Frannie

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The resisters : a novel

by Gish Jen

FICTION Jen Gish
Dystopian

An audacious wonder of a novel about baseball and a future America, from the always inventive and exciting author of The Love Wife and Who's Irish. The time: Some thirty-five years hence. The place: AutoAmerica--governed by "Aunt Nettie," an iBurrito of AI algorithms and the internet, in a land half under water. The people: Divided into the angelfair "Netted," whose fate it is to have jobs and live on high ground, and the mostly coppertoned "Surplus," whose jobs have been stripped and whose sole duty now is to consume, living in plastic houses that talk and multi-colored houseboats at the water's edge. Neither group is happy. The story: A Surplus family--he was once a professor, she is still a lawyer--has a girl child, Gwen, who's born with a golden arm. By two she can throw her toy animals straight to the same spot every time. When AutoAmerica and ChinRussia decide to revive the Olympics, suddenly Gwen, who's been playing in the Resisters League her parents have organized, is in great demand. Soon she's at angelfair university, Net U, falling in love with her baseball coach and facing questions of "crossing over," while her mother and her "group" are bringing charges before the botjudge about Surplus rights. An amazing story of a world that looks only too possible, and a family struggling to maintain its humanity in circumstances that daily threaten their every value as well as their very existence.

A perfect book for the return to baseball! Gish Jen's new book tells of a Dystopian future where the Internet of things has taken over our lives and society is divided into producers and consumers and America is half under water because of rising sea levels. Wait, I thought this was about baseball? It is! The national past time is much different in the future and in this book a young girl gets her opportunity to move up in the class hierarchy due to her talent on the field. Come for the sports, stay for the nuanced description of a world that seems just around the corner... -Frannie

All the light we cannot see : a novel

by Anthony Doerr

eAUDIO

"From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Doerr's gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work"--

I can not sing the praises of this book enough. The plot moves quick, the characters are fully realized, and the prose is beautifully written. The audiobook narrated expertly by Zach Appelman imbues every sentence with emotional gravitas. I was left searching for ways to continue to listen to this making it the audio equivalent of reading with a flashlight under the covers. -Frannie

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Interests: Graphic Novels, Memoir, Classics, Literary Fiction, Humor

About Me

What music do you listen to? Trying to stay current with the latest but always love ambient music and soundscapes. Recent favorites include: Porridge Radio's Every Bad, Caribou's Suddenly, and Jeff Parker's Suite for Max Brown
What is your favorite thing about ICPL? The people you run into, and that's not just my co-workers, friends I haven't seen in years always seem magnetized to the library
What are your hobbies? I'm very physically active and practice yoga every day and swim up to 9 miles a week
Share a surprising fact about you. I've been a vegetarian nearly my entire life, and vegan for the last 5, however I will break for good oysters and unpasteurized cheese
If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go? On a hike up Table Mountain in Cape Town South Africa

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