Talk About Books

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey is set in Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel.  Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow.  The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness.  As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of...

Unsheltered is the story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum, as they navigate the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. In this mesmerizing story told in alternating chapters, Willa and Thatcher come to realize that though the future is uncertain, even unnerving, shelter can be found in the bonds of kindred—whether family or friends—and in the strength of the human spirit.  Willa Knox has always prided herself on being the embodiment of responsibility for her family. Which is why it's so unnerving that she's arrived at middle age with nothing to show for her hard work and dedication but a stack of unpaid bills and an inherited brick home in Vineland, New Jersey, that is literally falling apart. A science teacher with a lifelong passion for honest investigation, Thatcher finds himself under siege in his community for telling the truth: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting n...

Kent Haruf was best known for his novel “Plainsong”,  published in 1999. Haruf set all of his books in the fictional small town of Holt, Colo., integrating his bare-bones descriptions of the high plains so strikingly and crucially into his plots that setting is generally the first thing people mention about his work. But that is an over-simplification.  In fact, his great subject was the struggle of decency against small-mindedness, and his rare gift was to make sheer decency a moving subject. “Our Souls at Night,” his final novel, opens with an evening visit that Addie Moore pays to her longtime neighbor, Louis Waters. Both are widowed — Addie is 70, Louis about the same — and Addie makes the surprising proposal that they begin sleeping together, without sex, just to talk in the dark and provide the sleep-easing comfort of physical company. They don’t know each other all that well, but Addie has decided to ask at once for what she really wants. It’s an odd...

This month, Talk About Books is participating in the "Let's Read 2019" program supported in part by the Vermont Humanities Council. Multiple copies of The Benefits of Being of an Octopus  are available at the library. Ann Braden's debut novel is written for juvenile readers but is being enjoyed by adults for its honest portrayal of poverty. She explores the cultural divides around class and the gun debate through the eyes of one girl living on the edges of society, trying to find her way forward. Seventh grader Zoey has her hands full as she takes care of her much younger siblings after school every day while her mom works her shift at the pizza parlor. Not that her mom seems to appreciate it. At least there's Lenny, her mom's boyfriend - they all get to live in his nice, clean trailer. At school, Zoey tries to stay under the radar. Since she is in an entirely different world than most of the other kids, she thinks about how much easier everything woul...

From Russia to the jungles of South America to the Himalayas, an intrepid explorer’s travels make for exhilarating reading. I n a period roughly encompassing the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, a handful of very young European men crisscrossed the world on ships and changed the way we think. Exhibiting an almost mad degree of assurance, they beguiled committees, sea captains and patrons to take great risks and accommodate their often eccentric needs. Joseph Banks on the Endeavour, Georg Forster on the Resolution, Charles Darwin on the Beagle, Joseph Hooker on the Erebus and Thomas Huxley on the Rattlesnake seemed to have a hypersensitivity to the ideas around them and, influenced by their exotic surroundings, brought these to bear on the great scientific questions of the day. Darwin’s observations of earthquakes, finches and coral atolls were influenced by his reading of Charles Lyell and Thomas Malthus, while Humboldt took the wo...

There There is distinguished not only by Orange's crackling style, but by its unusual subject. This is a novel about urban Indians, about native peoples who know, as he says, "the sound of the freeway better than [they] do rivers ... the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than [they] do the smell of cedar or sage..." Orange's story takes place in Oakland, Calif., and his title comes from the famous pronouncement about rootlessness that Gertrude Stein made when, as an adult, she revisited Oakland, her childhood home. "There is no there there," Stein said. Orange knows the feeling and the terrain: He also grew up in Oakland and is enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. But in There There , Orange wanted to do something more than fictionalize his own experience. Instead, his novel is composed of the stories of a bunch of Native and mixed-race characters, all of them eventually converging in...

A naturalist who spent months at a time living on her own among wild creatures in remote jungles, Sy Montgomery had always felt more comfortable with animals than with people. So she gladly opened her heart to a sick piglet who had been crowded away from nourishing meals by his stronger siblings. Yet Sy had no inkling that this piglet, later named Christopher Hogwood, would not only survive but flourish--and she soon found herself engaged with her small-town community in ways she had never dreamed possible. The Good Good Pig celebrates Christopher Hogwood in all his glory, from his inauspicious infancy to hog heaven in rural New Hampshire, where his boundless zest for life and his large, loving heart made him absolute monarch over a (mostly) peaceable kingdom. His intelligence and fame increased along with his girth and he was eventually featured in USA Today and on several NPR environmental programs. One local election day, some voters even wrote in Christopher's name o...