The Read Local committee is pleased to announce Elizabeth Uppman has won Johnson County Library’s #IHeartU Essay contest with her entry Lucia's War. Uppman's essay was chosen for its response to the theme of love, and the juxtaposition of "war" in the title with Lucia's ultimate triumph. We also love the evolution of Lucia's attack, how her "storming the beaches of Normandy" approach slowly transitions to a blunt and irrefutable request.
Leonora (Nora/Lee/Leo) Shaw's past has come back to visit her. With a mysterious invitation to a hen-do (British bachelorette party) in the English countryside for a friend she hasn't seen or spoken to in years, she is forced to get out of her apartment and shed her closed-off personality for a weekend. She doesn't, however, quite know why she is invited and when she begins to ask around, no one else seems to know why they have been invited either. The hostess, Flo, is crazy about the bride, Clare, and puts all of the guests ill-at-ease.
What’s going on? Where am I? Who am I? Both the characters in the story and the reader wonder. Sigler has achieved an interesting balance between a thriller-like atmosphere and a slowly unfolding reality.
A group of twelve-year-olds wake up in older bodies, in coffins, with no memory of who they are and how they got there. Thus begins what is slated to be a trilogy.
Fourteen year old Charlie Simmons is enjoying the summer before starting at a new school in Thunder Point. His very protective mom, Lin Su, is working in Thunder Point as a home nurse for Winnie who has ALS. This is the best job Lin Su has had in a long time and it gives Charlie the opportunity to change schools and get away from the bullies that had been taunting him at his old school.
Imagine that food is scarce, money is even scarcer, education is not an option for women and freedom of anything - speech, religion, choice - no longer exists. This is Afghanistan in the 1990s, the world in which Fereiba now lives and she is desperately seeking a way out. She grew up in a better time where she was able to go to school, teach and live a respectable but free life. She recounts her childhood and growing up in a middle-class family while remembering her first love and how heartbroken she was when he married her sister.
I don’t know about you, but I enjoyed the early 2000s TV show, Alias, starring Jennifer Garner. And I’ve been missing it ever since – I mean, what actor since has shown such facility for multiple identities and costume changes?
Facing hard moments is not easy for anyone, especially Jean Perdu, the self-proclaimed literary apothecary who prescribes books to people based on their emotional state. He has essentially shut himself off, emotionally and physically, from the world since he was left by his lover over twenty years ago. Now fate has led him back to that very moment of heartbreak when he is forced to open a door, again emotionally and physically, and give away some of his last few possessions to a friend in need. Amongst those items is a letter his lover wrote to him on that fateful day.
