The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

The holiday season is upon us, and has been since early September when I started seeing strings of Christmas lights and holiday wreaths being sold at our local big-box store.  I like my holidays kept separate, but even a Scrooge like me must admit that we are now into full-blown retail-enhanced holiday madness.

My library has not escaped this onslaught. Our Christmas picture books, which for most of the year are carefully hoarded on a special shelf accessible only to librarians, have been put on display.  There are at least twelve tinsel trees scattered throughout the stacks. The endcaps are full of books about gift-giving, crafting, and cooking. Someone even created a "book tree" topped with an origami star made out of weeded book pages and surrounded by twinkle lights.

But what about the other traditions? We are instructed to say "Happy Holidays" to patrons and fellow staff, which is great since it allows me to wish everyone a wonderful season of giving and anticipation of the new year without having to guess which religious tradition they may choose to follow.  And I do live and work in a large cosmopolitan metropolitan area. I am surrounded by nearly as much diversity as I saw when I lived and worked on the island of Guam.  But my library seems to be drowning in Christmas, and even our holiday books are mostly, if not completely, Christmas-themed and not celebrating Hanukkah or Bodhi Day or Kwanzaa or even Christmas as celebrated by those in the Eastern Orthodox religion.  There are so many beautiful cultures and celebrations we are missing, and that makes me sad.

My younger sister's birthday was Wednesday, and when we were kids, there was a rule in our house that the Christmas decorations did not go up until my sister had been able to celebrate her birthday. My mom wanted to make sure that my sister's day was a special one and didn't want it to be swallowed up by Christmas.  And now I'm trying to figure out how to do the same in my library, to acknowledge the different traditions and cultures of my various patrons without letting their special days be swallowed up by the behemoth that Christmas has become.

For those of you in public libraries, how do you do this? Do you put up no holiday decor, or only secular decor, or do you find a way to celebrate all winter holidays?

The Killing Woods

Christopher, Lucy. The Killing Woods. Chicken House Ltd, 2013.

Emily's dad has been accused of murdering Ashlee, a popular teen girl whom Emily's dad carried out of the woods near her house one night. Emily's dad doesn't remember killing Ashlee, but he suffers from PTSD and assumes he killed her during a flashback while in the woods. Emily is determined to clear his name, but to do so she has to investigate what might actually have happened to Ashlee.

This book definitely sounds like it would be suspenseful and creepy, the perfect book to read around Halloween. Unfortunately, while the story does have a mystery element, the suspense aspect fell flat, as did the thrilling, must-turn-the-next-page aura that I expect from a book designated as a thriller. I also didn't feel like I got to know Emily or her father at all, even though both have starring roles in this story. I had high expectations for this book, but I was definitely disappointed. For teens who like thrillers or compelling reads, I'd recommend books by Nick Lake instead.

Recommended for: teens
Red Flags: murder, underage drinking and teen drug use, a soldier's PTSD flashbacks
Overall Rating: 3/5 stars

Read-Alike Suggestions: The Impossible Knife of Memory, The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die, Stolen: A Letter to My Captor

I Kill the Mockingbird

Acamopra, Paul. I Kill the Mockingbird. Roaring Brook Press, 2014.

Lucy, Elena, and Michael are all rising freshmen in a small town where their 8th grade English teacher will also be their freshman English teacher. She assigns a book list for summer reading, and Lucy is determined to get more of her classmates to read and love her favorite off of that list: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The trio create a scarcity of Lee's classic by relocating the book within bookstores and libraries in their area and utilizing social media to spread the word about the missing tomes. Their site quickly goes viral and then they must decide how to stop it before it gets out of hand.

I have mixed feelings about this book. The booknerd/bibliophile in me loves the literary references and the scene where the trio are digging through the weeded books discarded in the library's recycling bin. I love that the kids use social media to popularize their project and that it spirals farther than they could ever have imagined. I think the writing style is perfectly appropriate for children. However, I don't imagine many teens, even young teens, acting the way the trio acted; they seemed overly childish in the book. The simple solution would be to make them rising 7th graders instead of 9th graders, which would make their words/actions fit better with their age, but then the booklist for class would become problematic (more so than it already is - who assigns both Dickens and Lois Lowry?). The idea behind this book is clever and it was enjoyable to read, but I doubt many kids who would enjoy this book would be ready to enjoy Harper Lee's classic or many of the other books mentioned in the story.

Recommended for: middle grade, tweens
Red Flags: none
Overall Rating: 4/5 stars

Read-Alikes: Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library, The Grimm Legacy,

Just Call My Name

Sloan, Holly. Just Call My Name. Little, Brown BFYR, 2014.

The second installment in Sloan's I'll Be There series, this book picks up with Sam living more or less independently and starting college while Riddle lives with Emily's family as they pursue his adoption. Riddle is slowly catching up on the education he never had. Meanwhile, Sam and Riddle's father is planning to break out of prison, find his sons, and punish them for running away. Various story threads combine near the end of the book for an intense denouement.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. The story line itself sounds very intense and thriller-esque, but the writing didn't do much to compel me to continue reading. When I have read other books about convicts who escape and threaten to do awful things to other people, usually I can't stop turning the pages because even though I hope things will turn out well, I'm never quite sure. With this one, however, it was almost as if the characters themselves were not invested in the story, either. Add that to the multiple narrators who all had very similar voices and this story just didn't do it for me. I wanted to be in the characters' heads more, to feel their fear or pain or excitement or whatever, but they just fell flat for me. People who read Sloan's first book may also enjoy this one, but I am going to find it difficult to sell this to all but the strongest readers.

Recommended for: teens
Red Flags: mentions of past abuse, a kidnapping at gunpoint
Overall Rating: 3/5 stars

Read-Alike: Zebra Forest

All the Bright Places

Niven, Jennifer. All the Bright Places. Knopf, 2015.

Theodore and Violet meet on the bell tower at their school, and one of them is able to talk the other one out of jumping. These unlikely acquaintances develop into friends as they work together on a school project. Violet is grieving the loss of her old sister while Theodore is battling demons of his own. [Sorry, more info would constitute a spoiler.]

This book has been heralded as a mash-up between The Fault in Our Stars and Eleanor and Park. At first I wasn't sure this book would live up to the hype and was afraid I'd be disappointed, but I wasn't. Violet's grief over the death of her sister is very real, and it has colored her world for the past year. Theodore is battling bipolar disorder, which apparently has run in his family and which he refuses to acknowledge or relieve through medication. This book has death, life, love, mental illness - all the things a teen adores in fiction. Recommended.

Recommended for: teens

Red Flags: language

Overall Rating: 5/5 stars