New Adult Fiction: Friday, August 30

It’s not too late to get some good reading material for the long weekend! We’ll be open on Saturday from 10-2, so swing on by to see what’s on the shelves. We will continue to offer “Grab and Go” services for those who prefer to place their books on hold online and then pick them up in the cabinet inside the library.

Here are a few of the new books that have arrived at the library recently. We invite you to check them out!

The Phoenix Keeper

As head phoenix keeper at a world-renowned zoo for magical creatures, Aila’s childhood dream of conserving critically endangered firebirds seems closer than ever. There’s just one glaring caveat: her zoo’s breeding program hasn’t functioned for a decade. But mustering the courage to ask for help from the hotshot griffin keeper at the zoo’s most popular exhibit? Virtually impossible. Especially when that hotshot griffin keeper happens to be her arch-rival from college. With the world watching and the threat of poachers looming, Aila’s success is no longer merely a matter of keeping her job.

Ordinary Monsters

England, 1882. In Victorian London, two children with mysterious powers are hunted by a figure of darkness—a man made of smoke. Sixteen-year-old Charlie Ovid, despite a brutal childhood in Mississippi, doesn’t have a scar on him. His body heals itself, whether he wants it to or not. Marlowe, a foundling from a railway freight car, shines with a strange bluish light. When a jaded female detective is recruited to escort them all to safety, all three begin a journey into the nature of difference, and belonging, and the shadowy edges of the monstrous. Riveting in its scope, exquisitely written, Ordinary Monsters presents a catastrophic vision of the Victorian world—and of the gifted, broken children who must save it.

Mina’s Matchbox

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home, and her handsome, foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company, are symbols of that status. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling. In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life, which she looks back on briefly from adulthood.