Monroe County Public Library, Indiana - mcpl.info

Animals

Eligible

What do jogging, hate sex, cross fit gyms, and reality TV have to do with Jane Austen? Don’t be so 19^th century. So what if Austen is rolling over in her grave. Sittenfeld has made a delightful pastiche of Pride and Prejudice, much more to my fiction-reading tastes than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

In this reimagined version of the classic, it’s 2013 and the Bennet family has relocated to a spider-infected old Tudor in an upscale neighborhood of Cincinnati. Country club lunches, anyone?

The five unmarried daughters still ground the story although all of them have turned very 21^st century. Even Mrs. Bennet has been modernized, she’s now a shopaholic busybody. However, she still remains in determined pursuit of worthy husbands (rich, upper class) for her daughters.

Jane and Liz have flown the nest for New York City where gentle Jane teaches yoga, and Liz, writes for the entertainment mag, Mascara. She also sleeps with her married boyfriend. At thirty-nine, Jane has given up on finding a man, and has begun in vitro fertilization treatments in the hopes of having a child. Alas, no wedding bells in the offing for both Jane and Liz. Read more about Eligible

Posted by Dory L. on June 13, 2016

Eligible

Dumplin', Julie Murphy

Willowdean Dickson is a Dolly Parton fan, a self described fat girl, and a resident of a small town where the event of the year is a beauty pageant. Willowdean's mother is a former winner and now basically runs the pageant. Will does her best to ignore it, preferring to spend her time with her best friend, Ellen, and at her after school job where she has a crush on a coworker. After experiencing her first heartbreak and standing up to the school bully, Will decides to go for broke and enter the pageant.

Willowdean is a character to root for. She is a very real girl who finds herself an unexpected superhero for the misfits of her town. Her story is one of family, friendship, love, and self discovery that will appeal to many readers. Check out Dumplin' this summer and enjoy it with a big glass of sweet tea (Willowdean is a Southern girl after all). Don't forget to sign up for the Teen Summer Reading Program so you can earn prizes for reading!

Posted by Becky F. on June 10, 2016

Dumplin'

Teens

Teens

Half-Earth: our Planet's Fight for Life

Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life

The central premise of this book is that in order to save many of the world’s species, humankind has to do something truly radical, that is, create wildlife and nature preserves over half the earth.

Renowned entomologist and conservationist, Edward O. Wilson, presents in this book many examples of how interconnected life is in on our planet, and then makes a clarion call to save it. As someone who has actively worked for conservation for decades, Wilson is very knowledgeable.

He points out that of all the fauna and flora now on earth, we know only 20% of them at most at the species level. And much less about how they work together to maintain this web of life. To learn all these species, even were they to survive, would take at least a couple more centuries. Read more about Half-Earth: our Planet's Fight for Life

Posted by Dory L. on June 6, 2016

Nonfiction

My Name is Lucy Barton

My Name is Lucy Barton: A Novel

If you ever worried as a child about bringing other children home from school and their possible reaction to your home and family life, this book will resonate with you. If you ever reconnected with a close relative after a long absence, ditto.

Lucy Barton had a pretty horrific childhood: dirt-poor for many years the family lived in an actual garage without running water. And not only was there little money, food, or clothes, but her parents provided little emotional sustenance.

Strout takes you deep into the mind and heart of her protagonist, a young mother in her twenties, recently hospitalized after an operation. Lucy is happily married with two young children whom she feels she has abandoned because of her illness. She also is a new writer, proud of her work, but still not at ease calling herself an author.

The present time of the book occurs in a New York City hospital where Lucy is amazed to see her mother, who’s come all the way from Iowa to take care of her daughter. But this is so out of character for her, that Lucy can scarcely believe she has arrived. Neither parent has ever visited Lucy before and neither attended her wedding. At his one meeting with their future son-in-law, Lucy's father flipped out because her fiancée was German. Read more about My Name is Lucy Barton

Posted by Dory L. on June 1, 2016

The Nest

Tolstoy’s quote from Anna Karenina applies to this book: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The Nest is about three generations of Plumbs: Francie, the matriarch, the middle generation that consists of Leo, Bea, Jack, and Melody, plus two of their spouses, and Melody’s two girls, the twins, Nora and Louise.

At novel’s opening we find Leo, the eldest, who long ago made a bundle on a trendy magazine, and has just been released from rehab, wandering through Central Park trying to score some drugs.

The twins, who are playing hooky from their senior year SAT prep class, watch as their uncle falls to the ground. They decide not to rescue him because he will most likely tell their mom, Melody, where he saw them, thus getting them into trouble.

At that very moment, Leo was supposed to be attending a family lunch. It’s about the nest, which is the money their Dad set aside for them in trust that comes due at Melody’s 40^th birthday. The elder Mr. Plumb wanted his kids to inherit something but not a grand inheritance, nothing that would create havoc in their lives or make them too dependent on his money. Read more about The Nest

Posted by Dory L. on May 12, 2016

The Nest