Like Trees, Walking by Ravi Howard

Like Trees, Walking by Ravi Howard is the author’s first novel, expanded from a prize-winning short story he wrote while in college. Set in Mobile, Alabama, the novel is a fictional exploration of the repercussions of a real crime — the lynching of a 19-year-old African American teenager, Michael Donald, in 1981 — and the lack of effort by law enforcement officials to bring the guilty white men — members of the Ku Klux Klan — to justice.The narrator, Roy, is the younger of two brothers. In 1981, he’s in his last year of high school, preparing to go off to New Orleans for college the following year and trying to figure out how to tell his father that he doesn’t want to take over the family’s funeral home business, when his older brother, Paul, finds the dead body of his friend Michael hanging from a tree. Michael Donald was chosen at random and lynched on a street where known Klansmen lived. The whole African-American community is affected and mourns with Michael's family. The last lynching in Mobile had been over sixty years before, a horrifying crime that belonged in the past, but here it had happened — in 1981 — to one of their own. Paul becomes obsessed by the fact that the known criminals go about freely while Michael is dead and buried. Roy looks on helplessly, wrestling with his lack of faith and his responsibility to his family and the larger community.
A finalist for the 2008 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Like Trees, Walking is a short novel, quiet and reflective, that should start showing up on high school and college summer reading lists.
Check the Old Colony Library Network for availability of Like Trees, Walking.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

If you liked Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (and a lot of people did, including the 2009 Pulitzer Prize judges), you may like another book of loosely connected stories, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. This is the first novel by the author, who is also a journalist. What links all the stories and characters is an English-language newspaper in Rome; the stories span the decades of the newspaper's rise and fall.
Like Olive Kitteridge, The Imperfectionists isn't a feel-good book, although there are funny parts. Journalism, like librarianship, is changing rapidly with the rise of the Internet and digital media. The Imperfectionists is a glimpse into the career of journalism as it used to be. A sense of loss and regret pervades many of the stories, but, most of the time. it's human nature to recover and adapt.
Read The Washington Post's review of The Imperfectionists.
Check the Old Colony Library Network for The Imperfectionists.

Beach Books and Summer Reading

Beach books should be easy to put down on the blanket but absorbing enough to get right back into when you pick it up again. Also, they should NOT be depressing. 
Vogue blogger Megan O’Grady recommends the season’s hottest new beach books here. Her list includes The Summer We Read Gatsby by Danielle Ganek and The Same River Twice by Ted Moone. One of my own favorite authors for beach chair reading is Penny Vincenzi. Her most recent novel is The Best of Times
In its list of 10 Unforgettable Beach Reads, Reader’s Digest recommends older titles that might be found on the library shelf instead of the holds list. Most – such as Sophie Kinsella’s Can You Keep a Secret? and Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed – look like they’ll appeal more to women, but guys might try Gutted: Down to the Studs in My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life by Lawrence LaRose, which Reader’s Digest describes as the “touching, honest, and often hilarious true story of one couple's struggle to build their dream home and dream life together.”
Summer reading lists tend to be more substantial than beach book recommendations -- assuming that readers have more time to devote to reading in the summer and want to tackle some big titles, maybe some of the books that everyone's been talking about, like Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, starting with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
For a Latina take on summer reading, check out some of the suggestions from Latina Magazine in its list of Top 10 Latina Summer Beach Reads. Isabel Allende's new historical novel about Haiti's slave rebellion, Island Beneath the Sea, shows up here, as well as on other lists.
NPR has compiled a list of summer reads, Best Of The Bestsellers: Wisdom Of The Crowds, from the purchase habits of NPR listeners. For more, check out NPR's Audience Picks: 100 Best Beach Books Ever from last summer's public radio listeners' recommendations.
Another list that's heavy on the literary, light on fluff, is Oprah's 2010 Summer Reading List. It includes The Passage by Justin Cronin, which has been getting a lot of buzz in a lot of places, including on BookPage's The Book Case blog, as this year's big summer book. (Literally. It's 766 pages long.)
Whether at the beach, in the backyard, or sitting inside with the air conditioner, we hope you have lots of time for reading and visiting the library this summer.

Audiobooks for Everyone

The Booklist audiobook blogger Mary Burkey has posted a list of family-friendly audiobooks perfect for car trips. For older kids and teens, the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association, has also posted its list of Amazing Audiobooks for Teens.
It was a running joke in my family that whenever my husband or one of the kids came in while I was listening to an audiobook in the kitchen, the opening to an off-color scene or an impressive string of swears would invariably issue forth from the speakers before I could reach the remote. These lists of family-friendly audiobooks may come too late for me, but may be helpful to others!
A young adult audiobook I have recently listened to and liked was Airborn by Kenneth Oppel. It's a good introduction to the steampunk genre for kids.

Shoot to Thrill by P.J. Tracy

If you haven’t met the Monkeewrench crew, you might want to start with the book that introduces them: Monkeewrench. If you have met them, you’re probably waiting for me to return my copy of Shoot to Thrill, the fifth book in the suspense series, to the library.
Monkeewrench is a group of computer hacker geniuses — some of them quirky to the point of pathology — who help the Minneapolis Police Department detectives bring down murderers. The Monkeewrench books by P.J. Tracy — a pen name for the mother-daughter team, Patricia and Traci Lambrecht — have action-packed plots, serial killers, and rapid-fire dialogue. If you’re in the mood for a thriller, try this series.
Here’s the order to read them in, although the Publishers Weekly review says you can jump in on the fifth one without any problem:
Monkeewrench (check OCLN for availability)
Live Bait  (check OCLN for availability)
Dead Run  (check OCLN for availability)
Snow Blind  (check OCLN for availability)
Shoot to Thrill  (check OCLN for availability)
By the way, whenever I want to look up the order of a series, I use the wonderful What's Next™: Books in Series database maintained by the Kent District Library in Kent County, Michigan.

The Postmistress & Blackout

The heroism of Londoners as they took shelter during nightly bombing raids and carried out their business in as close an approximation to usual as possible during the day quickly become legendary. Two recent novels -- The Postmistress and Blackout -- give readers a sense of how it might have been to live through the London Blitz, while Americans were divided on what to do.

Given a big publicity boost by Katherine Stockett, author of The Help, The Postmistress by Sarah Blake will be popular with the same readers, but has the added bonus for us of a Massachusetts connection. Confident and strong, Iris James is the postmaster (not postmistress) in the fictitious Cape Cod town of Franklin in 1940, where Emma Fitch has just moved to join her husband, a young doctor. Country after country is falling to the Germans, President Roosevelt is promising Americans their boys are “not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” and plucky radio correspondent Frankie Bard is bucking male chauvinism in broadcasting, reporting heartrending stories of the Blitz that bring the war home to American listeners.

If you’re an audiobook reader, try The Postmistress on audio, narrated by Orlagh Cassidy. (The only problem with an otherwise excellent audio version is that the characters with broad Boston accents sounded more like Mainers to me.) Like The Help, The Postmistress is a good story, grounded in American history, with strong female characters, and many poignant moments.
Read The New York Times review of The Postmistress here.
Check availability of The Postmistress in the OCLN catalog here.

Blackout, the new book by science fiction author Connie Willis, is also about the London Blitz and other historical turning points in England during World War II.
Set in the same time-travel universe as The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout’s storyline is continued in All Clear, which isn’t coming out until fall. (!) Readers will have to wait to find out what happens to the time-traveling young historians in Blackout, whose cautiously laid plans for safe travel in and out of London and surrounding areas during crucial periods in World War II history have gotten them in to observe the casual heroism of ordinary Brits, but aren’t working to get them -- ordinary historians now in crisis themselves -- back to their own time.
Read The Washington Post review of Blackout here.
Check availability of Blackout in the OCLN catalog here.

Massachusetts Book Awards

In a switch from fall to spring, the 10th annual Massachusetts Book Awards were announced last night at a ceremony celebrating a decade of literature by Massachusetts authors or about Massachusetts. To download the complete list of this year's must-reads in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children's/young adult, visit the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

Fiction Winner
Woodsburner by John Pipkin (Random House, 2009)
In this debut novel, the author takes an actual incident in the life of Henry David Thoreau (an accidental fire that consumes 300 acres of the Concord woods) and weaves it into a richly satisfying tale.

Check Old Colony Library Network for availability of Woodsburner.

Nonfiction Winner
American Passage: The History of Ellis Island by Vincent J. Cannato (HarperCollins, 2009)
A clarifying and enlightening account of Ellis Island that is not only a history of the Island itself but also a study of the process of the entire Ellis Island experience and an invitation to contemplate openings and closings of the gates in our nation of immigrants.
(At the awards ceremony, the author did rub it in that he was a New Yorker receiving a MassBook Award for a book about New York, but he is a professor at U. Mass., Boston, so can be forgiven.)
Check Old Colony Library Network for availability of American Passage.

Poetry Winner
This Is the Red Door by James R. Whitley (Ironweed, 2009)
A wonderful collection of lyrical poems about love, loss, and moving on.

Children's/Young Adult Winner
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (Little, Brown, 2009)
A young girl named Minli takes an epic journey seeking fortune and wisdom in this beautifully designed and illustrated novel blending Chinese folktales with the Wizard of Oz.

Check Old Colony Library Network for availability of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.