Are you participating in our 2023 Reading Challenge?
If you’re participating in the category-based reading challenge, either by using the tracking sheet or on Beanstack, we can help you find books in each of the categories. Today we’re featuring books with weather on the cover. Below are just a few recommendations, but these aren’t all the books that fit the category. These are just a few ideas to help get you started.
Click here to see more titles.
Are you participating in our 2023 Reading Challenge?
If you’re participating in the category-based reading challenge, either by using the tracking sheet or on Beanstack, we can help you find books in each of the categories. Today we’re featuring award-winning books. Below are just a few recommendations, but these aren’t the only award-winners we have. You can read books from any book award of your choice, and from any year. These are just a few ideas to help get you started. Look here for a list of more awards, but feel free to read books from other award lists!
The Rabbit Hunch by Tess Gunty / South to America by Imani Perry / All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin / Deacon King Kong by James McBride / Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Gibbs
Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott / The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich / Covered with Night by Nicole Eustace
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka / Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart / Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley / Everything sad is untrue by Daniel Nayeri / Dig by A.S. King
If These Wings Could Fly by Kyrie McCauley / The Field Guide to the North American Teenager by Ben Philippe / Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera / When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller / New Kid by Jerry Craft
Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre by Carole Boston Weatherford / Me (Moth) by Amber McBride / Before the Ever After by Jacqueline Woodson
Efrén Divided by Ernesto Cisneros / Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez / The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff / Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo / The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar
Watercress by Andrea Wang / We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom / The Undefeated by Kwame Alexander
It’s the start of a new year and we’re saying hello to our 2023 reading challenges!
Each challenge asks that you read 12 (or more!) books over the course of the year. We have paper challenge slips in the library’s lobby and the adult category-based reading challenge is also available for participation on Beanstack.
New this year, we have a kid’s version of the “Everyone’s Read it Except Me Challenge”!
Download Here: Everyone Has Read It Except Me 2023
Download Here: Everyone Has Read It Except Me 2023 Kids Edition
Download Here: 2023 YA Reading Challenge
Have you started any of our three reading challenges for 2022?
If you’re participating in the category-based reading challenge, either by using the tracking sheet or on Beanstack, we can help you find books in each of the categories.
Today we’re featuring Magical Realism books! What is Magical Realism? The genre of Magical Realism usually refers to books where the fantastical and surreal and combined with the ordinary. They usually have a realistic narrative, except there is a little bit of extraordinary added in.
Below are just a few Magical Realism recommendations, but these aren’t the only books we have available in this category. They are just ideas that can help you spark inspiration, help clarify the category, and (hopefully) make your decision easier.
Magical realism, lyrical prose, and the pain and passion of human love haunt this hypnotic generational saga.
Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender. Ava—in all other ways a normal girl—is born with the wings of a bird.
In a quest to understand her peculiar disposition and a growing desire to fit in with her peers, sixteen-year old Ava ventures into the wider world, ill-prepared for what she might discover and naïve to the twisted motives of others. Others like the pious Nathaniel Sorrows, who mistakes Ava for an angel and whose obsession with her grows until the night of the Summer Solstice celebration.
That night, the skies open up, rain and feathers fill the air, and Ava’s quest and her family’s saga build to a devastating crescendo.
First-time author Leslye Walton has constructed a layered and unforgettable mythology of what it means to be born with hearts that are tragically, exquisitely human.
In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers.
Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.
Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.
A spellbinding tale of magical realism, where twelve-year-old Lottie’s colorful world turns suddenly gray when an unexpected accident claims her parents, and she is uprooted from her home to live with an eccentric uncle she never knew she had—on the border that separates the living and the dead.Lottie lives in Vivelle—the heart of a vibrant city where life exists in brilliant technicolor and nearly everyone has magic. And Lottie is no exception; she can paint pictures to life in every shade and hue imaginable. But at the sudden loss of her parents, all the color is stripped from Lottie’s heart and the world around her. Taken in by her reclusive, eccentric uncle, Lottie moves into Forsaken, his vast manor located in the gray wasteland between the Land of the Living and Ever After, the land of the dead.
The discovery of a locked-up garden, a wise cardinal, a hidden boy, and a family whose world is full of color despite the bleakness around them begins to pull at the threads of what it means to live in such a near-dead place, slowly returning some of the color to Lottie’s private world and giving her hope that life is worth living and experiencing fully, even while one carries sorrow.
But as time runs out, Lottie must find a way to thaw both the world and the hearts of her uncle, cousin, and those she has come to know and love in her new home, or all of Forsaken—including Lottie herself—will be absorbed by Ever After long before their time.
An exquisitely written, richly imagined, stunning portrait of love and loss, magic and hope; a true celebration of the strength we all possess to transcend tragedy—and the gifts that make life worth living.
An enchanting tale filled with magical realism and moments of pure love that won’t let you go.
Between the real and the imaginary, there are stories that take flight in the most extraordinary ways.
Right off the coast of South Carolina, on Mallow Island, The Dellawisp sits—a stunning old cobblestone building shaped like a horseshoe, and named after the tiny turquoise birds who, alongside its human tenants, inhabit an air of magical secrecy.
When Zoey comes to claim her deceased mother’s apartment at the Dellawisp she meets her quirky and secretive neighbors, including a young woman with a past, two estranged middle-aged sisters, and a lonely chef, and three ghosts. The sudden death of one of Zoey’s new neighbors sets off a search that leads to the island’s famous author and to a long-estranged relative of the sisters.
Each of them has a story, and each story has an ending which hasn’t yet been written.
In this young adult novel by award-winning author Anna-Marie McLemore, two non-binary teens are pulled into a magical world under a lake – but can they keep their worlds above water intact?
Everyone who lives near the lake knows the stories about the world underneath it, an ethereal landscape rumored to be half-air, half-water. But Bastián Silvano and Lore Garcia are the only ones who’ve been there. Bastián grew up both above the lake and in the otherworldly space beneath it. Lore’s only seen the world under the lake once, but that one encounter changed their life and their fate.
Then the lines between air and water begin to blur. The world under the lake drifts above the surface. If Bastián and Lore don’t want it bringing their secrets to the surface with it, they have to stop it, and to do that, they have to work together. There’s just one problem: Bastián and Lore haven’t spoken in seven years, and working together means trusting each other with the very things they’re trying to hide.
Orphaned, raised by wolves, and the proud owner of a horned pig named Merlin, Weylyn Grey knew he wasn’t like other people. But when he single-handedly stopped that tornado on a stormy Christmas day in Oklahoma, he realized just how different he actually was.
That tornado was the first of many strange events that seem to follow Weylyn from town to town, although he doesn’t like to take credit. As amazing as these powers may appear, they tend to manifest themselves at inopportune times and places. From freak storms to trees that appear to grow over night, Weylyn’s unique abilities are a curiosity at best and at worst, a danger to himself and the woman he loves. But Mary doesn’t care. Since Weylyn saved her from an angry wolf on her eleventh birthday, she’s known that a relationship with him isn’t without its risks, but as anyone who’s met Weylyn will tell you, once he wanders into your life, you’ll wish he’d never leave.
Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance tells the story of Weylyn Grey’s life from the perspectives of the people who knew him, loved him, and even a few who thought he was just plain weird. Although he doesn’t stay in any of their lives for long, he leaves each of them with a story to tell. Stories about a boy who lives with wolves, great storms that evaporate into thin air, fireflies that make phosphorescent honey, and a house filled with spider webs and the strange man who inhabits it.
There is one story, however, that Weylyn wishes he could change: his own. But first he has to muster enough courage to knock on Mary’s front door.
In this warm debut novel, Ruth Emmie Lang teaches us about adventure and love in a beautifully written story full of nature and wonder.
A mother and daughter with a shared talent for healing—and for the conjuring of curses—are at the heart of this dazzling first novelConjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their master’s daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom.
Magnificently written, brilliantly researched, richly imagined, Conjure Women moves back and forth in time to tell the haunting story of Rue, Varina, and May Belle, their passions and friendships, and the lengths they will go to save themselves and those they love.
The Sentence asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book.A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
The Sentence begins on All Souls’ Day 2019 and ends on All Souls’ Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.
Need more inspiration? Check out a list of more Magical Realism books here!
