Sept 2026 - The Boy from the Sea

 

Ambrose had all the language required to define precisely the meaning of a cloud, the character of a sea, an attitude of rain, but to describe his own emotional weather he was limited to ‘Been better,’ ‘Been worse,’ and ‘You know yourself.’

The Boy from the Sea

by Garrett Carr  (2025)

From the publisher: 1973. In a close-knit community on Ireland’s west coast, a baby is found abandoned on the beach. Named Brendan by Ambrose Bonnar, the fisherman who adopts him, Brendan will become a source of fascination and hope for a town caught in the storm of a rapidly changing world.

The Boy From the Sea is an exploration of the ties that make us and bind us, as a family and community move irresistibly towards the future.

Resources: 

• Author interview on YouTube
• A bookseller's Q&A with the author

Extras:

• More background than you will likely ever need on Rockall (but really interesting)

Keep reading:

•  similar: Claire Keegan, Niall Williams

August 2026 - The Secret Garden

It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together.

The Secret Garden

by Frances Hodgson Burnett  (1911)

From the publisher: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved classic tells the story of  Mary Lennox, a spoiled orphan who leaves India to live with her cold uncle in his dreary mansion in England. When Mary hears of a secret garden kept locked for ten years, she is determined to find it and tend it back to life. With the help of her uncle’s sickly son and a boy who knows all about nature, Mary secretly transforms the garden – and all of their lives.
 

Notes: 

• Audiobook: The audio version on Libby is abridged/full cast. It is unabridged online in audiobook at Librivox (free to all). Also available on hoopla (unabridged is 8 hours or so).
• Full text as e-book at Project Gutenberg
• HTL has the book, the 1993 film on DVD, a recent graphic novel adaptation, and audiobook CDs, as well as an abridged book for children. Right now, we also have lots of extra copies of the book and a Large Print copy to borrow.

Resources: 

• A biographical sketch of Burnett at Literary Ladies Guide. 
• Discussion questions from Victoria Magazine
• Reader's Guide at Penguin RandomHouse 

Keep reading:

• A Little Princess, Burnett's other children's classic, does hold up (in my opinion) 
• "My Robin" is an essay Burnett wrote about a robin she "knew" in real life in the gardens at Maytham Hall (full text online). 

Go beyond:

• If you find yourself in NYC, check out the Burnett Fountain in Central Park.
• Visit (or visit virtually) the garden in England that inspired the secret garden in the book: Great Maytham Hall in Kent. More history of that site here.

July - Remember Us and Another Brooklyn

Remember Us (2024) and Another Brooklyn (2015) 

two (short novels) by Jacqueline Woodson

July 15, 2026 at 1pm 

 

Resources:

• Author's homepage
• About Another Brooklyn ; about Remember Us
• Images of 1970s Brooklyn 
• Background on the Blackout and fires of 1977 
• A recipe for Shrimp Etouffee, because that sounded yummy
• WNBA history (started in 1996) 
• A brief history of The Vulcan Society

If you like these books, try these next:

• more by Woodson (I recommend her picture book The World Belonged to Us because it is also set in late 1970s Brooklyn)
• Jason Reynolds (one of my favorite authors, try Ghost or The Boy in the Black Suit if you liked Remember Us) and Kwame Alexander [Woodson dedicated Remember Us to these two authors] (both are mostly YA/J)
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith (I haven't read this in ages, but it seems fitting) (adult)
• Kin, by Tayari Jones (adult)
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred Taylor, was an influential book for Woodson. (J)
• Gather, by Kenneth Cadow (YA)

 

June - Founding Mothers

Founding Mothers (2005)

by Cokie Roberts

Wednesday, June 17, at 1pm 

Legendary journalist Cokie Roberts' New York Times bestseller, Founding Mothers, is an intimate and illuminating look at the fervently patriotic and passionate women whose tireless pursuits on behalf of their families—and their country—proved just as crucial to the forging of a new nation as the rebellion that established it.

Drawing upon personal correspondence, private journals, and even favored recipes, Roberts reveals the often surprising stories of  fascinating women in the American Revolution, bringing to life the everyday trials and extraordinary triumphs of individuals like Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Deborah Read Franklin, Eliza Pinckney, Catherine Littlefield Green, Esther DeBerdt Reed, and Martha Washington—proving that without our exemplary women, the new country might have never survived.

 Resources:

• The Westwood (Mass) Public Library has created a page with author bio, discussion questions and read-a-likes.
• A University of California interview with Cokie Roberts shortly after the book was published. 
• A virtual exhibit on "When Women Lost the Vote" from the Museum of the American Revolution
• Field Trip, anyone? "Founding Mothers: Women in the American Revolution" - a free lecture at the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk July 18, 2026
• I recommend a field trip to Boston - to Commonwealth Ave Mall (the park up the middle of the road) for The Boston Women's Memorial, which has statues of two Revolutionary era women from the book. 
• You can find out more about all of the women in Roberts' book online. But as a former professional historian, I have a soft spot for historians like Mercy Otis Warren, so I'll add this link for more on her from the Mount Vernon website., which has lots of profiles relevant to this book.

Keep reading:

• HTL's US@250 booklist of titles related to the American Revolution.
• I can personally recommend NH author Alex Myers' fictional story of Patriot soldier Deborah Sampson - Revolutionary (2014). We don't have it, but I can request it through interlibrary loan.
• Some of Cokie Roberts' other books : Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868; Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation; and We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters
• Learn about more founding mothers, noted on panels in our National Parks.

2026 April - Prodigal Summer

 

"She loved the air after a hard rain, and the way a forest of dripping leaves fills itself with a sibilant percussion that empties your head of words."

Prodigal Summer

Barbara Kingsolver (2000)

Wednesday, April 15, 1pm

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by  a young hunter. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa, a bookish city girl turned farmer’s wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about the complexities of a world neither of them expected.

Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth.

**See content warnings at bottom of this post. 

 Resources (so many great links and pages on these two sites):

• Author's website

  In particular, I suggest you read BK's autobiography page  and she links to this Prodigal-specific interview with Science Friday

• A resource page from a NY library

   

  We have a program coming to the library that is related to this book's themes/plot. 

  Becoming Wolf: The Eastern Coyote in New England, with wild canid ecologist, (and local) Chris Schadler. Saturday, April 11, 11am

  
  
  Read more:
• Read your way through Appalachia
• We have a lot of BK's books in our collection, including her fiction, essays, nonfiction, and poetry.

 

 

**Content warnings: Adult/minor relationship, Animal cruelty and death, Bullying, Cancer, Cursing, Death of Spouse, Grief, Misogyny, Religious bigotry, Sexual Content, Transphobia

2026 March - Hell of a Book

 

At some point, a person has to be seen.

Hell of a Book

Jason Mott (2021)

Wednesday, March 18, 1pm

In Hell of a Book, an African-American author sets out on a cross-country book tour to promote his bestselling novel. That story is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour. 

As the characters’ stories build and build, they converge, and they astonish. This heartbreaking and magical book is about family, love of parents and children, art, and money. It is also, throughout, a tragic story of a police shooting that plays over and over on the news, and a reckoning of what it can mean to be Black in America.

An astounding work of fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole.
 

**See content warnings at bottom of this post. 

 Resources:

• Author's homepage
• Author's older page for his poetry 
• Discussion questions (from the publisher)
• Interview with the author (after is more recent novel) from the Decatur Book Festival, I recommend starting at 30 minutes into the interview, and then do the first 30 if you have more time.
• An NPR interview with Mott

**Content warnings: death, violence, racism, mental illness and depression, police brutality, alcoholism,  racism, gun violence, child death, parent death, bullying

Feb 2026 Homeseeking

 

Homeseeking

Karissa Chen (2025)

Wednesday, February 18, 1pm

Haiwen is buying bananas at a supermarket in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back. Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

**Click here to see content warnings. 

 Resources:

• Author's homepage (including a PDF download reader's guide with discussion questions)
• Another reader's guide/discussion questions 

To augment your reading:

• Chen created a playlist for Haiwen and Suchi on YouTube.  
• Photographs from 1947-49 Shanghai by Life Magazine photographer, Jack Birns