Welcome, Summer! The Library's Summer 2021 newsletter is here. Grab a refreshing beverage and click to read.
Wednesday, May 26, 2021
Friday, May 14, 2021
Friday Reads: The Woman in the Window
Happy Friday before finals! Our Cataloging & Acquisitions Librarian, Adam Pellman, has a dark thriller to share on a sunny afternoon: A.J. Finn's The Woman in the Window.
With the exception of Gillian Flynn's superb Gone Girl, I haven't read any of the popular psychological thrillers that have been topping the bestseller lists over the past decade or so. I wanted to give The Woman in the Window a shot, in case I decide to watch the film adaptation that is coming to Netflix this week. The novel's protagonist is Anna Fox, a New York City psychologist who has become an agoraphobic shut-in after a traumatic accident. Separated from her husband and daughter, she spends much of her time drinking wine, playing online chess, watching old black-and-white movies, and spying on her neighbors. She forms a tenuous connection after a couple of visits from Jane Russell, who has just moved into the house across the park with her husband and teenage son. However, Anna's world begins to spin out of control one night when, while peering out her window, she sees a shocking act of violence in the Russell home. Or does she? With her unstable mental state, her drinking, and her new medications, did she imagine the whole thing?
"Hitchcockian" is a term often used to describe stories like this one, and it's a perfect description in this case. The novel's storyline, about a homebound person who witnesses a crime while spying on their neighbors, is reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's great film Rear Window, and Anna herself watches several of Hitchcock's films throughout the novel. Anna's love of old movies, especially the thriller and film noir genres, is one of my favorite elements of the novel, which even shares its title with a classic film noir from the 1940s. Anna's movie watching habits are described in wonderful detail: "This time I'm coiled on the sofa, watching Rififi--the extended heist sequence, half an hour without a syllable of dialogue or a note of music, just diegetic sound and the hum of blood in your ears." Be still my cinephile heart.
With the exception of Gillian Flynn's superb Gone Girl, I haven't read any of the popular psychological thrillers that have been topping the bestseller lists over the past decade or so. I wanted to give The Woman in the Window a shot, in case I decide to watch the film adaptation that is coming to Netflix this week. The novel's protagonist is Anna Fox, a New York City psychologist who has become an agoraphobic shut-in after a traumatic accident. Separated from her husband and daughter, she spends much of her time drinking wine, playing online chess, watching old black-and-white movies, and spying on her neighbors. She forms a tenuous connection after a couple of visits from Jane Russell, who has just moved into the house across the park with her husband and teenage son. However, Anna's world begins to spin out of control one night when, while peering out her window, she sees a shocking act of violence in the Russell home. Or does she? With her unstable mental state, her drinking, and her new medications, did she imagine the whole thing?
"Hitchcockian" is a term often used to describe stories like this one, and it's a perfect description in this case. The novel's storyline, about a homebound person who witnesses a crime while spying on their neighbors, is reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's great film Rear Window, and Anna herself watches several of Hitchcock's films throughout the novel. Anna's love of old movies, especially the thriller and film noir genres, is one of my favorite elements of the novel, which even shares its title with a classic film noir from the 1940s. Anna's movie watching habits are described in wonderful detail: "This time I'm coiled on the sofa, watching Rififi--the extended heist sequence, half an hour without a syllable of dialogue or a note of music, just diegetic sound and the hum of blood in your ears." Be still my cinephile heart.
Thursday, May 6, 2021
Summer Reading
Can you feel summer yet? Whether you're picking up a summer job, solving a murder, finding yourself, or falling in love, we have a book to fit the mood.
This book is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. It is an instant classic and one of the great love stories of our time. (Publisher's summary)
Summer Sisters by Judy Blume
When Victoria Leonard answers the phone in her Manhattan office, Caitlin's voice catches her by surprise. Vix hasn't talked to her oldest friend in months. Caitlin's news takes her breath away--and Vix is transported back in time, back to the moment she and Caitlin Somers first met, back to the casual betrayals and whispered confessions of their long, complicated friendship, back to the magical island where two friends became summer sisters. (Publisher's summary)
Dandelion Wine: A Novel by Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. Dandelion Wine stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semi-autobiographical recollection of a magical small-town summer in 1928. (Publisher's summary)
A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly
In 1906, sixteen-year-old Mattie, determined to attend college and be a writer against the wishes of her father and fiance, takes a job at a summer inn where she discovers the truth about the death of a guest. Based on a true story. Set... in the Adirondack Mountains, against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, this Printz Honor-winning coming-of-age novel effortlessly weaves romance, history, and a murder mystery into something moving, and real, and wholly original. (Publisher's summary)
A Good Neighborhood by Therese Fowler
In Oak Knoll, a verdant, tight-knit North Carolina neighborhood, professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is raising her bright and talented biracial son, Xavier, who's headed to college in the fall. All is well until the Whitmans--a family with new money and a secretly troubled teenage daughter--raze the house and trees next door to build themselves a showplace. With little in common except a property line, these two families quickly find themselves at odds: first, over an historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers. (Publisher's summary)
The Apprentice: A Novel by Tess Gerritsen
A series of shocking crimes that end in abduction and death terrorizes Boston during a boiling summer. Forced again to confront the killer who scarred her--literally and figuratively--Detective Jane Rizzoli is determined to finally end Hoyt's awful influence on a murderous disciple. (Publisher's summary)
The Finishing School by Gail Godwin
Justin Stokes would never forget the summer she turned fourteen, nor the woman who transformed her bleak adolescent life into a wondrous place of brilliant color. In the little pondside hut she called her "finishing school", eccentric, free-spirited Ursula DeVane opened up a world of love and loyalty, encouraging her to change, to learn, to grow. But the lessons of the finishing school have their dark side as well, and Justin learns how friendship can be shattered by shocking, unforgivable betrayal. (Publisher's summary)
The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing
As the summer begins, Kate Brown -- attractive, intelligent, forty five, happily enough married, with a house in the London suburbs and three grown children -- has no reason to expect anything will change. But when the summer ends, the woman she was -- living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring -- no longer exists. (Publisher's summary)
For Love by Sue Miller
For Love tells the story of Lottie Gardner, her brother Cameron, and their childhood friend Elizabeth, who all come together one summer in their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, after years of separation. The packing up of her mother's house and the rekindling of the romance between Cameron and Elizabeth lead Lottie to look back at her past, as well as to consider the future of her own new marriage. The intrusion of a senseless tragedy upon the lives of all three characters forces Lottie to examine the consequences of the things she herself has done, and will do, for love. (Publisher's summary)
Escapade by Walter Satterthwait
In the summer of 1921, Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attend a weekend party and seance at an English country house. Their host, the Earl of Axminster, is found murdered in a locked room. Will an American private eye beat two 20th century heroes to the punch and find the killer--before he finds them? (Publisher's summary)
The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
Does this one need an introduction?
Set amid the austere beauty of coastal North Carolina in 1946, The Notebook begins with the story of Noah Calhoun, a rural Southerner returned home from World War II. Noah, thirty-one, is restoring a plantation home to its former glory, and he is haunted by images of the beautiful girl he met fourteen years earlier, a girl he loved like no other. Unable to find her, yet unwilling to forget the summer they spent together, Noah is content to live with only memories, until she unexpectedly returns to his town to see him once more. (Publisher's summary)
Night of the Moonbow by Tom Tryon
An awkward, mysterious orphan becomes the victim of a cabal led by a charismatic, selfishly competitive young man at a summer Bible camp. (Publisher's summary)
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