library reads

Through a series of elegiac vignettes, David Small offers a haunting account of his formative years into adolescence with Stitches, a graphic memoir. David’s mother is not what one would call emotionally available. She snaps at him if he shows vulnerability and, when he gets sick, she only gripes about the medical bills. In therapy, young David grieves the heart wrenching truth: “Your mother doesn’t love you. I’m sorry, David.” To make matters worse, the boy’s father, an aloof radiologist, has been making his son ill, albeit unwittingly.

If you are anything like me, you may have already become an expert in the domestic noir genre, without even realizing it. Ever since the publication of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, back in 2012, I have been voraciously reading every book that allows me to take a peek behind the curtain into other people’s seemingly perfect lives.

T.J. Klune’s 2021 novel The House in the Cerulean Sea is about a middle-aged man who finds belonging where he least expects it. It won the RUSA Reading List award for outstanding fantasy fiction, as well as the Alex Award for its appeal to young adults. The story follows Linus Baker, a scrupulous caseworker for DICOMY, the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. His job is to inspect schools for the magical, ensuring that everything is up-to-code per RULES AND REGULATIONS.

Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle synergize their storytelling skills in Squad, a graphic novel about a group of bloodthirsty werewolves who hunt sexual predators. Becca is the new girl at Piedmont High. With no friends and a deep hunger to belong, she is over the moon when Marley, Arianna, and Amanda—the most popular girls in school - invite her to join the pack.

"When you are a great listener and a great communicator—and you combine that with being smart, focused, and unselfish—you can go very far." - Jeffrey Lurie, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles (from foreword to Fearless)

Spotlight on the library's collection for Jacksonville Model Train and Railroadiana Show 2023

The hashtag “dark academia” arrives on the scene in 2005 to describe a scholarly aesthetic, accessorized with pocket watches, oxfords, and tweed blazers. The term has since found its way into the literary lexicon to define tragic stories set in institutions of higher education.

All good things must come to an end. Humans have always been fascinated by what the future holds and the futures in these books do not disappoint. Whether it is the disappearance of natural resources in Shusterman’s book Dry, a community learning to live without the comforts of 20^th century life in Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon or Robert Neville’s attempt to hide from the night walkers in I am Legend, these books will leave you wondering how you would fare if the world as you knew it was suddenly turned on its head.

Set in the early years of WWII, School for German Brides tells the opposing stories of Hanna, a young German woman sent to live with her aunt and uncle in Hitler’s Berlin, and Tilde, a young Jewish seamstress who finds that same Berlin a trap she will do anything to escape.

Medical science fiction, those books dealing with fictional practitioners of medicine or aspects of human physiology, are among the most compelling titles in the science fiction genre. From the reanimating of dead matter by Dr. Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's 1818 groundbreaking novel Frankenstein to the unethical harvesting of patient organs in Robin Cook's novel Coma, the power a doctor has to heal or harm will always make them fascinating characters.