Staff Picks: April 2022
LISA S’s PICK: These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant
GENRE: Suspense
WHY SHE CHOSE IT: I devoured this novel. At 288 pages, this one is a quick read. I enjoy books about living in the wild, and this one reminded me a little of The Great Alone by Kristen Hannah in that way. I laughed, I cried (and if you don’t cry near the end, I don’t know if we can be friends), and I learned a lot about living off the land. This was a tender, and taut, look at what it means to be a family, and the lengths a parent will go to keep a family together.
THE SYNOPSIS: No electricity, no family, no connection to the outside world.
For eight years, Cooper and his young daughter, Finch, have lived in isolation in a remote cabin in the northern Appalachian woods. And that's exactly the way Cooper wants it, because he's got a lot to hide. Finch has been raised on the books filling the cabin’s shelves and the beautiful but brutal code of life in the wilderness. But she’s starting to push back against the sheltered life Cooper has created for her—and he’s still haunted by the painful truth of what it took to get them there.
The only people who know they exist are a mysterious local hermit named Scotland, and Cooper's old friend, Jake, who visits each winter to bring them food and supplies. But this year, Jake doesn't show up, setting off an irreversible chain of events that reveals just how precarious their situation really is. Suddenly, the boundaries of their safe haven have blurred—and when a stranger wanders into their woods, Finch’s growing obsession with her could put them all in danger. After a shocking disappearance threatens to upend the only life Finch has ever known, Cooper is forced to decide whether to keep hiding—or finally face the sins of his past.
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TORI’s PICK: Skyward (Skyward #1) by Brandon Sanderson
GENRE: Young Adult Science Fiction, Fantasy
WHY SHE CHOSE IT: Sanderson is my go-to guy for fantasy. This is an excellent book to start with if your wanting to get into his writing. The characters are complex and so well written, the plot unique, fresh and full of action. This was the book that made me realize sci-fi is my absolute favourite genre. Before reading this I never would have thought my favourite character of all time would be a mushroom-loving talking spaceship but here I am ordering t-shirts with M-Bot on them. Sanderson really makes an art out of building worlds that just keep getting bigger and bigger, you almost forget that your reading.
THE SYNOPSIS: Defeated, crushed, and driven almost to extinction, the remnants of the human race are trapped on a planet that is constantly attacked by mysterious alien starfighters. Spensa, a teenage girl living among them, longs to be a pilot. When she discovers the wreckage of an ancient ship, she realizes this dream might be possible—assuming she can repair the ship, navigate flight school, and (perhaps most importantly) persuade the strange machine to help her. Because this ship, uniquely, appears to have a soul.
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BRANDY’s PICK: Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
GENRE: Memoir
WHY SHE CHOSE IT: In South Africa during apartheid, Noah's existence was considered a crime (his father was white and his mother black) because at the time mixed race relationships were illegal and punishable. Noah had to be hidden away for the first few years of his life. His mother and father lived apart but there were stolen moments where he could see his father in secret so he could have a little relationship with him. Noah's story describes how he struggled to fit in as he wasn't black enough in to fit in with the black community and wasn't white enough to fit in there. Noah also explains how his mother struggled to make ends meet but was the hardest worker he knew. You can feel his love and admiration for his mother as she endures some of her own struggles while Noah was growing up. Throughout the autobiography you learn how intelligent, entrepreneurial and even mischievous Trevor was from a young age. If you are looking for heartbreaking but also hilarious at times read, please include this book in your TBR (to be read) list.
THE SYNOPSIS: Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.
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LISA G’s PICK: Columbine by Dave Cullen
GENRE: Nonfiction, True Crime
WHY SHE CHOSE IT: This book compiles all known events leading up to April 20, 1999 and the aftermath from every angle of the victims and the families of the teenage gunmen, and the evolution of their grief and emotions over the 10 years that passed between the mass shooting and the book. An interesting examination when you realize this event was the first of it's kind to unfold live on televison, which prompted changes in the response to violent situations by schools, police, and media.
THE SYNOPSIS: "The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror . . . " So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers. In the wake of Newtown, Aurora, and Virginia Tech, the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this plague grows more urgent every year.
What really happened April 20, 1999? The horror left an indelible stamp on the American psyche, but most of what we "know" is wrong. It wasn't about jocks, Goths, or the Trench Coat Mafia. Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on scene, and spent ten years on this book-widely recognized as the definitive account. With a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen, he draws on mountains of evidence, insight from the world's leading forensic psychologists, and the killers' own words and drawings-several reproduced in a new appendix. Cullen paints raw portraits of two polar opposite killers. They contrast starkly with the flashes of resilience and redemption among the survivors.
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