🥇 Library Champion Newsletter | 💵 Your donation is needed to connect the community 📶
Library Champion,
The tech website The Verge wrote this week about counties across America that have less than 15% of their population connected to high-speed internet. They define high-speed internet as 25mbs download or greater. These speeds are needed if you want to watch (stream) a video, surf the web, complete classwork, and is shared amongst multiple devices if you have a family using the internet at the same time.
(The Verge: “This is a map of America’s broadband problem.”)
There are 5 counties in Pennsylvania that are included in this article, one of which unfortunately is Juniata County (only 6% connected to high-speed internet). Rural areas have historically been one of the last areas to be able to get access to utilities; in the past utility companies said they couldn’t justify the costs to extend telephone or electric infrastructure to rural outposts.
The Verge hits the nail on the head in describing its dire impact on these left-behind communities: > “Counties on the wrong side of the line are poorer and more remote, losing population even as the country grows. This is why there’s no broadband, of course: from a business perspective, building out fiber in Apache County is a losing bet. But the lack of fiber also stifles economic activity and makes young people more likely to leave, creating a cycle of disinvestment and decay that has swallowed large portions of our country.”
Ouch. But there is hope!
Your donation can connect the community by funding our mobile hotspot program. Since 2016 we have lended out mobile hotspots that people can borrow and take the internet with them. Perfect for those who need to use the internet on their own schedule, or who have moved and are waiting to get internet installed in their new place, or for those taking their summer trip and want to bring the internet with them. We also lend out Chromebooks that give you full-screen access to the internet.
Read more about the technology we lend out.
Here is one book I am reading and a book that I just bought for the library’s collection.
I finally finished A Promised Land by Barack Obama. A longer review is to come, but this book was simply great.
A book we bought today that you should borrow:
The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker
(Adult fiction, female thriller)
“I killed a little boy today. Held my hands around his throat, felt his blood pump hard against my thumbs. He wriggled and kicked....I roared. I squeezed.” The murderer is 8-year-old Chrissie, who is trying to navigate an unimaginably hard and lonely life. Her mother doesn’t feed her—Chrissie is quite literally starving—and tries to give her away. Her mostly absent father offers only empty promises. Chrissie finds relief in frenzied bursts of action that make her feel powerful: Acting as milk monitor at school (so she can drink the dregs from each bottle). Stealing candy from the shop. Bossing and bullying the neighborhood kids. Even strangling the little boy is her way of saying “I am here, I am here, I am here.”
But the empathetic Tucker gives the adult Chrissie a voice, too: Twenty years later with a new name and a daughter of her own, Chrissie, now Julia, is out in the world again and struggling with guilt. She loves her daughter but doubts herself and fears authorities will take the girl away.
The chapters alternate between the child and adult perspectives, and Tucker builds almost unbearable tension in both timelines as the police circle closer to young Chrissie and the past pulls adult Chrissie back to the scene of her crime.
This novel is a riveting thriller in every sense, but Tucker is asking big questions, too. Can society forgive the unforgivable? Does everyone deserve a second chance? She forces us to reconsider the perils of poverty and neglect.
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Thank you for being a library champion. You make a difference each day!
–Vince Giordano
Librarian and Director of the Juniata County Library.
P.S.- You don’t need to make an account or jump through any hoops to be a library champion. I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true. You can make this happen in less than a minute. Just click here.