It’s time again, Beloved Patrons, for another round of staff favorites for this year! This week’s selection comes from one of our children’s room staff, and my favorite Saturday afternoon circulation desk friend:
Snow in August: Pete Hamill’s tale is a moving story of friendship, crossing cultures, and loving baseball, between a Jewish rabbi and a Catholic altar boy in 1940s Brooklyn. The rabbi, a Czech who fled the Nazis on the eve of World War II, teaches the boy Judaism while the boy, who is Irish, teaches the rabbi English and baseball. When anti-Semitic hoods attack the rabbi, the boy goes to his defense. The New York Times Book Review called this one “Magic….This page-turner of a fable has universal appeal.”
The Kite Runner: Khaled Hosseini’s modern-day masterpiece is an epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present. The story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, it is set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies
A Thousand Splendid Suns: Another winner from the great Khaled Hosseini, this one about two women, Mariam and Laila, who are born a generation apart but are brought together by war and fate. They witness the destruction of their home and family in war-torn Kabul, losses incurred over the course of thirty years that test the limits of their strength and courage. Together they endure the dangers surrounding them and discover the power of both love and sacrifice, as they become allies in their marriage to the violently mysogynistic Rasheed.
The Glass Castle: Jeannette Walls book has been featured here before–and with good reason. Her writing is wonderfully powerful, and this memoir, though heartbreaking, also the life-affirming about surviving a willfully impoverished, eccentric and severely misguided family. The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother, Walls described her family’s nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities in a story that is hard to forget.
Heaven is for Real: When four year old Colton Burpo made it through an emergency appendectomy his family was overjoyed at his miraculous survival. What they weren’t expecting, though, was the story that emerged in the following months, a story as beautiful as it was extraordinary, detailing their little boy’s trip to heaven and back. This true story, retold by his father but using Colton’s uniquely simple words, in a tale that was also made into a feature film.