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Notes from Harney County Library

Written by the staff

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Enjoyed Where the Crawdads Sing? Here are some things to read next!

8/31/2022

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Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life—until the unthinkable happens.

Read it and looking for something to read next? Try one of these titles!


The Girls in the Stilt House by Kelly Mustian

Set in 1920s Mississippi, this debut Southern novel weaves a beautiful and harrowing story of two teenage girls cast in an unlikely partnership through murder. Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her hard life on the swamp and her harsh father. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. And she knows there will be a price to pay with her father.

Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle. She forms a plan to go north, to pack up the secrets she's holding about her life in the South and hang them on the line for all to see in Ohio.

Want to read it?
Find it in the Catalog / On Hoopla: Audiobook or eBook / Library2Go (eBook)

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Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

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Memphis, Tennessee, 1936. The five Foss children find their lives changed forever when their parents leave them alone on the family shantyboat one stormy night. Rill Foss, just twelve years old, must protect her four younger siblings as they are wrenched from their home on the Mississippi and thrown into the care of the infamous Georgia Tann, director of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. South Carolina, Present Day. Avery Stafford has lived a charmed life. Loving daughter to her father, a U.S. Senator, she has a promising career as an assistant D.A. in Baltimore and is engaged to her best friend. But when Avery comes home to help her father weather a health crisis and a political attack, a chance encounter with a stranger leaves her deeply shaken. Avery's decision to learn more about the woman's life will take her on a journey through her family's long-hidden history.

Want to read it?
Find it in the Catalog / On Library2Go: Audiobook or eBook


The Marsh King's Daughter by Karen Dionne

Helena Pelletier has a loving husband, two beautiful daughters, and a business that fills her days. But she also has a secret: she is the product of an abduction. Her mother was kidnapped as a teenager by her father and kept in a remote cabin in the marshlands of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Helena, born two years after the abduction, loved her home in nature, and despite her father's sometimes brutal behavior, she loved him, too...until she learned precisely how savage he could be.

More than twenty years later, she has buried her past so soundly that even her husband doesn't know the truth. But now her father has killed two guards, escaped from prison, and disappeared into the marsh. The police begin a manhunt, but Helena knows they don't stand a chance. Knows that only one person has the skills to find the survivalist the world calls the Marsh King--because only one person was ever trained by him: his daughter.

Want to read it?
Find it in the Catalog / On Library2Go: eBook

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The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

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Alaska, 1974. Ernt Allbright came home from the Vietnam War a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes the impulsive decision to move his wife and daughter north where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier.

Cora will do anything for the man she loves, even if means following him into the unknown. Thirteen-year-old Leni, caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship, has little choice but to go along, daring to hope this new land promises her family a better future.

In a wild, remote corner of Alaska, the Allbrights find a fiercely independent community of strong men and even stronger women. The long, sunlit days and the generosity of the locals make up for the newcomers’ lack of preparation and dwindling resources.

But as winter approaches and darkness descends, Ernt’s fragile mental state deteriorates. Soon the perils outside pale in comparison to threats from within. In their small cabin, covered in snow, blanketed in eighteen hours of night, Leni and her mother learn the terrible truth: they are on their own.

Want to read it?
In the Catalog: Book or Playaway (audio) / On Library2Go: Audiobook / On Hoopla: Audiobook


The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes

Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve, hoping to escape her stifling life in England.  But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically.

The leader, and soon Alice's greatest ally, is Margery, a smart-talking, self-sufficient woman who's never asked a man's permission for anything. They will be joined by three other singular women who become known as the Packhorse Librarians of Kentucky. 

What happens to them--and to the men they love--becomes an unforgettable drama of loyalty, justice, humanity, and passion. These heroic women refuse to be cowed by men or by convention. And though they face all kinds of dangers in a landscape that is at times breathtakingly beautiful, at others brutal, they’re committed to their job: bringing books to people who have never had any, arming them with facts that will change their lives.

Want to read it?
In the Catalog / Library2Go: Audio or eBook

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Educated by Tara Westover

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Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Want to read it?
In the Catalog / On Library2Go: Audiobook or eBook

Have recommendations to share? Leave them in the comments section!
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August Nonfiction Reviews

8/12/2022

1 Comment

 
August Nonfiction Book Reviews by Marjorie Thelen
(Find Marjorie Thelen's books in the catalog or on her website)

Being interested in history, I look for authors and scholars who examine history from a different perspective. There are three such volumes available at the Harney County Library that feature scholars interested in looking at history from an Indigenous perspective. I recommend all three.
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Archaeologies of Indigenous Presence, 2022 edited by Tsim D. Schneider and Lee M. Panich.

This is a collection of articles by a wide representation of anthropologists and archaeologists, some Indigenous. Among other subjects, they discuss how to incorporate Indigenous knowledge or presence into archaeological practice and research. Diane Teeman, enrolled member of the Burns Paiute tribe, and her colleague, Sarah E. Cowie, write about “Navigating Entanglements and Mitigating Intergenerational Trauma in Two Collaborative Projects”.  Teeman’s project is “Our Ancestors Walk of Sorrow” about the forced removal of the Burns Paiute Tribe from their ancestral homelands in the winter of 1879. Cowie’s project “Stewart Indian School Project in Carson City, Nevada” discusses the federal government’s forced assimilation of Native children from 1890 to 1980. Teeman is currently a doctoral candidate and faculty research assistant in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Cowie is a professor of anthropology at the same university. It is especially worth reading their articles, which start on page 265. They are thought-provoking and deserve careful reading as do the other articles in the book. As the editors, Schneider and Panich, point out “we will do well to reforge our institutional boilerplate to acknowledge that Native people have been here all along.” (See it in the catalog here.)

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An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States, 2014 by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

This Indigenous scholar looks at the history of the U.S. from an Indigenous perspective. She identifies settler colonialism as one of the primary causes of the harm done to Indigenous peoples and culture. The U. S. westward expansion took land from Indigenous peoples, moving them to reservations where promises by the U.S. government weren’t kept. Native culture was destroyed, and whole tribes exterminated. Indigenous children were moved to government and church run boarding schools to “civilize” them. Native peoples resisted, and they point out that “We are still here.” All of us need to read this perspective of history. (See it in the catalog here.)

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Origin – A Genetic History of the Americas, 2022 by Jennifer Raft.

This anthropologist and geneticist speculates on how First Peoples arrived in North and South America based on sequencing their complete genomes. The migration of First Peoples is surrounded by controversy. Raft is critical of some of the outlandish theories that surround certain First Peoples sites in the U.S like the mound builders. If you want to learn about the speculation on how First Peoples arrived and thrived in “the New World” for thousands of years, take a look at this book. It is a challenging read. (See it in the catalog here.)

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