After Visiting Friends by Michael Hainey

In 1970, Chicago newspaperman Robert Hainey died suddenly in the early hours of the morning. He was thirty-five and left behind a wife and two young sons, one of whom was Michael Hainey, then six years old.  Michael’s mother, Barbara, never discussed the death with her sons and curtly cut off all questions. This only heightened Michael’s need to know. When he was older, he found his father’s obituaries in library archives. He read that his father died on a Chicago street far from both his home and his workplace. The phrase “after visiting friends” was used, although the family had no friends in that area of Chicago. The desire to know the facts remained with Michael into adulthood. He became a journalist and eventually used his training to investigate the circumstances of his father’s death. His father’s co-workers claimed to be unable to tell him anything. But that was an answer he was unwilling to accept. He worked for years, searching out old medical records and finding long-ago acquaintances of his father’s until he arrived at the difficult truth. But he considered truth, as difficult as it was, better than ignorance or misinformation. In After Visiting Friends, the author has written a memoir about the difficulty of growing up fatherless in 1970’s Chicago, a time and place when there were no grievance counselors and stoic silence was considered a virtue.

Check out After Visiting Friends @ the library! 

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

Claire Waverly, a highly-sought caterer, has an instinctive flair for cooking and more – her food has magical properties. She’s a bit of a solitary recluse, living and working alone in the house where she grew up, and she is perfectly content with her lifestyle. Then her sister, Sydney, returns home to Bascom, North Carolina, after a long absence, and disrupts everything. She has a five-year-old daughter, the niece Claire did not know she had, and she needs shelter from an abusive ex-boyfriend. As the two sisters confront each other and the abuse in their own shared past, Claire is forced to drop her guard, which opens the door for new possibilities.

Sarah Addison Allen describes Garden Spells as Southern-fried magical realism with a love story at its heart. It also has an ornery apple tree that flings prophetic apples at people. If you like Alice Hoffman, you might also like Sarah Addison Allen. Now is a good time to read Garden Spells and her other novels The Sugar Queen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon, and The Peach Keeper. Her new novel Lost Lake, is set to release early in 2014.

Check out Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen @ the library!

Happy Holidays!

We're taking a break for the holidays! We'll be back on Friday with another great read that someone on our staff thinks you'll love!

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

This new novel by the acclaimed author of The Secret Life of Bees tells the unlikely stories of two very different women in 19^th century Charleston.  Spanning more than thirty years, Kidd reveals the lives of Sarah Grimké: middle child in a large, wealthy South Carolina family and Hetty Handful Grimké: a slave owned by the Grimké family.  We begin in 1803 around the time of Sarah’s eleventh birthday.  The young girl is presented with two very different gifts: a chance to graduate from the nursery into her very own bedroom and a slave for her own personal maid.  Immediately Sarah tries to refuse the second “gift” from her mother.  This only ends in Sarah embarrassing her mother in front of a bunch of guests and having to write out many apology letters.

Late that same evening, Sarah sneaks into her father’s study to copy out a manumission document in order to free Hetty Handful outright.  Her father is a very important lawyer.  Surely he will carry out her wishes? Sarah remarks “What could Father do but make Hetty’s freedom as legal and binding as her ownership?  I was following a code of law he’d fashioned himself!” But when Sarah finds the document torn in two and lying in front of her bedroom door the next morning, she knows that helping Handful obtain her freedom will be more difficult than she’d imagined. 

Kidd allows us to see the two girls grow in friendship though their backgrounds are very different.  But Kidd also allows the reader a glimpse into the horror and brutality of slavery.  As we get to know Handful, we see that her mother Charlotte has dreams of freedom.  Though the woman is an expert seamstress and clearly the most valuable slave in the Grimké home, she is not content.  After years of bowing, scraping, and saving money from odd jobs outside the household, Charlotte disappears.  Handful, while heartbroken that she has been left behind, hopes that her mother is living somewhere as a free woman. 

Sarah grows and changes as the years go by.  She begs to become the godmother of her youngest sister, Nina, and her influence on the child is very apparent.  While Sarah quietly changes her religious views and begins to study abolition, Nina is a girl of outspoken and firm conviction.  After both women are jilted by potential husbands, the two join forces and become the first female voices for abolition; travelling all over the northern states speaking to other women about their views. 

Kidd has found an interesting way to bring the very real Grimke sisters to life.  Readers who enjoy historical fiction will not be disappointed in Kidd’s third novel.  TheInvention of Wings is available everywhere on January 7th, 2014.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toiben

The Testament of Mary is a new look at an age-old story.  According to legend, Mary the Mother of Jesus lived out the end of her life in Ephesus, Turkey, an important city in early Christianity.  It is in this city that she gives her testament, hoping to understand the events that eventually became the story told in the New Testament, events that she admits “unhinged” her.  This Mary is not the dutiful saintly woman of Christian teaching and her recounting of events does not correspond to that in the Bible.  She does not agree that her son is the Son of God.  She is angry about her son’s death and at both his followers and herself for not protecting him from his gruesome fate. At the end of her life she is in hiding, living among strangers, dependent on two men she does not like or trust, possibly John and Luke. Colm Toibin’s Mary is a tragic human woman, imperfect, doubtful and frightened. The Testament of Mary is a book for readers open to examining another point of view.

Check out The Testament of Mary @ the library!

Slow Getting Up by Nate Jackson

Have you ever wondered what it's like to be on a professional football team? Maybe not a starter like Aaron Rodgers or Clay Matthews, but that guy who sits on the bench and gets paid to play? Did you ever wonder how hard can it be? If that thought has ever crossed your mind, then Slow Getting Up by Nate Jackson is the book for you.

Like the sub-title implies, this is a story of NFL survival. He may not have been a star, and unless you were in Denver while he was playing you might not know who he is, he was out there, some weeks getting into some games, and earning a world of hurt.

For Nate Jackson, football was just a part of life, and he would do anything to be able to keep playing. When he was cut from the Cal Poly team, he transferred to a Division III school. His coaches there saw professional talent, and before he knew it, the 49ers were calling him. Sure he was un-drafted, traded to Denver and barely made the practice squad, but he was a professional athlete.

Slow Getting Up it is the perfect book a the football fanatic or just a fan of the game. Nate Jackson gives a behind the scenes tour of a NFL football team in this memoir, and after reading it you'll be happy you just have to watch the game from the comfort of your living room.

Check out Slow Getting Up @ the library!

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm- Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink

 

Sheri Fink, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, presents the harrowing events that took place at Memorial Medical Center before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.  Without a sure disaster plan the hospital was woefully underprepared for the devastating storm.  Facing life or death decisions the staff made questionable choices that led to an involved investigation and criminal charges ultimately being brought against a doctor and two nurses.  We may never know exactly what happened during those five days but this book takes as comprehensive a look as possible at all sides.   

Checkout Five Days at Memorial @ the library!

Slimed! The Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age by Mathew Klickstein

Did you ever wish you could take the physical challenge to get out of a test? How about wishing for a best friend who would climb through your window? Do you still look above for the slime when someone says "I don't know?" Do you wish you could submit stories for the approval of the midnight society?

Now, you are either confused,or reliving some of the best TV memories from your childhood. If you picked the latter, then Slimed! is the book for you. Mathew Klickstein has gathered interviews from Nickelodeon executives, show runners and actors from the early days, meaning the 1980's and early 1990's. From the people trying to start a network for kids, to the teens starring in the shows, no one is left without a say. And no matter if you dreamed of winning big on Double Dare, or just wishing you could go to Camp Anawanna, no early show is left untouched.

This is definitely for those readers who remember the early days of Nickelodeon, however even if you caught the shows in re-run, or just want to know more about the early days of a growing television channel, Slimed is a must read!

Check out Slimed! @ the library!

We Live in Water by Jess Walter

 

We Live in Water is a wonderful collection of short stories by Jess Walter, author of previously reviewed Beautiful Ruins. Many of these stories are about parents, often working-class or even criminal class, and their relationships with children. Some succeed in making a moment or an hour in a child’s life better. Some, despite their best intentions, neglect and even endanger the children.  Most, despite being slightly bewildered, strive to do their best, as poor as that might be. These straightforward and simply told stories are about the poor, the uneducated, and the down-and-out of Spokane, Washington, people who seemingly never had a chance. A homeless man panhandles to buy his son a gift. Some con men are not as smart as they think they are. A man, intending to take his stepfather to his prison-release kidney dialysis treatment, instead takes him fishing, and this seems like the right thing to do. An ex-con doing community service reads to a second grader who brings the same book every time.  “Thief” is about a traditional family—two parents, three children. In “Thief,” Wayne, the father, is a blue-collar worker. He puts a lot of effort into trying to discover which of his children (the girl, the middle or the little) is stealing from the family vacation fund, a jar where Wayne throws his spare change. What he discovers surprises both Wayne and the reader. The final story in this book is not actually a short story but a list of facts about Spokane and Walter’s life there, grim facts that reveal the inspiration for these insightful stories.

 

Check out We Live in Water @ the library!