Featured Book
White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy
by William J Barber II
Review by Frequent Ferret Alex H:
White Poverty is a powerful read that lays out the true scale of poverty and the myths that are used to keep the richest nation from addressing it. As Rev Barber states often, poverty isn't a black or brown issue, but a moral issue facing over 140 million Americans, who are overwhelmingly white.
- Average worker in America makes $54 a week LESS than they did 50 years ago
- 85 percent of total wealth in the US is held by 20 percent of the people
- 40 percent of Americans have no net worth at all
- 63 percent of of US workers live paycheck to paycheck
The book offers a unifying message for all Americans. It helps the reader see the complete face of poverty in the US and gives a clear call to action.
June's Featured Book
Night Watch
by Jayne Anne Phillips
Night Watch was released last fall, but was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It’s a beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.
April's Featured Book
James
A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view - From the Pulitzer Prize Finalist whose novel Erasure is the basis for Cord Jefferson's critically acclaimed film American Fiction
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin...), Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
March's Featured Book
Wandering Stars
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to be the children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts. - from Penguin
January's Featured Book
The Land Breakers
The late John Ehle, a beloved resident of Winston-Salem and a founder of the School of the Arts, published The Land Breakers in 1964. Harper Lee was a fan: "John Ehle's meld of historical fact with ineluctable plot-weaving makes The Land Breakers an exciting example of his masterful storytelling. He is our foremost writer of historical fiction."
Book Ferret also features Ehle’s other mountain novels, including The Journey of August King and The Winter People.
November's Featured Book
America Fantastica
America Fantastica: A Novel
By Tim O'Brien
(Mariner Books, 9780063318502, $32, Oct. 24, Fiction)
In the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, America Fantastica delivers a biting, witty, and entertaining story about the causes and costs of outlandish fantasy, while also marking the triumphant return of an essential voice in American letters. And at the heart of the novel, amid a teeming cast of characters, readers will delight in the tug-of-war between two memorable and iconic human beings--the exuberant savior-of-souls Angie Bing and the penitent but compulsive liar Boyd Halverson. Just as Tim O'Brien's modern classic, The Things They Carried, so brilliantly reflected the unromantic truth of war, America Fantastica puts a mirror to a nation and a time that has become dangerously unmoored from truth and greedy for delusion.
October's Featured BookThe MANIAC
The MANIAC
By Benjamín Labatut
(Penguin Press, 9780593654477, $28, Oct. 3, Fiction)
From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI.
September's Featured BookThe Fraud
by Zadie Smith
From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.
Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”
August's Featured BookThe Heat Will Kill You First
Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
by Jeff Goodell
The Heat Will Kill You First is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing. It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later and the impact that will have on everything from our food supply to disease outbreaks. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90 F to 110 F. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event-- one that culls out the most vulnerable people. But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic.
July's Featured Book100 Places to See After You Die
A Travel Guide to the Afterlife
by Ken Jennings
From New York Times bestselling author, legendary Jeopardy! champion, and host Ken Jennings comes a hilarious travel guide to the afterlife, exploring destinations to die for from literature, mythology, and pop culture ranging from Dante’s Inferno to Hadestown to NBC’s The Good Place.
June's Featured BookLove Makes a Family
This fun, inclusive board book celebrates the one thing that makes every family a family . . . and that’s LOVE.
Love is baking a special cake. Love is lending a helping hand. Love is reading one more book. In this exuberant board book, many different families are shown in happy activity, from an early-morning wake-up to a kiss before bed. Whether a child has two moms, two dads, one parent, or one of each, this simple preschool read-aloud demonstrates that what’s most important in each family’s life is the love the family members share. - from the Penguin Random House review
May's Featured BookTomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
a novel by Gabrielle Zevin
Check out NPR’s review: NPR Review of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Play a video game based on a game in the book: Emily Blaster game
Other Featured Books
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
by Lorrie Moore
From Penguin Random House:
Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs—a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart
From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (Caryn James; The New York Times)—a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things—seen and unseen.
Fabulous Fruit
by Melissa Kale, illustrated by Dana Troy
from the IndieBound review:
Dedicated to our Earth, this cheerfully illustrated 28-page book introduces children to the magical processes of planting seeds and growing fruit, through its multi-sensory exploration of the diverse and vibrant qualities of fruit. It also teaches lessons in human diversity, community, and acceptance with its statement: "Fruits are like us, each unique and quirky with our own color, size and shape. Every fruit has a place at the table and we love them all "
In addition Fabulous Fruit promotes care of the planet. "If fruit could talk, we believe they would tell us that with each generation, we can create communities that work to take care of our Earth," say the author and illustrator in a message to readers.
Liberation Day
by George Saunders
Do you love short stories? Dystopian fiction? Edgy humor? If so, George Saunders’ new collection may be a treat for you. Finneas found himself laughing on one page and reflecting on existential questions on the next.
An interview with Saunders: Sanders interview on NPR
