New Acquisitions for the New Year

by Jenny Hubbard  Rowan Public Library

            I don’t make new-year resolutions, but I do make a list of books I’d like to read and books I’ve read that I like.  Allow me to introduce you to a handful of interesting, worthwhile reads that the Rowan Public Library has acquired since July.

Orphan Island, by Laurel Snyder, is targeted for 10-12-year-olds, but I’m 52, and I loved it.  Imagine yourself on a peaceful island cared for by other children; as you age, you become the one in charge. The only awareness of a world beyond this paradise is a small green boat that comes rocking across the ocean once a year to drop off a new orphan and carry away an old one.  For a young reader, the novel is a page-turning adventure; for an adult, it’s a lovely but haunting commentary on the fleeting nature of childhood.

Some childhoods are not nearly as happy as the ones spent on Orphan Island.  About The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, by Alexandra Marzano-Lesnevich, I say proceed with caution.   The author spent ten years on this work, and, after reading this genre-bending work, I can understand why.  The writing is stellar—vivid and crystalline.  As she tracks the story a murder, Marzano-Lesnevich also investigates her family’s darkest secrets, and she does so with the accuracy of a scalpel.  If you prefer a dark truth to a lighter one, this memoir’s authentic voice is hard to beat.

If you welcome authentic voices in fiction, too, consider Stephen Florida, by Gabe Habash.  It’s a novel that I wish existed when I was teaching high-school boys; it’s gritty and raw and wonderfully strange.  Stephen Florida, a competitive college wrestler, is a loner out for blood and love and everything in between. If you’ve been wondering what goes through the mind of a male on the edge of adulthood, here’s your chance.

Or if you’ve wondered what it’s like to be in prison, try staying for a night or two at The Graybar Hotel, by Curtis Dawkins.  These fictional stories, which walk that fine line between comedy and tragedy, illuminate the mindsets and heartaches of the incarcerated. You would be hard-pressed to find a writer on this subject who is more credible than Dawkins, who, although he holds an MFA in fiction-writing, is serving a life sentence for a murder he committed during a drug-related robbery gone wrong.  

How about a family vacation gone wrong?  Maile Meloy’s Do Not Become Alarmed compelled me to stay up until 3:00 in the morning to find out what happens after a cruise-ship excursion takes a terrible turn.  This novel has both the pace of a thriller and the artistry of a prize-winner, a rare combination.  Meloy is a writer to keep on your radar screen.

So many books, so little time!  My list grows longer by the day, new titles on top of older ones.  Maybe 2018 is the year I finally tackle Middlemarch.  Rowan Public Library has a copy if you’d like to join me.