Book Discussions

By the author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair, Sue Monk Kidd's exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at one of the most devastating wounds in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved.(from the publisher) Third Thursday is an informal group, open to all, no sign up necessary. Reserve your book at the adult circulation desk or online.

Mystery and suspense readers are invited to the library on the first Thursday of the month at 6:30 for a lively discussion of the book and other of life’s mysteries. This month’s title, "Raven Black" won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award for the best crime novel of the year. The novel is the first in a series known as the Shetland Island series.

""A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be." In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace--and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox--possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. Full of Ozeki's signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home"-- Provided by publisher. Third Thursday is an informal group, open to all, no sign up necessary. Reserve your book at the adult circulation desk or online.

Open to all interested adults - no sign up necessary. "Keeping secrets, telling lies, they require the same skill. Both become a habit, almost an addiction, that's hard to break even with the people closest to you, out of the business. For example, they say never trust a woman who tells you her age; if she can't keep that secret, she can't keep yours. I'm fifty-nine." Brigid Quinn's experiences in hunting sexual predators for the FBI have left her with memories she wishes she didn't have and lethal skills she hopes never to need again. Having been pushed into early retirement by events she thinks she's put firmly behind her, Brigid keeps telling herself she is settling down nicely in Tucson with a wonderful new husband, Carlo, and their dogs. But the past intervenes when a man named Floyd Lynch confesses to the worst unsolved case of Brigid's career--the disappearance and presumed murder of her young protégée, Jessica. Floyd knows things about that terrible night that were never made public, and offers to lead the cops to Jessica's body in return for a plea bargain. It should finally be the end of a dark chapter in Brigid's life. Except...the new FBI agent on the case, Laura Coleman, thinks the confession is fake, and Brigid finds she cannot walk away from violence and retribution after all, no matter what the cost. With a fiercely original and compelling voice, Becky Masterman's Rage Against the Dying marks the heart-stopping debut of a brilliant new thriller writer"-- Provided by publisher.

The first of three book talks with Reba-Jean Shaw-Pichette, in costume. Join us for the talk and free pizza, sponsored by the Friends of Tilton. (Sign ups for pizza needed.) Free and open to all ages. Wonder is the story of ten-year-old Auggie Pullman, who was born with extreme facial abnormalities and was not expected to survive. He goes from being home-schooled to entering fifth grade at a private middle school in Manhattan, which entails enduring the taunting and fear of his classmates as he struggles to be seen as just another student.

“That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.” New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder. Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years. Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God. Third Thursday is an informal group, open to all, no sign up necessary. Reserve your book at the adult circulation desk or online.

In her quest to connect with Robin Hood, the father she has never met, thirteen-year-old Rosemary disguises herself as a boy, befriends a half-wolf, half-dog, a runaway princess, and an overgrown boy whose singing is hypnotic, and makes peace with her elfin heritage. This book talk will be presented by Reba-Jean Shaw-Pichette. Sponsored by the Friends of Tilton Library it is free and open to all ages. Sign up is needed for free pizza.

Book talk presented by a costumed Reba-Jean Shaw-Pichette. This program is free and open to all. Please sign up - we want to be sure to have enough pizza. Sponsored by the Friends of Tilton Library.

Join us on the first Monday of the month for a lively discussion of this month's title and other of life's mysteries. Copies of the book are usually available at the circulation desk or can be reserved online or by asking at the desk. This discussion also features cheese pizza while it lasts. Free and open to all.

Publishers Weekly Reviews Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together 0n an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system. This is, in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which might be called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim's Suicide. However, rather than anomie, Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public anonymity. This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity, in which the sale of "articulated" corpses was a semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh unnoticed. 6 b&w photos, 1 map. (Feb.) Forecast: With this book, Larson builds on the success of Isaac's Storm. Anyone with an interest in American history-in particular fans of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough-should find much to engross them here. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. Third Thursday is an informal group, open to all, no sign up necessary. Reserve your book at the adult circulation desk or online.