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The Favorites
by Layne Fargo
She might not have a famous name, funding, or her family's support, but Katarina Shaw has always known that she was destined to become an Olympic skater. When she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely kid stuck in the foster care system, their instant connection makes them a formidable duo on the ice. Clinging to skating--and each other--to escape their turbulent lives, Kat and Heath go from childhood sweethearts to champion ice dancers, captivating the world with their scorching chemistry, rebellious style, and roller-coaster relationship. Until a shocking incident at the Olympic Games brings their partnership to a sudden end. As the ten-year anniversary of their final skate approaches, an unauthorized documentary reignites the public obsession with Shaw and Rocha, claiming to uncover the real story through interviews with their closest friends and fiercest rivals. Kat wants nothing to do with the documentary, but she can't stand the thought of someone else defining her legacy. So, after a decade of silence, she's telling her story: from the childhood tragedies that created her all-consuming bond with Heath to the clash of desires that tore them apart. Sensational rumors have haunted their every step for years, but the truth may be even more shocking than the headlines.
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The Girls Who Grew Big
by Leila Mottley
Adela is sixteen years old. When she tells her parents she's pregnant, they send her from their home in Indiana to her grandmother's in Padua Beach, Florida, a town built on y'all bein' good now? and babies havin' babies, said in the rasp of a loud whisper and one polite little shake of the head. There, Adela meets Emory, who has a baby of her own she brings to high school, strapped to her chest; and Simone, ringleader of the Girls, young moms who hang out with their growing brood in the back of her red truck--dancing defiantly, breastfeeding, watching each other's backs. The town thinks they've lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood. Before long they will find themselves on a collision course with one another. An uplifting novel, full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends' secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley's promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.
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Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert
by Bob the Drag Queen
In an age of miracles where our greatest heroes from history have magically, unexplainably returned to shake us out of our confusion and hate, Harriet Tubman is back, and she has a lot to say. Harriet Tubman and four of the enslaved persons she led to freedom want to tell their story in a unique way. Harriet wants to create a hip-hop album and live show about her life, and she needs a songwriter to help her. She calls upon Darnell, a once successful hip-hop producer who was topping the charts before being outed on a BET talk show. Darnell has no idea what to expect when he steps into the studio with Harriet, only that they have a short period of time to write a legendary album she can take on the road. Over the course of their time together, they not only create music that will take the country by storm, but confront the horrors of both their pasts, and learn to find a way to a better future. Original, evocative, and historic, Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert is a landmark achievement that will burrow deep into our hearts (and ears).
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Hole in the Sky
by Daniel H. Wilson
Heliopause is a real place--the very outer edge of our solar system where the sun's solar winds are no longer strong enough to keep debris and intrusions from bombarding our system. It is the farthest edge of our protected boundary (it was recently crossed by Voyager), and the line beyond which space experts look for extraterrestrial presences. This is where Daniel Wilson's fascinating novel begins. Weaving together the story of Jim, a down-on-his-luck absentee father in the Osage territory of Oklahoma, and his daughter, Tawny, with those of a NASA engineer, a misfit anonymous genius who lives in military isolation analyzing a secret incoming Pattern, and a CIA investigator tasked with tracking unexplained encounters, Hole in the Sky explores a Native American first contact that pulls all five characters into something never before seen or imagined.
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Insectopolis: A Natural History
by Peter Kuper
Award-winning cartoonist Peter Kuper transports readers through the 400-million-year history of insects and the remarkable entomologists who have studied them.
This visually immersive work of graphic nonfiction dives into a world where ants, cicadas, bees, and butterflies visit a library exhibition that displays their stories and humanity’s connection to them throughout the ages. Kuper’s thrilling visual feast layers history and science, color and design, to tell the remarkable tales of dung beetles navigating by the stars, hawk-size prehistoric dragonflies hunting prey, and mosquitoes changing the course of human history.
Kuper also illuminates pioneering naturalists, from well-known figures like E. O. Wilson and Rachel Carson to unheralded luminaries like Charles Henry Turner, the Black American scholar who documented arthropod intelligence, and Maria Sybilla Merian, the seventeenth-century German regarded as the mother of entomology.
Galvanized by the sixth extinction and the ongoing insect crisis, Kuper takes readers on an unforgettable journey.
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Plum
by Andy Anderegg
Told entirely in the second person, Plum follows J as she grows from kid to teen in a house ruled by her alcoholic dad and complicit mother. Her older brother is sometimes wonderful, sometimes gross, and he's her only hope of getting out. J's world is one of nail polish, above-ground pools, and drive-thrus--and of violence, carelessness, and so many rules. J covets the peace that comes when she slips on her headphones, turns on her handheld radio, and dreams of how she and her brother can make their escape. When her brother leaves home and disappears, so does J's best chance to flee her parents' chaotic orbit. Alone and angry, J reaches through her computer screen for the life she wants: blonde hair, glittering nails, attention, freedom. As she stumbles into adulthood with no template to follow, J must figure out how to build a family for herself full of the love she deserves. In her brutally compelling debut, Anderegg turns her singular gaze on the generational patterns of addiction and abuse.
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Sonita: My Fight Against Tyranny and My Escape to Freedom
by Sonita Alizada
The first time Sonita was put up for sale, she was 10 years old and she thought that she was participating in a dress-up game. She quickly realized that, in her culture, a wedding is a kind of funeral for the bride. Sonita says, It represents the loss of a future. The loss of a voice. After the marriage fell through, she was placed on sale again. She was expected to form a family, sleep with a man she never met, and then repeat the terrible cycle with her own children. But Sonita wanted more. In Sonita, the Afghan rap artist and activist shares the story of how she fled Afghanistan to pursue her dreams and evolved into a woman who is changing the world. She shares incredible highs, like winning the song writing contest that gave her the opportunity of a lifetime, and unimaginable lows, like when the cruel Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, and how some of her family escaped, and how some were left behind. Sonita also shares photos and access to exclusive music--
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These Heathens
by Mia McKenzie
Where do you get an abortion in 1960 Georgia, especially if your small town's midwife goes to the same church as your parents? For seventeen-year-old Doris Steele, the answer is Atlanta, where her favorite teacher, Mrs. Lucas, calls upon her brash, wealthy childhood best friend, Sylvia, for help. While waiting to hear from the doctor who has agreed to do the procedure, Doris spends the weekend scandalized by, but drawn to, the people who move in and out of Sylvia's orbit: celebrities whom Doris has seen in the pages of Jet and Ebony, civil rights leaders such as Coretta Scott King and Diane Nash, women who dance close together, boys who flirt too hard and talk too much, atheists And even more shocking? Mrs. Lucas seems right at home. From the guests at a queer kickback to the student activists at a SNCC conference, Doris suddenly finds herself surrounded by so many people who seem to know exactly who or what they want. Doris knows she doesn't want a baby, but whatdoesshe want? Will this trip help her find out? These Heathensis a funny, poignant story about Black women's obligations and ambitions, what we owe to ourselves, and the transformative power of leaving your bubble, even for just one chaotic weekend.
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What Kind of Paradise
by Janelle Brown
Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia. As Jane becomes a teenager she starts pushing against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past, and her mother's death: San Francisco. It is a city in the midst of a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling internet, and where she will come to question everything she values. In this sweeping, suspenseful novel from bestselling author Janelle Brown, we see a young woman on a quest to understand how we come to know ourselves. It is a bold and unforgettable story about parents and children; nature and technology; innocence and knowledge; the losses of our past and our dreams for the future.
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The Whyte Python World Tour
by Travis Kennedy
It's Los Angeles, 1986, and metal rules the world. For aspiring drummer Rikki Thunder, life is beautiful, just like his hair--even if he is sleeping in a condemned paint store and playing with a band that's going nowhere. But when Rikki gets a shot to join L.A.'s hottest up-and-coming club band, Whyte Python, his young life takes a mind-blowing turn. Soon he and his new band mates have a hit single rocketing up the charts, Whyte Python is selling out major clubs, and Rikki has a gorgeous girlfriend in the audience and in his life. He literally could not ask for anything more. But good fortune can be deceiving. As the band gets a deeper taste of success in the US, the late-80's Cold War is breathing its last gasps around the world. American music is blasting through the Iron Curtain and a youth revolution is taking hold--with a hair band unknowingly playing host to the final battle for the hearts and minds of young people everywhere. Rikki Thunder soon questions the forces that are helping to propel Whyte Python, and he realizes the stakes of his musical journey--to spread peace, love, and epic shredding across the globe--might be far more dangerous than he had ever imagined. Crafted on the satirical knife-edge between high-suspense and head-banging hilarity, The Whyte Python World Tour is a raucous, uplifting, and refreshing debut. Travis Kennedy's adrenaline-charged novel is delightfully steeped in '80s music and cultural nostalgia, delivering one of the most entertaining reads of the year.
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Bloomingdale Public Library
101 Fairfield Way, Bloomingdale, Illinois 60108
630-529-3120
https://www.mybpl.org |
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