Hi everyone, just a reminder that the July Book Club for Adults gathering will be held at the library this Friday, July 10, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. 

You may attend in person or via Zoom & here is the Zoom link:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84991054902?pwd=HsOXig3xmqZb1TywdGvvdw3Z7ctJoF.1

We’ll be discussing the novel The Antidote by Karen Russell; copies of which are available at the Circulation Desk if anyone needs a copy.  

Here is the Starred Booklist review of the title: 

The Antidote by Karen Russell: The prairie witch calls herself The Antidote because people feel so much better after she unburdens them of painful memories, storing them in her “vault.” But when she finds herself in jail in the midst of a terrifying dust storm in Uz, Nebraska, she realizes that the deposits she’s been paid to protect have vanished. High-school basketball star Asphodel Oletsky, living, since her mother was murdered, with her uncle Harp, a dryland farmer, is desperate to keep her winning team on the court after they lose their sponsor. Harp is haunted by how his Polish parents were forced off their land by the Germans, only to find themselves unwittingly doing the same to Native Americans. New Deal photographer Cleo Allfrey, at risk on the plains as a Black woman, arrives in Uz during the worst of the Dust Bowl and finds people pushed to the brink by drought, deadly and otherworldly dust storms, vanished crops and topsoil, unsolved murders, and a corrupt and brutal sheriff. Among many strange occurrences, Cleo’s photographs inexplicably depict the horrific past and a possible future. Highly honored Russell follows two stellar story collections with her second novel, an ardent work of encompassing and compassionate historical fiction supercharged with her signature imaginative, astutely calibrated supernatural twists. A dramatic and uncanny tale of the drastic consequences of our destruction of nature and Indigenous communities. 

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Also of note, the book received great reviews from Kirkus & Publishers Weekly, and was one of NPR’s best books of 2025 https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#year=2025&book=242 

Time Magazine also recommended the book: https://time.com/7291593/best-books-of-2025-so-far/ 

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Looking forward to August, we’ll be meeting on Friday, August 14 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. and we’ll be discussing the novel The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

Here is the Publishers Weekly Review of the novel: 

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans: The charming debut from Evans takes the form of letters and emails exchanged by a divorced and retired woman with her friends, family, foes, and literary idols. It begins in 2012 as Sybil Van Antwerp, 73, politely declines an invitation to visit her brother, Felix, in France, then fancifully invites the author Ann Patchett to use her Maryland home as a writer’s retreat. Sybil spent her career clerking for a judge, and after reading of his death in the newspaper, she begins receiving strange and threatening letters from an aggrieved former defendant, who calls her a “cold metal bitch.” Evans juxtaposes these screeds with Sybil’s intimate fan mail to Joan Didion, who writes her back in 2013, expressing empathy as a fellow member of “the club of parents who have buried children” (Sybil lost a son at eight). Sybil, who was adopted, grows curious about her ancestry after her older son gives her a DNA test for Christmas, and she brushes off concerns about her declining eyesight from her daughter, Fiona, who lives in Australia. As the years go on, Sybil’s relationships brim with tension waiting to be released, and the detailed connections between each character are brilliantly mapped through the correspondence. It adds up to an appealing family drama.  

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And just as FYI, the Summer Reading seasons has started & you can sign up for the Summer Reading program at the Reference Desk. You can win prizes for reading and improve library stats too! 

There are also special events for all ages during the Summer Reading Program season and here is the Summer Reading Programming brochure with all the events, dates & times:

And here is the updated Book Club Schedule for the balance of 2026:

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What’s the difference between: “Magical Realism” and “Urban Fantasy?” This topic came up during our June gathering, and I thought I’d check so I’d have a more concrete answer to the question!

So here is more information on the subject:

Magical Realism

In magical realism, the extraordinary is woven seamlessly into everyday life. The magical elements are rarely explained because the story is not about the magic—it is about the human experience.

Examples

• One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez
• Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel García Márquez (contains magical realist elements)
• The House of the Spirits — Isabel Allende
• Like Water for Chocolate — Laura Esquivel
• Beloved — Toni Morrison
• The Famished Road — Ben Okri
• Exit West — Mohsin Hamid
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake — Aimee Bender

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Urban Fantasy

Urban fantasy takes place in a recognizable modern world where magic, supernatural beings, or mythical creatures exist alongside ordinary life—often hidden from most people.

Examples

• Storm Front — Jim Butcher
• Moon Called — Patricia Briggs
• Magic Bites — Ilona Andrews
• Rivers of London — Ben Aaronovitch
• Neverwhere — Neil Gaiman
• American Gods — Neil Gaiman
• Dead Until Dark — Charlaine Harris
• Rosemary and Rue — Seanan McGuire

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Books Read by Book Club Members in June (and reported at the June gathering): 

God Impulse: The Power of Mercy In An Unmerciful World by Jack Alexander: For Jesus, truth and mercy went hand in hand. Where he preached he also healed. He didn’t outsource one or the other to biblical scholars or nonprofit ministries. He presented the truth of the gospel through his words and his actions, and he did it all in a hands-on, relational way. And the reaction was the same wherever he went–people were amazed. 

Today we seem to have lost this powerful pattern of self-giving love, focusing on truth at the expense of mercy or on mercy at the expense of truth, and often failing to build genuine, lasting relationships with the people around us. 

In The God Impulse, Jack Alexander helps us recover Jesus’s model, showing through biblical and modern real-life stories that God’s first impulse toward us is mercy. He then sets forth a pattern for us to follow–to see, go, do, and endure–that not only spreads truth and love to those around us who are suffering but also causes them to gasp in amazement and consider the claims of the gospel for themselves. 

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God: A Biography: Pulitzer Prize Winner by Jack Miles: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE 

What sort of “person” is God? What is his “life story”? Is it possible to approach him not as an object of religious reverence, but as the protagonist of the world’s greatest book—as a character who possesses all the depths, contradictions, and ambiguities of a Hamlet? This is the task that Jack Miles—a former Jesuit trained in religious studies and Near Eastern languages—accomplishes with such brilliance and originality in God: A Biography. 

Using the Hebrew Bible as his text, Miles shows us a God who evolves through his relationship with man, the image who in time becomes his rival. Here is the Creator who nearly destroys his chief creation; the bloodthirsty warrior and the protector of the downtrodden; the lawless law-giver; the scourge and the penitent. Profoundly learned, stylishly written, the resulting work illuminates God and man alike and returns us to the Bible with a sense of discovery and wonder. 

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Isola by Allegra Goodman: Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. That journey takes a unexpected turn when Marguerite, accused of betrayal, is brutally punished and abandoned on a small island. 

Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed. 

Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival. 

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On Witness and Respair: Essays by Jesmyn Ward: From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub).  

Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy’s footsteps when she promises always to “Tell it straight. Tell it all.” 

True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood—the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright’s novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies—including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward’s powers as “one of America’s finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience. 

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The Retirement Plan: A Novel by Sue Hincenbergs:  

THEY’D KILL TO BE WIDOWS. 

Three best friends turn to murder to collect on their husbands’ life insurance policies… But the husbands have a plan of their own in this darkly funny debut suspense novel that will delight readers from the first laugh to the final twist. 

After thirty years of friendship, Pam dreams of her perfect retirement with Nancy, Shalisa, Marlene, and their husbands—until their husbands pool their funds for an investment that goes terribly wrong. Suddenly, in this witty domestic thriller, their golden years are looking as dreary as their marriages. 

But when the women discover their husbands have seven-figure life insurance policies, a new dream forms. And this time, they need a hitman. 

Meanwhile, their husbands are working on their own secret retirement scheme and when things begin to go sideways, they fear it’s backfired. The husbands scramble to stay alive…but soon realize they may not be quick enough to outmaneuver their wives. 

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Theo of Golden by Allen Levi: One spring morning, a stranger named Theo arrives in the small Southern city of Golden. He doesn’t explain much about where he came from or why he’s there—but when he visits the local coffeehouse, where pencil portraits of the people of Golden hang on the walls, he begins purchasing them, one at a time, and giving each portrait to the person depicted. In exchange, he asks only for the person’s story. And so portrait by portrait, person by person, secrets are revealed, regrets are shared, and ordinary lives are profoundly altered. 

A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is an unforgettable novel about the power of generosity, the importance of connection, and the quiet miracles that happen when we choose kindness and wonder. 

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Two Women Living Together by Kim Hana & Hwang Sunwoo: The big-hearted, bestselling South Korean memoir co-written by two best friends flouting gender norms and societal expectations with their decision to grow old together under one roof. 

When most of their peers were moving in with romantic partners and having children, Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo chose independence—savoring solitude, quiet mornings, and the unmitigated freedom of living alone. But in their forties, something shifted, and they were met with a new, unexpected loneliness. Refusing to settle for the outdated choice between marriage or isolation, Hana and Sunwoo made a radical decision: to buy a home and live together—not as lovers, not as roommates, but as chosen family. 

Now a bustling household of two women and four cats, Hana and Sunwoo still value solitude, but can do so while sharing a life and its meaning with someone else. Together they navigate the challenges and comforts of cohabiting in midlife, the growing pains of interdependence and the unexpected rewards of compromise when you’ve grown set in your ways. From sick days to career wins to aging parents and beach-side retirement plans, they are redefining domestic bliss on their own terms, where love, partnership, and home are defined not by tradition, but by choice. 

With warmth, wit, and sharp social insight, Hana and Sunwoo share their blueprint for building a life outside the scripts of marriage and society’s expectations for women. Two Women Living Together is a quiet revolution—a celebration of female friendship, community, and the many forms that love and family can take. 

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The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe by Richard Rohr and Brian D. Mclaren: “Anyone who strives to put their faith into action will find encouragement and inspiration in the pages of this book.”—Melinda Gates 

In his decades as a globally recognized teacher, Richard Rohr has helped millions realize what is at stake in matters of faith and spirituality. Yet Rohr has never written on the most perennially talked about topic in Christianity: Jesus. Most know who Jesus was, but who was Christ? Is the word simply Jesus’s last name? Too often, Rohr writes, our understandings have been limited by culture, religious debate, and the human tendency to put ourselves at the center. 

Drawing on scripture, history, and spiritual practice, Rohr articulates a transformative view of Jesus Christ as a portrait of God’s constant, unfolding work in the world. “God loves things by becoming them,” he writes, and Jesus’s life was meant to declare that humanity has never been separate from God—except by its own negative choice. When we recover this fundamental truth, faith becomes less about proving Jesus was God, and more about learning to recognize the Creator’s presence all around us, and in everyone we meet. 

Thought-provoking, practical, and full of deep hope and vision, The Universal Christ is a landmark book from one of our most beloved spiritual writers, and an invitation to contemplate how God liberates and loves all that is. 

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Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux: An original and revealing portrait of the misunderstood French Post-Impressionist artist. 

Paul Gauguin’s legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this gorgeously illustrated, myth-busting work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved. 

Self-taught, Gauguin became a towering artist in his brief life, not just in painting but in ceramics and graphics. He fled the bustle of Paris for the beauty of Tahiti, where he lived simply and worked consistently to expose the tragic results of French Colonialism. Gauguin fought for the rights of Indigenous people, exposing French injustices and corruption in the local newspaper and acting as advocate for the Tahitian people in the French colonial courts. His unconventional career and bold, breathtaking art influenced not only Vincent van Gogh, but Matisse and Picasso. 

Wild Thing upends much of what we thought we knew about Gauguin through new primary research, including the resurfaced manuscript of Gauguin’s most important writing, the untranslated memoir of Gauguin’s son, and a sample of Gauguin’s teeth that disproves the pernicious myth of his syphilis. In the first full biography of Paul Gauguin in thirty years, Sue Prideaux illuminates the extraordinary oeuvre of a visionary artist vital to the French avant-garde. The result is “a brilliantly readable and compassionate study of Gauguin―not just as a painter, sculptor, carver and potter, but as a human soul perpetually searching for what is always just out of reach” (Artemis Cooper, Spectator).   

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Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke: Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it. 

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible. 

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood. 

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Hope to see everyone on Friday!

Linda Reimer, Southeast Steuben County Library