Staff Picks

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It's a Love Story

Annabel Monaghan

OverDrive Audiobook
Fiction, Humor, Romance

“Poignant, funny, and bingeable, Annabel Monaghan writes five star reads.” —Abby Jimenez From the USA Today bestselling author of Nora Goes Off Script, a novel about a former adolescent TV actress-turned-Hollywood producer whose “fake it till you make it” mantra sets her on a crash course with her past, forcing her to spend a week on Long Island with the last man she thinks might make her believe in love. Love is a lie. Laughter is the only truth. Jane Jackson spent her adolescence as "Poor Janey Jakes," the barbecue-sauce-in-her-braces punch line on America's fifth-favorite sitcom. Now she’s trying to be taken seriously as a Hollywood studio executive by embracing a new mantra: Fake it till you make it. Except she might have faked it too far. Desperate to get her first project greenlit and riled up by pompous cinematographer and one-time crush Dan Finnegan, she claimed that she could get mega popstar Jack Quinlan to write a song for the movie. Jack may have been her first kiss—and greatest source of shame—but she hasn’t spoken to him in twenty years. Now Jane must turn to the last man she’d ever want to owe: Dan Finnegan. Because Jack is playing a festival in Dan’s hometown, and Dan has an in. A week in close quarters with Dan as she faces down her past is Jane's idea of hell, but he just might surprise her. While covering up her lie, can they find something true?

I got to be the lucky "First Hold" on this audiobook. Two days in, and I feel like it's a whirlwind love affair between me and this story! It took a few chapters for me to get into the narration, but the slow burn love story is so engrossing that I'd love it no matter what. As usual with the books I recommend, the main characters are quite likeable. I do want propose shame plays a key role in this book as well, as so much of the main female character's life is shaped by the emotion's influence on her. There is some fun meta-romance in this book as well, like a fun enemies-to-friends argument about The Notebook and discourse about what makes a love story truly wonderful. The relationship building is paced nicely. There's no first-date-lap dance like you get in Hannah Grace's Wildfire. I'm only about halfway through the book, and there's only been thoughts of kissing rather than any action-packed lip-smacking. But the anticipation is what makes it so good! Gotta remember that for future book choices: give me yearning over instant gratification. -Melody

All kinds of things = Todo tipo de cosas book cover

Impossible monsters : dinosaurs, Darwin, and the battle between science and religion book cover

You were born for this : astrology for radical self-acceptance book cover

Andor. The complete first season book cover

The Strawberry Patch Pancake House book cover

Dream state : a novel

Eric Puchner

FICTION Puchner Eric
Fiction, Literary Fiction

"PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, Pushcart Prize winner, and Best American Stories contributor, Eric Puchner returns with an ambitious and deeply moving novel set against the backdrop of the American West that follows three lifelong friends and the betrayal at the center of their entwined fates. Cece and Charlie are in love and a few weeks away from their summer wedding. But when Cece meets Charlie's best friend from college, Garrett, her long-held expectations for her future begin to crumble. As Garrett's gruff mask slips, Cece begins to anticipate the big day with dread as her feelings for Garrett become impossible to bury. And as she decides to follow her instincts, ditching her groom for his best man, she will alter the three of their lives forever, the events of that July reverberating through marriage, parenthood, and, in the end, across generations. Years later, Cece's daughter, Lana, and Charlie's son, Jasper, meet and become fast friends, finding themselves reunited again and again throughout their adolescence. Soon enough, they find themselves enacting their parents' mistakes, falling victim to duplicity and heartbreak, with age and mortality looming. With Montana's once-warm summers growing untenably hot, and the nearby lake all but drying up, obscured only by the ceaseless smoke of wildfires, Garrett's career as a wildlife researcher feels increasingly futile. As he watches Cece begin to lose herself, Charlie wonders whether he will ever find stability, especially with a son failing to adjust to the demands of adulthood. With delicacy, precision, and enormous heart, Dream State is at once a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage, and a tender ode to the beauty of impermanence"--

I’ve been a little stuck on “Dream State” since I’ve finished it. I have a range of feelings and lots of unanswered questions—about the book, the characters, the sequence of events, and about myself. It is one of those books that makes you self-examine your past and think more about the future. What is in our control and what is out of it? What do our relationships mean to us and what do we mean to others? “Dream State” is a heavy-lift of a novel, but if you want a book to stay with you, this one sure will for me. -Anne M

The body alone : a lyrical articulation of chronic pain

Nina Lohman

616.0472 /Lohman
Nonfiction, Health, Memoir

"The Body Alone is a lyrical nonfiction inquiry into the experience, meaning, and articulation of pain. It is a hybrid account incorporating research, scholarship, and memoir to examine pain through the lenses of medicine, theology, and philosophy. Broken bodies tell broken stories. This is why the pain experience is portrayed through an engaging but tangled, cyclical narrative of primers, vocabulary lessons, prescription records, and hypothesized internal monologues. The Body Alone is fractured not for the sake of experimentation but because the story itself demands it. A personal account of a societal problem, The Body Alone will appeal to readers who experience or are impacted by chronic illness. Like the author, the majority of the 51 million Americans who suffer chronic pain identify as women and are young or middle-aged. Research reveals the uncomfortable truth that medicine continues to be a gendered institution where 70% of chronic pain patients are women but 80% of pain studies are conducted on men or male mice. This is one of the many disparities that leave women systemically underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and even gaslighted on account of inequitable access to research funding, clinical trials, and effective medications. Pain is more than personal; it is a political issue prime for reformation. In both form and content, The Body Alone represents boundary-pressing work that subverts the traditional narrative by putting pressure on the medical, cultural, and political systems that impact women's access to fair and equal healthcare. The Body Alone is more than an illness narrative. It is a battle cry demanding change"--

Poetic, cutting, and accurate. This book is part memoir, part poetry, and part explanatory nonfiction. Lohman details the ways that chronic pain derailed her life and reshaped her identity. If you have chronic pain, this could be a very therapeutic read. I was recently diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and I appreciated untangling the snarled threads of pain alongside the author as she explored different techniques for thinking about and living with her pain. If you don't have chronic pain, this book is an excellent window into the experience of people that do. It especially elucidates the difference between acute and chronic pain, and asks the question: How much pain can you handle? -Chelsea

Why fish don't exist : a story of loss, love, and the hidden order of life book cover

The mortal and immortal life of the girl from Milan book cover

The anxious generation : how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness

Jonathan Haidt

305.23 /Haidt
Nonfiction, Health, Science

"From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health--and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood. After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures. Why? In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the "play-based childhood" began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the "phone-based childhood" in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this "great rewiring of childhood" has interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies. Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the "collective action problems" that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood. Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes--communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children--and ourselves--from the psychological damage of a phone-based life"--

This book was illuminating to say the least. As someone who is just beginning my journey into parenthood, as well as someone who part of the generation who had a mostly low-tech childhood, this book was an interesting and alarming deep dive into the the long-term effects of a "phone-based childhood." I work with children every day, and I easily see the differences as the years go by and we rely more and more on social connections and experiences via online versus in person, and the way it affects children is astounding. I think all parents should consider the concerns and calls to action suggested in this book, and rethink how they want to help frame the childhoods their children experience. I particularly hope that even as we lean more and more heavily on smart phones as a society, that we don't totally lose the emphasis on a play-based childhood to support healthy child development. Obviously I use my phone and connect online all day, but I really want to be conscious of the factors that come into play when parenting a child. -Mari