May 25, 2022
Featured in this week's Book Talk Bakersfield:
Catch up with library staff members, Fahra and Jasmin this week and find out what they have been reading, watching, and listening to! 
 
Fahra Daredia
Beale Memorial Library
 
Jasmin LoBasso 
Kern County Library 
Fahra is reading...

The Immortal King Rao
by Vauhini Vara
 
In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government.

In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, King’s daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacy—literally, for he has given her access to his memories, among other questionable gifts.

With climate change raging, Athena has come to believe that saving the planet and its Shareholders will require a radical act of communion—and so she sets out to tell the truth to the world’s Shareholders, in entrancing sensory detail, about King’s childhood on a South Indian coconut plantation; his migration to the U.S. to study engineering in a world transformed by globalization; his marriage to the ambitious artist with whom he changed the world; and, ultimately, his invention, under self-exile, of the most ambitious creation of his life—Athena herself.

The Immortal King Rao, written by a former Wall Street Journal technology reporter, is a resonant debut novel obliterating the boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, the historic and the dystopian, confronting how we arrived at the age of technological capitalism and where our actions might take us next.
 
The Many Deaths of Laila Starr
by Ram V

Humanity is on the verge of discovering immortality. As a result, the avatar of Death is cast down to Earth to live a mortal life in Mumbai as twenty-something Laila Starr. Struggling with her newfound mortality, Laila has found a way to be placed in the time and place where the creator of immortality will be born. Will Laila take her chance to stop mankind from permanently altering the cycle of life, or will death really become a thing of the past?
 
Also available on HooplaDigital
Fahra is watching...
 
Dybbuk: The Curse is Real 
Amazon Prime
 
Mahi, a newly married woman, brings an antique Jewish box into her home. When Mahi and her husband Sam begin to have paranormal experiences, they soon learn that the box is a dybbuk containing an evil spirit. The couple then seeks the help of a rabbi to unravel its mystery. Will they survive this ordeal before their child is born?
.

Jasmin is reading...
 
The Last Cuentista
by Donna Barba Higuera

Había una vez...There lived a girl named Petra Peña, who wanted nothing more than to be a storyteller, like her abuelita. But Petra's world is ending. Earth has been destroyed by a comet, and only a few hundred scientists and their children--among them Petra and her family--have been chosen to journey to a new planet. They are the ones who must carry on the human race. Hundreds of years later, Petra wakes to this new planet--and the discovery that she is the only person who remembers Earth. A sinisterCollective has taken over the ship during its journey, bent on erasing the sins of humanity's past. They have systematically purged the memories of all aboard--or purged them altogether. Petra alone now carries the stories of our past, and with them, anyhope for our future. Can she make them live again?
 
Also available as eBook on CloudLibrary 
Also available as eBook & eAudiobook on Hoopla Digital 
Also available as eBook on Libby 
 
So We Meet Again: A Novel
by Suzanne Park

When investment banker Jessie Kim is laid off in a virtual meeting...she storms out...After moving back home to Tennessee to live with her loving but meddling mother and father, she runs into her childhood nemesis, Daniel Choi...Jess begrudgingly accepts Daniel's help to relaunch her long abandoned Korean cooking YouTube channel...But just as she discovers Daniel's life isn't as perfect as it seems and there's more to him than meets the eye, he shows up for a life-changing business opportunity, and their rivalry is back on.
 
Also available as eBook on HooplaDigital 
Also available as eBook on Libby

Jasmin is watching...
 
Senior Year
 On Netflix 
 
A cheerleading stunt gone wrong landed her in a 20-year coma. Now she's 37, newly awake and ready to live out her high school dream: becoming prom queen. queen.
 

Even More Titles We Talk About

    Books
    Clifford's First Valentine's Day by Norman Bridwell
    Kiss the Fae by Natalia Jaster
    The Watermelon Seed by Greg Pizzoli
     
    Shows
    The Circle Season 4
    Love on the Spectrum U.S.
    Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
    The Valet