🥇 Library Champion Newsletter #88 | 🐝 Beekeeping, Artwork and Passports! ✈️
Library Champion,
👋 Welcome to our new subscribers! I am SO GLAD to have you aboard!
🐝 May 3 - Honey in the Hollow Beekeeping
Join us on the first Wednesday of the month for some fun, informative programs for our homeschool families! We will meet at 10:00 am in the lower level community room.
Our next program will be tomorrow, May 3rd, and the topic is bees!
🎨 Our latest local artist display
Please welcome Susan Hipple's works in oil to the Art Space at the Juniata County Library.
Sue takes her inspiration from talking with friends, especially artist friends, and uses that inspiration to paint when no one is around and she has excess energy. Susan describes art as a reflection of society. "Art is one way we pass on states of mind from one generation to the next".
Thank you for sharing your staggering talent with us, Sue!
Passport Services at the Library! ✈️
Make an appointment at the Juniata County Library to get or renew your passport!
Visit our website to learn more about this new service and how you can get a passport or renew your passport.
Passport agents: Vince Giordano, Christine May and Mercedes Berrier
Book of the week! – if you are going to read one book, give this one a try…
Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane
(New adult fiction: mystery, suspense, literary)
A master of literary crime fiction, Lehane revisits the Boston of almost a half-century ago, when, in 1974, court-ordered school busing incites protest throughout the White neighborhoods of a very segregated city.
As a working-class White woman trying to keep one step ahead of the bill collector, Mary Pat Fennessy has a close but tense relationship with her teenage daughter, Jules, who seems to be keeping secrets from her mother. One night Jules doesn’t come home, and Mary Pat is frantic. The next day at Meadow Lane Manor, the old folks’ home where she works as an aide, she learns that the son of Dreamy Williamson, one of her few Black co-workers, died in a mysterious subway incident that night. Mary Pat doesn’t know Dreamy well but likes her well enough.
It seems that both of them have lost children now, but they respond differently, experience different levels of support from their communities, and come to learn that these seemingly separate losses—a death and a disappearance—have a connection that neither could have anticipated. The novel focuses on Mary Pat, illuminates her from within as a loving mother and basically a decent person who nonetheless shares the tribal prejudices of her Irish neighborhood toward people whom they feel are encroaching on their turf.
It’s a hot summer, tensions are escalating, and threats of violence are at a fever pitch. As Mary Pat keeps trying to find out what happened to Jules and why—wherever the truth may lead her—she discovers how much she has to learn about her daughter, the neighborhood, and the crime outfit whose power and authority have long gone unchallenged. She risks everything to discover the truth.
Bottom line: This taut, gripping mystery is also a novel of soul-searching, for the author and reader alike.
Borrow the book: Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane
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--Vince Giordano
Librarian and Director of the Juniata County Library.
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