It’s a glorious holiday weekend, dear readers, and so we’ll keep things brief, wish you a very happy, safe, relaxing, joyful Memorial Day! Don’t forget, after today, the Library will be closed until Tuesday!
And now, here are some of the books that have gamboled onto our shelves this week:
Into the Water: One of the summer’s biggest releases is here–Paula Hawkins’ second book after her stunning and wildly successful Girl on a Train. In this twisty tale, Hawkins brings another tale of psychic tension and social unease that is sure to keep fans flipping the pages. A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return. Sophomore works are always a challenge, but Hawkins seems to have carried this one off with aplomb, resulting in a work that the USA Today calls a “succulent new mystery… Hawkins, influenced by Hitchcock, has a cinematic eye and an ear for eerie, evocative language… So do dive in. The payoff is a socko ending. And a noirish beach read that might make you think twice about dipping a toe in those dark, chilly waters.”
Since We Fell: And speaking of summer blockbusters, I think it’s probably safe to say that Dennis Lehane’s newest release is going to be another summer favorite–and, hopefully, a much-needed twist on the current run of psychological thrillers involving scary spouses. Here, Rachel Childs, a former journalist who, after an on-air mental breakdown, now lives as a virtual shut-in. In all other respects, however, she enjoys an ideal life with an ideal husband. Until a chance encounter on a rainy afternoon causes that ideal life to fray. As does Rachel’s marriage. As does Rachel herself. Sucked into a conspiracy thick with deception, violence, and possibly madness, Rachel must find the strength within herself to conquer unimaginable fears and mind-altering truths. By turns heart- breaking, suspenseful, romantic, and sophisticated, Lehane is already winning acclaim from critics and readers across the country, with New York Times confirming “[Lehane] remains one of the great, diabolical thriller kings who seems intimately acquainted with darkness and can make it seep from the page.”
Behave : the biology of humans at our best and worst: From the celebrated neurobiologist and primatologist, a landmark, genre-defining examination of human behavior, both good and bad, and an answer to the question: Why do we do the things we do? Sapolsky begins with a neurological answer: What went on in a person’s brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? From there he expands to consider behavioral and learned habits and cultural experiences that weigh in on the brain’s inherent reactions. Utilizing cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines, Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement that Kirkus called (in it’s starred review), a “wide-ranging, learned survey of all the making-us-tick things that, for better or worse, define us as human…. An exemplary work of popular science, challenging but accessible.”
Burntown: This is a “new to us” books, but any time a Jennifer McMahon novel comes to the Library, it’s worthy of note. In her newest tale of sleepy towns and hidden secrets, McMahon has also worked in a little science fiction that makes the whole story into something utterly original. Ashford, Vermont, might look like your typical sleepy New England college town, but to the shadowy residents who live among the remains of its abandoned mills and factories, it’s known as “Burntown.” Eva Sandeski, known as “Necco” on the street, has been a part of this underworld for years, ever since the night her father Miles drowned in a flood that left her and her mother Lily homeless. A respected professor, Miles was also an inventor of fantastic machines, including one so secret that the plans were said to have been stolen from Thomas Edison’s workshop. According to Lily, it’s this machine that got Miles murdered. Necco has always written off this claim as the fevered imaginings of a woman consumed by grief. But when Lily dies under mysterious circumstances, and Necco’s boyfriend is murdered, she’s convinced her mother was telling the truth. Now, on the run from the man called “Snake Eyes,” Necco must rely on other Burntown outsiders to survive, resulting in a story of edge-of-your-seat suspense that Booklist calls “bar-raising. . . . . A stunning genre blend of thriller and fantasy.”
The potlikker papers : a food history of the modern South: Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens from the pot and set aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, both black and white. In the South of today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as chefs have reclaimed it. Potlikker is a quintessential Southern dish, and The Potlikker Papers is a people’s history of the modern South, told through its food. Beginning with the pivotal role cooks and waiters played in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South’s fitful journey from a hive of racism to a hotbed of American immigration. He shows why working-class Southern food has become a vital driver of contemporary American cuisine. Over the last three generations, wrenching changes have transformed the South. The Potlikker Papers tells the story of that dynamism—and reveals how Southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation. Whether you’re a connoisseur, or interested in the ways in which food is an intricate part of our history and culture, this is a book for you. Indeed, Southern Living called this book “The one food book you must read this year…No matter the subject, there is always something to learn from Edge’s work…The Potlikker Papers is a reminder of where we’ve been, how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.”
Until next week, beloved patrons–happy reading!