set in London in the mid 1880’s, now has five books with the newest title Murder on Cold Street. Dear Miss Kopp by Amy Stewart is the sixth book in the ‘Kopp Sisters’ series set in the 1910’s. Elly Griffiths’ forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway is back in her twelfth book The Lantern Men. Austin, Texas author Mark Pryor is back with his ninth book about Hugo Marston, the head of security at the US Embassy in Paris in The French Widow.
Terry Brooks wrote The Sword of Shannara in 1977. Forty-three years later, ‘the triumphant conclusion’ is published. The Fall of Shannara: the last druid finishes both the Fall of Shannara and the entire saga, all thirty five novels.