Extinction by Douglas Preston is one of last summers big thrillers. It’s a great mix of murder mystery/thriller/science fiction set at a resort featuring “de-extincted” woolly mammoth and other prehistoric mega fauna. It shares the fascinating ethical conundrums found in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and feels ready-made for its own movie adaptation.
This title was on Texas’ 2024 Lariat Adult Reading List which aims to highlight books that are “simply a pleasure to read.” The list has been a joy so far and features many of last year’s well-known titles.
-Laurel, Reference
The Ghost Trap is part of the OystHers summer book club that includes all books by Maine women authors. This fiction book perfectly captures the lobstering community of Rockland and Owls Head, Maine and tells a sad but beautiful story of one family and their very real struggle of that life.
-Samantha, Development Director
While the book is written for a middle school aged person, I found the audio version to be very entertaining. Particularly because a cat is one of the featured characters.
The narrators really made the book come alive for me. This is why I love audio books; because good narration adds so much to it. I don’t think I would have chosen to read this book because of its target audience and that would have been a shame. This is a good lesson for me to learn — just because a book is written for a different audience than myself doesn’t mean I shouldn’t at lest give it a go.
The story of The Lost Library is about a small town somewhere in the United States where the old library burned down many years ago. There’s a mystery around it how the fire started. The main character is a young boy who is transitioning from his small elementary school to the large middle school in another town. Other characters involved include the boy’s favorite author, a cat, three librarians who might have survived the fire, and a group of friendly ice. One of the voice actors is the voice of the cat.
A fun part of the story is that everybody in the town calls the cat by a different name. No one seems to know his real name. That makes me wonder what my cat’s real name is.
There are some layers to this mystery. There is a house where the three former librarians live one of whom is a young woman who only ventures out to shop when groceries are needed.
The mystery of the fire is eventually solved by the young boy with help from books written by his favorite author as well as some helpful mice, and of course, the cat.
I won’t spoil any of the surprises for you in case you want to read, or listen to, this delightful book for yourself. I will, however, say that several other mysteries besides the old libraries’ fire are also resolved.
-Julie, PFL Friends Treasurer
The Bone Shard Daughter is a YA fantasy novel with an east, south-east Asian style culture set in a string of floating islands drifting around in “The Endless Sea”. The emperor of these floating islands keeps the art of bone shard magic (a magic used to animate constructs made from dead flesh using a small shard of bone) a closely guarded secret. Despite his diminishing health, he refuses to pass on the art, even to his own daughter, Lin. Sick of her father’s secrets and living in an empty palace full of locked doors, Lin begins to teach herself bone shard magic with the help of stolen books and stolen friends.
-Stephanie, Circulation
A middle grade book that I’ve been meaning to read for years, and I truly couldn’t put down. It’s a story about a newly trained bard who is kidnapped with his sister and has to learn to survive amidst bloodthirsty Vikings, frost giants, and more. It’s a really great suggestion for someone looking for a Rick Riordan read alike.
-Mary, Head of Children’s Services
Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America by Sarah Gold McBride
Likely enough you’ve heard of phrenology, the Victorian pseudoscience of drawing conclusions about people and their capacities by palpating and measuring their skulls. Less known is that inquiring minds of the period were prone to reading into even more superficial cephalic signs as well. University of California, Berkeley historian Sarah Gold McBride’s new book, Whiskerology, teases out the shifting connotations assigned to hair during a century when the urge to classify and categorize developed into an American cultural obsession, as a young nation in the midst of serious growing pains labored to slot people into their proper places within the social hierarchy. McBride explains that, prior to the nineteenth century, hair was viewed as dead matter, a form of “bodily discharge,” even excrement. Hair presented a hygiene concern, not a political one. But as the U.S. population burgeoned, growing increasingly diverse, hair came to be seen as having far more to say, each strand instilled with a unique power to reveal hidden truths about the individual from whose scalp it sprouted. Not only hairstyle but hair color, texture, volume, quantity, and composition were taken to signal a person’s race, sex, religion, temperament, and more, if only one knew how to interpret the evidence. Hair emerged as an important public marker of social identity as a result—but also a highly suspect one, since easily transformed through trimming, snipping, dyeing, and straightening. Add wigs to the mix and who can be trusted? The possibility that people might be disguising their true identities by means of trichological chicanery gave rise to a new cultural anxiety about epidemic “hair fraud.” Whiskerology is a rich and surprising history of the many meanings of hair, sure to give you more food for thought than the salon’s ratty “vintage” copy of People Magazine the next time you settle into the stylist’s chair.
For the coiffure curious, along with fans of American culture’s weirder quirks, the history of the body, and dubious taxonomies.
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
When I was a child my favorite website was Court TV’s Crime Library, a now defunct clearinghouse for details on all manner of dreadful and tragic activity, with subsections custom-made for the tastes of a young ghoul: serial killers, cannibals, most bizarre. Poring over story after horrible story on the computer at my mother’s work, I found myself well-versed in the atrocities of (primarily) men’s violence against (primarily) women at an early age. But like any glutton I made myself sick with the stuff in time, and these days reading true crime mostly makes me feel terrible; and the bottomless cultural appetite for it – back in vogue courtesy of podcast fever – gives me the creeps. Why are so many of us so enthralled by tales of men terrorizing, brutalizing, and slaying people (again, primarily women)? I have my own ideas as to the answer, none of which give me the warm, fuzzy feelings I’d like to have when contemplating my species. But Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Fraser’s Murderland would seem to be true crime of a different order, with a deeper purpose. The narrative she crafts is less a vehicle for grisly crime scene carnage – though the book doesn’t shy away from the gruesomeness of the crimes it reviews, so readers averse to violence be warned – than it is a survey of the tainted landscapes that gave rise to this country’s most notorious serial killers, grown from American soil like some noxious crop. Fraser directs our attention to the alarming proliferation of serial rapists and murderers produced by the Pacific Northwest in the postwar period, a time and place also notably abundant in massive, unregulated, poison-spewing industrial smelters. Before the EPA began placing limits on emissions from these facilities in the late 1970s and ‘80s, their smokestacks retched up a constant haze of heavy metals over cities like Tacoma, and the people who called them home. People like Ted Bundy, for example, or like Gary Ridgway, the so-called “Green River Killer.” In Murderland, Fraser builds on research suggesting a correlation between lead, a principal constituent of the smelters’ unwholesome exhalations, and violent crime to chalk out her case against extractivism and corporate disregard for life as at least partially culpable for the midcentury serial murder boom. Have men of industry wrought a wasteland overrun by killers? Again, I have my own ideas about the answer, and no, I’m not feeling warm or fuzzy at all.
For true crime enthusiasts (reformed or otherwise) and folks seeking exciting new reasons to fear industrial pollution.
…with this lib guide to fermentation! Still looking for more? We are providing starter kits for kombucha and sourdough all summer long. Visit or email the Reference Desk to reserve yours today.
See the ListIn our minds, a good summer read applies to anything you read in the summer! In the list below, we have mysteries, poems, road trips, romances, fantasies, and more murders than you might have been expecting! Read on for a glimpse into the fascinating assortment of things PFL staff are currently reading. The majority of these titles can be placed on hold, either in our collection or through Minerva.
Before We Were Innocent by Ella Berman
Three high-school best friends travel to Greece to live in their friends’ ancestral home. It ends in tragedy, and the friends go separate ways until one evening ten years later.
Green Shadows, White Whale by Ray Bradbury
The Creature Commandos by J.M. DeMatteis
The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer
MurderLand: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
A portrait of the noxious American wasteland men of industry have wrought over the last two centuries, with a vicious madness latent in the soil, as ubiquitous as dust.
Heartwood by Amity Gage
A hiker goes missing on the Appalachian Trail near sugarloaf and a variety of people try to find her. A mystery plot not told like a mystery novel- plus it takes place in Maine)
The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett
Darky funny- often very dark and very funny road trip novel about families: found, born into, created, and very complicated.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Fairy Tale by Stephen King
This is now one of my top 5 Stephen King books.
Plays: 1 by Martin McDonagh
God of the Woods by Liz Moore
WOW. It was the perfect paced mystery that takes place in a summer camp in 1973. Perfect summer vibes.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
The latest standout.
The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley
Extinction by Douglas Preston
The In-Betweens – The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna by Mira Ptacin
Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia
A clever puzzle/treasure hunt story that takes place in Boston- perfect for the Level Up theme!
The Ghost Trap by K. Stephens
The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Instructions for Travelling West by Joy Sullivan
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
A sideways sort of murder mystery with a decidedly animal liberationist flair.
Georg Trakl’s Collected Poems
Trakl is one of my longtime favorite poets; he’s like Arthur Rimbaud, but Austrian. Moody, mystic, depressive.
Late Bloomers by Deepa Varadarajan
My Murder by Katie Williams
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Fifteen years ago, PJ Halliday’s daughter drowned on her prom night. Since then, he has found himself divorced from his wife, barely speaking to his younger daughter, living alone in his former family home, now filling up with things he can’t bear to throw away. He spends his mornings walking to his ex-wife’s house for breakfast with her and her new boyfriend and his nights (and days, and afternoons) at the local bar. He is also a million dollar lottery winner, and is about to inherit his estranged brother’s grandchildren after their parents murder-suicide, as well as a former nursing home cat who can see who is about to die next. In the middle of all of this, PJ reads an obituary for his high school lost love’s husband, and decides to drive to Arizona to win her heart for good. This is a dark comedy (at times both very dark and very funny) road trip novel with so much heart it nearly leaks off the page. Author Annie Hartnett says that she wrote this book to encapsulate every fear and worry she had ever felt, while challenging herself to make it as funny as possible. She has certainly succeeded, and I would say The Road to Tender Hearts is her best title yet. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wish, unlike the Halliday’s family road trip, that it could go on forever.
-Hannah, Program and Outreach Manager
Just before the end of school, Patten Free Library staff was treated to a visit from the first graders of Georgetown Central School. They recommended some really terrific picture books about kindness and we are pleased to share them here as well.
The Lonely Mailman by Susanna Isern, Reviewed by Sonny
The Smartest Giant in Town by Axel Scheffler and Julia Donaldson, Reviewed by Ryleigh
Cake and I Scream by Donna David, Reviewed by Lilly
The Stone Giant by Anna Höglund, Reviewed by Harrison
The Recess Queen by Alexis O’Neill, Reviewed by Amelia
Maddi’s Fridge by Lois Brandt, Reviewed by Cyrus
The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld, Reviewed by Wyeth
