Bring an extra dose of fun to reading with your kids with these picture books! Your child will think you are the most hilarious person ever. As a bonus, the silliness of these stories will have you chuckling along too!

Alan’s Big, Scary Teeth by Jarvis

Alan is an alligator with an impressive set of chompers that he uses to scare all of the other animals. What those animals don’t realize is that Alan has a secret, those teeth are fake. When Alan’s teeth get stolen, everyone realizes that Alan isn’t so scary anymore. This book that is both heartfelt and wildly entertaining.

Stuck by Oliver Jeffers

It all began when Floyd got his kite stuck in the tree. He tried to get the kite out by throwing his shoe in the tree, only for that to get stuck too. With each progressively bigger object that Floyd throws (and gets stuck) in the tree, the story becomes more comical and ridiculous. Laugh your way through this and check out the rest of Jeffers’ fantastic books.

Charlotte and the Rock by Stephen W. Martin, illustrated by Samantha Cotterill

For her birthday, Charlotte’s parents surprise her with a pet rock. Charlotte decides to make the best of the situation and names her new pet Dennis. She does all the typical pet activities with Dennis, showering him with attention and affection. She just wishes that he would learn to love her back (aww!). One night, something completely unexpected happens. Everyone will be charmed by the surprise ending to this tale.

Attack of the Underwear Dragon by Scott Rothman, illustrated by Pete Oswald

This book has everything kids love: brave knights, fire-breathing dragons, and underwear. Young Cole is a knight-in-training to Sir Percival of King Arthur’s Round Table. When the Underwear Dragon arrives to destroy the kingdom, Cole is the only defender left standing. Luckily, Cole triumphs thanks to an unfortunate underwear mishap. Don’t worry when you get to the end, because you can also grab a copy of the sequel, Return of the Underwear Dragon.

Those Darn Squirrels by Adam Rubin, illustrated by Daniel Salmieri

A tale of a grumpy man versus some very smart squirrels. Old Man Fookwire’s favorite thing in life is to paint pictures of the birds that visit his yard. He attempts to prevent the birds’ winter migration with bird feeders stocked with seeds and berries. The only problem is that the squirrels want those treats too and plan daring raids on the feeders. After enjoying this title, make sure to grab Those Darn Squirrels Fly South along with Rubin’s other books such as Dragons Loves Tacos.

Amanda Gramley is the Adult Programming Coordinator at the Alamance County Public Libraries (and mom to two young children who love silly books). She can be reached at agramley@alamancelibraries.org.

Reader, I Murdered Him by Betsy Cornwell. New York : Clarion Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2022].

Reader, I Murdered Him continues the story of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. However, other reviewers have noted that they didn’t even realize this was a continuation of a famous novel, so having read Jane Eyre is not a requirement to understand and enjoy this book.

The first third of the book is a recap of Bronte’s novel, through the eyes of Adele. Adele is Mr. Rochester’s ward, and is possibly his daughter. Her mother is a dance hall girl in Paris, and Adele grows up surrounded by world-weary, jaded women who don’t think much of men. Her mother has consumption and is dying, and her (possible) father, Mr. Rochester, comes back to Paris to take her England to live with him.

Adele lives in Mr. Rochester’s home with his servants, as he is often gone, and spends time with his first wife, Bertha, who is mad and locked up in the attic. When Jane Eyre comes to be her governess, she watches Jane and Mr. Rochester fall in love. Adele doesn’t have any friends, other than a pen pal, Eric, who is her cousin and lives in Jamaica, but she is happy with her father and Jane.

Adele is sent to a boarding school when Jane becomes pregnant and needs to focus on her new child and caring for her husband. The school, Webster School for Young Ladies, is a progressive school, teaching not just manners, dancing and embroidery, but also history, geography, poetry, mathematics, and philosophy. However, the goal is still to make the women marriageable and put them in front of eligible men of society. As Adele gets to know her classmates, she realizes several have already dealt with sexual and physical abuse, and others are so innocent, they could easily be taken advantage of by unscrupulous men. After a near-miss of an assault on one of her friends, Adele partners with an intriguing young woman from the wrong side of the tracks, a con woman who steals from the rich and gives to the poor, to punish those who take advantage of young women.

When I began reading this book, and it was a recap of Jane Eyre, I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy the story. I have read Jane Eyre, but it isn’t one of my favorite books. However, once the story had moved on to Adele’s life after the end of that novel, it became much more interesting to me. I really enjoyed Adele’s romance with Nan, the thief, and her strong defense of her friends and other women. I’d like to think there were Adeles protecting women throughout history, and finding their own happiness. And the title of the book is just perfect, given how many novels written during and about Victorian England focus on the main character escaping from a bad situation and marrying “him” when sometimes the best solution would have been murdering the bad “hims” and forging their own path.

Readers who love Jane Eyre, and those who love strong women and historical fiction, will enjoy this book.

Mary Beth Adams is the Community Engagement Librarian at the Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at madams@alamancelibraries.org.

Liberation Day by George Saunders. New York: Random House, 2022. 233 pages.

A mother seeks revenge on the stranger who hurt her son. A grandfather writes a letter to his grandson explaining why he did not take more action to stop a dystopia from forming. Two office workers who are both engaging in bad behavior struggle with their incompetent manager. Two women who were once in love with the same man reflect on their lives during a chance encounter. These are just some of the protagonists featured in George Saunders’ latest short story collection, Liberation Day.

George Saunders is best known as a short story author, and Liberation Day marks his first short story collection since his highly acclaimed collection Tenth of December in 2013. Throughout his career, Saunders’ stories have focused on ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Saunders’ writing often combines elements of science fiction with stories set in a world that feels similar to our own, just a few years in the future. Saunders also explores the psyche of his protagonists, offering insights on his characters to the readers that are not always evident to the characters themselves. This technique is exemplified in the story “Mother’s Day.”

“Mother’s Day” features two women, Alma, and Debi, who lives are forever linked by Alma’s late husband Paul. Paul was a frequent cheater, and Debi was his most frequent partner. In Alma’s internal monologue, she blames her children, Pammy and Paulie, for her husband staying out all night, passing out on the front porch, and smelling of other women’s perfume, instead of recognizing her husband for who he truly was. Debi imagines herself as Alma’s opposite, a free-spirited hippie in contrast with the uptight Alma, but as she recounts her past and her estrangement from her daughter and the lack of true love from her romantic encounters, it is clear both women are choosing to believe a comforting narrative rather than face their reality. Saunders reveals these details not to harm the characters that he has created, but to show the reader how easy it is to have a false narrative we tell ourselves.

Saunders writes with precision, but also a sense of humor. “Elliott Spencer” tells the story of an elderly man who has had his memory wiped to serve as a propaganda tool. Even in this bleak scenario, the relationship between 89, as Elliott is now known, and his handler Jer, has many funny moments as Jer is amused with and takes pride in his protégée relearning basic words. While Elliott’s fate is incredibly dystopian, by the end of the story, Saunders has given Elliott hope for a better life without the story taking a sappy turn.

Liberation Day is another brilliant collection from a modern master of the short story. The stories, while a bit offbeat, are full of humanity, and might reveal some inner truths to their readers.

Elizabeth Weislak is the Youth Services Coordinator at the Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at eweislak@alamancelibraries.org.

Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell. New York : Tor, 2022.

Romantic fantasy novels provided a gateway back into reading for many adults during the pandemic.  Can romantic science fiction novels persuade reluctant readers to dip their toes into a genre that is often seen as obscure and complex?  Give this approach a try with Everina Maxwell’s Ocean’s Echo.  While the novel’s plot includes genetic tampering, psychic abilities, chaotic space, and interplanetary coups, its heart remains rooted in its protagonists and their growing life together.

Tennalhin Halkana is the nephew of the Senator.  He has grown up in the limelight pretending to be perfect while constantly being reminded in private that he is the family failure.  Tennal, as he prefers to be called, is a “reader,” a person born with neuromodified genetics allowing him to read minds.  This is seen as a dangerous, distrust-worthy trait in Tennal’s society where “writers” or “architects,” those able to control minds, are prized instead.  Tired of this prejudice, Tennal strikes out against his family, living a life of decadence and escapism while he can.

Surit Yeni is the perfect soldier.  He has every military regulation memorized.  Literally.  However, he is also the son of a notorious traitor and a secret architect, unwilling to disclose his power just to rise through the ranks.  More annoyingly to the military, Surit has a strong moral compass.  When given orders he knows are wrong, he finds a way to follow those orders to the letter of the law…all while dodging the intended meaning of his superiors.

Thus, when Tennal is captured, forced into the army against his will, and told to “sync” with Surit, a soul-bonding process between reader and architect that would take away Tennal’s free will, Surit refuses to go through with the procedure.  However, he also refuses to leave Tennal alone and vulnerable, knowing that the military could simply find another architect ready to bind Tennal for life.  Instead the two men strike a plan to fake the “sync,” pretending to be able to read and influence each other’s minds until they can smuggle Tennal to another star system where he can be free.

Tennal and Surit, however, are not the only people in their universe.  Soon, they find themselves caught up in even larger and more insidious military machinations that force them to their limits.  Linked together through extreme circumstances, Tennal and Surit start to find themselves through loving each other, but what will this mean when their worlds are torn apart?  Beaten, broken, having only each other, can the pair find a way to save their galaxy as well as themselves?

Rebecca Mincher is the Children’s Library Assistant at Graham Public Library. Contact her at rzimmerman@alamancelibraries.org or 336-570-6730.

“Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love” by Dani Shapiro. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2019, 250 pages, $24.95, Kindle $12.

Dani Shapiro is a middle-aged professional writer with a slight interest in genealogy when she submits a DNA test kit for laboratory testing in 2016. As an Orthodox Jew, she’s not surprised when the results show 52 percent Eastern European Ashkenazi heritage. What rocks her world is the 48 percent English and western European ancestry that she can’t explain.

Both Dani’s parents are dead and her much older half-sister from her father’s first marriage doesn’t show significant chromosomal similarity in their genetics.  This lack of shared genetic material causes Dani to go on an odyssey that yields long buried secrets about her family history.

As a child and into adulthood, Dani is fair-haired and delicate featured in contrast with brunette contemporaries in her Jewish community.  She remembers receiving several questions from others about her appearance being unusual for her purported background.

After the shocking DNA result, Dani’s husband does some amateur sleuthing on a national DNA genealogy database and reveals a biological cousin with no known connection to her family tree. After exploring the cousin’s background with some advanced internet searching, Dani figures out that her recognized father is probably not her biological father and that the biological father may be living and someone she can trace.

Some twenty years earlier, Dani’s dad died in a serious car accident and her mother makes passing reference at that point to being treated by a fertility doctor in Philadelphia in order to get pregnant.  With her mother now dead as well, Dani tries to piece together her actual paternity. There are few older relatives to ask and so Dani seeks to contact a physician related to her cousin match in the DNA database and to research the fertility clinic. She reasons that medical students were often sperm donors for insemination and she’s able to pinpoint a certain retired doctor as her probable biological father.

What transpires is that as her parents became more and more desperate to conceive, they used the services of a non-licensed fertility doctor who used medical students as donors and a sperm-washing technique to boost chances of conception.  Much of Dani’s inquiry focuses on whether this technique was known to her parents and how it would have conflicted with their Orthodox religion. Did they know or suspect that her father was not the biological parent because of this process or did the chances of a healthy infant blind them to any moral or religious qualms?

Dani eventually arranges a face-to-face meeting with her biological father and tries to make peace with her new-found heredity and fit it into her world view. Her journey yields new insights on kinship, belonging, identity, and how biology impacts our sense of self.

Lisa Kobrin is the Reference Librarian at May Memorial Library. She can be reached at lkobrin@alamancelibraries.org.

Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn. New York : Margaret K. McElderry Books, [2022].

The middle book(s) in a series always feel a bit like a letdown. You know you’re not going to get resolution and answers to all of your questions, and it is easy for the story to get swamped down in details and foreshadowing for the next book.

But…

That didn’t happen in Bloodmarked. Deonn has written a wonderful second entry in the Legendborn Cycle that lives up to the promise of the first novel, and gets you ready for book three!

Bree is getting ready for the rite that will awaken Arthur’s Table and complete her transformation into Arthur’s Awakened Scion. She is woefully unprepared, given that she hasn’t spent her life getting ready for this moment, like the other Legendborns. Luckily, she has her friends – Alice, William and Sel – to help her prepare for the Rite and deal with the pressure from the Regents and the Legendborn leaders. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have her boyfriend Nick, who is Lancelot’s Scion and was abducted by his father after Bree was Called. And she is having little success crafting armor and weapons from aether. Most of the time, she just burns herself.

Bree wants nothing more than to complete the rite so she can go rescue Nick, but, of course, nothing goes as she plans. After being betrayed by the Regents and the Legendborn leaders, Bree runs for her life. She goes to Volition, a Root stronghold, where she will be safe and can figure out her next move, but what happens next changes everything.

This is a book you don’t want to put down because every chapter brings a new danger to Bree and her friends, as well as an escalation of the “will they, won’t they” sexual tension between Bree and Sel. Being a Gen Xer, it reminds me of the Angel/Spike love triangle in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s hard to choose between Nick and Sel, because they both love Bree, and they love each other, having been bonded for so many years. They bring out different sides of her, and she needs both of them in her life.

Deonn’s world-building is fantastic, and her description of the two branches of aether/root magic is fascinating. She has taken all of the racial unrest of the South (and all of the U.S.) and expressed it through the magical structure of her world. It feels all too familiar when people express racist sentiments and treat Bree as less-than in both the magical and non-magical world.

Now we have the long wait for the next book!

Mary Beth Adams is the Community Engagement Librarian for Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at madams@alamancelibraries.org.