Sunrise on the Reaping

August 17, 2026August 11, 2026 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

I love the Hunger Games series. I love a good action story, and Hunger Games delivers.

Like anything else, I did read the books before seeing the films, and I do feel the films have a slight advantage (except for Mockingjay – it’s nice you made it into two parts, but seriously, you didn’t need to). The films, being visual, cut any bloat that might have been lurking. I love them. I love the casting, I love the cinematography, I love the creative storyline. Any story that can make me love and hate a character at the same time is a pretty good story.

I can’t decide which is my favorite – there’s so much to love about all of them. It’s hard to make a sequel as good as an original – and we can all think of sequels that shouldn’t be spoken of in polite company (ahem, Highlander 2, Frozen 2, Caddyshack 2, Jaws 2, Godfather 3, Star Trek 5, etc) – and few franchises can pull it off – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Empire Strikes Back being two of them. Hunger Games does, driving home the horror and mental devastation with unrelenting drumbeats.

Prequels in general are easier to write (we won’t talk about Star Wars), because you generally know what came before and how it winds up. You’re just filling in the details between A and C. I’m sure Collins had a lot of the backstory written – or at least roughed out, before writing the Hunger Games prequel, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a title that works perfectly on many levels. This volume, too, I adored, drawing me into the characters. Even so, I felt this was the most bloated of the series, and I couldn’t always track the action in my head. The movie fixed that gloriously. As always, the original folk music is just the icing on the cake.

And, okay, I was a year late reading it, but we were gifted with a second prequel, twenty-five years later in the timeline, the 25th games where we first meet the alcoholic mentor Haymitch, Sunrise on the Reaping.

I love Haymitch. I love Woody Harrelson for playing him to perfection. Who the heck wouldn’t be an alcoholic after all that? And to find out you might have to do it again, late in life, when you don’t stand a chance against a 17 year old professional assassin? Yo! Fill my cup!

But for the first time in the series, this book on Haymitch left me wanting.

Sunrise suffers from what I’ve long-called “Muppet Baby Syndrome.” In the original Muppet Show, all the Muppets are adults from different backgrounds, just like people. When the Muppet Movie hit, it explored the origins of all the characters and how they all met and came together to work on The Muppet Show.

Good film. Funny and entertaining for adults, not just kids.

Then came the cartoon Muppet Babies, and suddenly all the Muppets are all together and in the same room as infants (grrr) and no one knows why or how. Many shows have fallen into this trap, where characters are thrown together years before they should be, have always known each other, and everyone who might possibly be a new character knows everyone already, even if the character lines were already set differently. Think of Scooby Doo, with 50 years of genre, and someone now starts a series where the characters were all adopted as newborns in the same family, all at the same time. Star Trek has done this with the Strange New Worlds series. Doesn’t make sense, does it. Sometimes, the stretch is so far, it’s painful.

And that’s what Sunrise on the Reaping does. Districts are districts, large geographic areas, not single towns. It’s like saying all of Appalachia – which spans 13 states – is the size of Bird-In-Hand, Pennsylvania (pop. 537). All of the entire District 12 assembles in one place for the reaping? How do all these poor people get there? Everyone in the village is related, knows everyone, has interbred for generations, even before the war? (Okay, that’s not too far-fetched, very small towns are very like that). Or is only that town lucky enough to be reaped? We really needed to drag in Effie Trinket, 25 years early (she never seemed that old)? Why? Why not someone else? She is the only one who can ever draw names for District 12? They don’t take turns with assignments? And Caesar? Plutarch? Beetee? Mags? It seems suddenly that every character in the last four books is here in this one, too, whether or not they need to belong there, and that hits that painful spot of disbelief. Muppet Baby Syndrome. Instead of introducing us to new characters, and new backgrounds, and new stories, it feels pieced together from all the other bits that we already know. And while I liked some of the new characters, even though you knew they were doomed, I just didn’t have enough feel for Haymitch and his girl to care.

Maybe because the story is tightly locked in by the formula, and “how many ways to kill 24/48 kids can we come up with and still make it fresh?” You can’t. It’s been done. Four times. We know what’s going to happen, and who’s going to live. That’s the way the story must play out. It can’t change, no matter what you try to make different.

Despite it all, I did enjoy it enough. Still love Haymitch. Still love the series. It’s just this book is my least favorite.

Watch for Sunrise on the Reaping in theaters this November 20. View the movie trailer here.

Signing off from District 13.

Context for Conflict: Israel-Hamas War

July 20, 2026July 16, 2026 / Lauren / 1 Comment

We’re continuing our look at global conflict with books about the Israel-Hamas war, which started in October 2023. As it stands in late May 2026, the military leader of Hamas was just killed in an airstrike, despite the ceasefire that’s been in place since October 2025. Israel and Hamas have both been accused of committing war crimes, and numerous international organizations and sovereign states have recognized Israel’s military actions as genocide. It’s too early to tell when or how the war will resolve.

As I said in my post about the war in Iran, I am a terrible historian and an even worse geopolitical expert, but I am a librarian who can find contextual works by experts and firsthand narratives by those whose lives are directly affected by these conflicts. I’ve compiled as many different perspectives as possible. Some perspectives may not exist in printed book format, or they haven’t been translated into English. If you know of an informative resource that’s not on the list, please feel free to leave a comment so other readers can find it!

Before the War

We have no shortage of books dedicated to the current Israel-Hamas conflict. However, if you want to go way back in history before Israel was even a state, try A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur. Originally published in 1972, Laqueur covers the philosophical development of Zionism, touching on figures like Benjamin Disraeli, Moses Hess, and Theodor Herzl. For a more political context, there’s David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace (1989). It’s a great read on how the modern Middle East was created in the wake of World War I and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire – and how those new borders set the stage for many conflicts that followed. And if you’re looking for a quicker and less academic read, you could try Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby (2021).

Do you want to read and compare just two books, one from an Israeli perspective and the other Palestinian? Then you can’t go wrong with Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1998 by Israeli Benny Morris (1999) and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Palestinian-American Rashid Khalidi (2020). Morris and Khalidi are both academics with a number of other well-researched, thoughtful works available in our library consortium.

After the War

For firsthand accounts of the war, give a try to Hostage by Eli Sharabi (2025) and 10/7: 100 Human Stories by Lee Yaron (2024). Both of these books cover the Israeli side of the October 7, 2023 attacks. Meanwhile, The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience by Plestia Alaqad (2025) recounts what happened in Gaza in the immediate aftermath of those attacks.

If you’re interested in responses to the war across the globe, there’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad (2025). It won the National Book Award in nonfiction last year. Another title worth checking out is Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning by Peter Beinart (2025), who is an American journalist and professor. There are many more accounts, and undoubtedly more will continue to be published as the world comes to terms with its losses on both sides of the border and beyond.

Historical Children’s Fiction, Hysterically

June 8, 2026June 4, 2026 / Susan O. / 1 Comment

Have you ever had that feeling of dismay when something you believe and love is crushed before your eyes?

Having finished our last communal reading book, my youngest brought me another book off her shelf to read together, Bread and Butter Journey, by Ann Colver. Printed in 1972, it’s my original Scholastic copy. I loved this book when I was eight, steeped in the hoopla of Little House on the Prairie, from which I sidestepped into B&BJ, Caddie Woodlawn, Let the Hurricane Roar, Anne of Green Gables, and more. The illustrations being done by Garth Williams, of Little House fame, only made it that much dearer. I hadn’t read it in 40+ years, but I hadn’t forgotten the details. I was happy to read it again.

Bread and Butter Journey follows the 1784 travel of young Barbara Blaum (age never given, but somewhere in the 8-10 range) from her home in Pennsylvania to Ohio, where her father and her father’s friend were buying up farmland on the frontier. As in all stories with children, she misses home, misses her father, hates her brother, and in the end learns to love life more than things. Wholesome pioneer reading for the 7-11 crowd, and it’s based on the journals of the real Barbara Baum, the author’s husband’s great-great grandmother. Should be good, right?

But I am not eight anymore, and I’ve studied a lot of college-level history, especially the settling of the west. And the more I read this time, the more horrified I became, crushing my cozy memories. This book was not just historically inaccurate; it barely fit under the term historical at all. I kept stopping cold and explaining the problems to my girls as we went.

My first question mark arose when they made way on the path for the Pony Express. Hold your horses! This is Pennsylvania, 1784. The Pony Express only ran for 18 months, and the furthest east it went was St. Louis, Missouri – in 1860, 80 years in the future! I burst out laughing when they mentioned hyenas howling in the night. Yes, hyenas. An African animal that I assure you with total faith was not in the wilds of western Pennsylvania in 1784, not even in a zoo, and no one out there had ever known of. Just what was that woman thinking! I will let the idea of putting up fruit preserves slide, even though berries would be out of season (October at least). Canning food wasn’t invented until 1795, and the common Mason jar until the 1860’s. But people had been preserving fruit in jellies by pouring the jelly into pots and “sealing” them with wax or waxed paper since at least the 1500’s, so I don’t believe it, but I’ll allow it as possible. They seem to make bean soup in the matter of an hour, when anyone who’s ever dealt with dried beans (including Laura Ingalls Wilder) knows they must be soaked overnight, and even then, it takes more than an hour to cook them. In addition, it wasn’t legal to settle in the Ohio area until 1787, with the first permanent settlement in 1788. Yes, American Indians (probably Shawnee) had every right to kill anyone encroaching on their land.

Argh. The only thing that was actually right was the state of Pennsylvania existed, and there actually was a Fort Hannahstown in Western Pennsylvania. I was crushed, to say the least. My daughter loved the book anyway, though after treasuring it for so many decades, I’m ready to get rid of it.

So what books are historically accurate for children? Okay, in 1970 we didn’t have an internet, and research had to be done in libraries or textbooks, by far a lot more time-consuming. There’s no excuse for any inaccuracies today. My favorites have always included My Brother Sam is Dead, by James and Christopher Collier, which won a Newberry in 1975 and takes place in Connecticut during the Revolutionary War. You can actually visit some of the places in the book, and if not the exact place, the towns still exist. Beware that the book is often banned in Southern schools, for including the words “hell,” “damn,” and “bastard.” Rough stuff. Spies on the Devil’s Belt is from the same era, and also takes place on the shoreline of Connecticut.

The entire American Girl series, whether or not you want to plop down $150 for each accompanying doll, is praised for its historical accuracy. Covering different cultures and eras, from Kaya, a Nez Perce girl from the mid 1700’s, through Julie, who celebrates Chinese New Year in San Francisco in the 1970’s, the stories will give a good glimpse into what it was like to live in that time period. They’re uncomplicated, and it’s their simplicity and focus that keeps them from falling apart.

The Little House on the Prairie series give an excellent view of 1870’s America, by someone who actually lived it. Same with Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, perfectly accurate because Mark Twain lived them. Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever 1793 and Seeds of America trilogy are highly regarded, as well as Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry, which won the 1990 Newberry Medal. Johnny Tremain, another oldie but goodie, still rings true today, despite its 1944 Newberry Medal. If you can find it, the book On to Oregon! by Honoré Willsie Morrow (and made into the movie Seven Alone) tells a mostly true tale of the seven Sager children who are orphaned on the trail from Ohio to Oregon. The children actually do make it all the way on their own (with a newborn) to Marcus Whitman, a real missionary who took in many orphaned children, but the movie (and tie-in novel) ends happily, ignoring the horrific end that awaited several of them during the Whitman massacre just three years later. Another book of their journey is For Ma and Pa: On the Oregon Trail, 1844 (go ahead, cue the game sound. You know you’re going to.).

What we live today is tomorrow’s history. Children may not see or understand the significance of what they live through today, but twenty years from now they will (I’m still not over the Watergate trials preempting my 8 year old TV watching, but I do get the point now). Spark an interest in the past with any of these or other amazing books, but remember, there are – and never were – no wild hyenas roaming Pennsylvania.

Ever.

For hands-on experiences for children, check out Old Sturbridge Village, just over the line in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, or Mystic Seaport, in Mystic, Connecticut (which is somehow farther away than Sturbridge) (discount pass here).

Honest Looks at Motherhood for Mother’s Day

May 10, 2026May 6, 2026 / Lauren / Leave a comment

I once, briefly, had beautiful hair. In 2019, tired of the constant maintenance required by my standard-issue short bob, I decided to stop visiting the hairstylist. The Covid lockdowns in 2020 were a convenient excuse to continue the experiment. By the time I had my first child in the summer of 2021, my hair was lustrous, thicker and longer than ever (thanks, pregnancy hormones!), and shot through with cinnamon-brown highlights. On the rare occasions that I washed and dried my hair during maternity leave, I could almost pass for a mildly successful TikTok influencer.

Then, on cue, the postpartum hair loss started. Strands fell out at an alarming rate. Bouts with Covid and daycare-transmitted viral infections caused even more hair loss. I saw parts of my scalp I didn’t know existed. By the time I returned to work from having my second child, my hair resembled Albus Dumbledore’s phoenix, sad and ragged, a dark echo of its former glory (except for the new grays, of course). So, I went to the salon and had them take it all off, snipping and shaving me down until I had a pixie cut. I officially had my Mom Hair. I was in the club. I was no longer subverting gendered expectations, but living the reality of the most gendered expectation of them all.

I’ll spare you the other indignities that come with giving birth to another human being, but know, if you haven’t done it yourself, that they are legion. So are the complex social and emotional changes that happen when you transition to parenthood, and specifically to motherhood. Your whole identity changes overnight. That’s harder to talk about than the stupid hair thing. And the longer I’m mired in the day-to-day reality of being Mama / Mom / Mamba to two young kids, the harder it is for me to remember those changes, let alone articulate it to others. Luckily, there are women out there who have been able to do it. It’s not all beautiful, not like the flower arrangements and the precious handprint art that will be exchanged on Mother’s Day. But they provide an illuminating glimpse into motherhood for those on the outside. If you’re a mom like me, these titles might hit you right where you used to have ab muscles.

Honest Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself by Libby Ward (2026)

From the publisher: In Honest Motherhood, Libby candidly shares her journey of unlearning the myth of the ideal mother. She dives headfirst into the experiences many mothers have but few feel safe enough to say out loud—the lack of support, the guilt, the invisibility, the cycles they’re breaking, and the fantasies about a hospital stay just to get a flippin’ break. Libby untangles her social conditioning from learned trauma responses and discovers that letting go of unrealistic standards, asking for help, and prioritizing herself aren’t failures—they’re necessities.

I’ll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood by Jessi Klein (2022)

From the publisher: In Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Jessi Klein’s second collection, she hilariously explodes the cultural myths and impossible expectations around motherhood and explores the humiliations, poignancies, and possibilities of midlife. Klein explores this stage of life in all its cruel ironies, joyous moments, and bittersweetness.

Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood by Jessica Grose (2022)

From the publisher: In this timely and necessary book, New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose dismantles two hundred years of unrealistic parenting expectations and empowers today’s mothers to make choices that actually serve themselves, their children, and their communities.

Nightbitch: A Novel by Rachel Yoder (2021)

From the publisher: An artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced that she is turning into a dog and, as her symptoms intensify, struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity a secret, until she meets a group of mothers who may also be more than what they seem.

Mama Needs a Minute!: A Candid, Funny, All-Too-Relatable Comic Memoir About Surviving Motherhood by Mary Catherine Starr (2025)

From the publisher: Filled with Starr’s signature wit, warmth, and observational humor, Mama Needs a Minute! tackles all the absurdities of modern motherhood through illuminating anecdotes and delightful illustrations. Whether you’re navigating a hellish sleep regression, wiping sweet potato off the walls, singing your four-thousandth lullaby, or simply hoping to pee without a toddler watching, this honest and irreverent account of motherhood will make you laugh, cry, and feel seen in a way that only a true mom-friend can.

I Was Told There’d Be a Village: Transforming Motherhood Through the Power of Connection by Melissa Wirt (2025)

From the publisher: Melissa Wirt thought she had everything-she’d built her own company and moved to a beautiful farm with her family. Then during a personal crisis, she realized: despite having created an online community reaching thousands of moms, she’d also somehow, become utterly isolated. In I Was Told There’d Be a Village, Melissa describes how she began making small changes-leaving behind a damaging Isolation Mindset and developing an advantageous Village Mindset. Using personal anecdotes and stories from moms across the country, this book provides specific, actionable steps to transform oppressive, solitary parenting into a connected, collective (even joyful) endeavor.

The Push: A Novel by Ashley Audrain (2021)

From the publisher: Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had. But in the thick of motherhood’s exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter—she doesn’t behave like most children do. Or is it all in Blythe’s head? Her husband, Fox, says she’s imagining things. The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well. Then their son Sam is born—and with him, Blythe has the blissful connection she’d always imagined with her child. Even Violet seems to love her little brother. But when life as they know it is changed in an instant, the devastating fall-out forces Blythe to face the truth.

A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering by Elinor Cleghorn (2026)

From the publisher: Mothers make history. But what it has meant for mothers to do the physical and emotional work of mothering has, for centuries, been neglected in the stories of the past. Patriarchal control of motherhood has relegated the acts of growing, birthing, nurturing, and loving to the sidelines, and deemed it unimportant, women’s work. Now, through the voices of women themselves, Elinor Cleghorn reclaims and retells the history of motherhood, showcasing the mothers, othermothers, midwives, activists, community leaders, and more who have shaped the course of history.

Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth (2022)

From the publisher: A darkly funny domestic horror novel about a woman who must take drastic measures to save her husband and herself from the vengeful ghost of her mother-in-law. Abby Lamb has done it. She’s found the Great Good in her husband, Ralph, and together they will start a family and put all the darkness in her childhood to rest. But then the Lambs move in with Ralph’s mother, Laura, whose depression has made it impossible for her to live on her own. She’s venomous and cruel, especially to Abby, who has a complicated understanding of motherhood given the way her own, now-estranged, mother raised her. When Laura takes her own life, her ghost starts to haunt Abby and Ralph in very different ways. Ralph is plunged into depression, and Abby is being terrorized by a force intent on taking everything she loves away from her. With everything on the line, Abby must make the ultimate sacrifice in order to prove her adoration to Ralph and break Laura’s hold on the family for good.

The Mill on the Brook

April 13, 2026April 11, 2026 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

*Huckins Road, circa 1983, when it was passable until it rained.*

While Cheshire is currently known as the Bedding Plant capital of Connecticut, did you know we were once a powerhouse of apples?

Way back when, in another century, when I was quite young, I can remember there being two apple trees far in the back of our yard. They were ancient, barely alive, and looked like something out of the Wizard of Oz, black and gnarled like a corpse’s hand. If they put out ten apples a year, it was a record. In fact, the entire neighborhood – the triangle of streets just past Darcey School – had these apple trees. It’s not surprising, since the old farmhouse at the top was built in 1780, the same year Cheshire was incorporated. Farms grew apples not so much for pies, but for animal feed, cider, and vinegar, which was used in pickling and preserving foods, as well as a cleaning agent and for curing hides. Apples were important.

Some fifty-five years ago, when the lower half of Huckins Road was nothing more than a dirt path, impassable to anything short of a jacked-up four wheel drive truck or tank, and the first house was being built, my father would take us for walks there, down this exotic uninhabited Brigadoon, most importantly teaching us to avoid the poison ivy that grew thick on the sides. There were two paths through the forest, and both led to beautiful waterfalls. The near one, across from our property (and loaded with poison ivy), was small, no more than 2-3 feet high, and narrow enough that if you put your feet on the right stones, you could hop across. But further down the road, past Darcey, was a high one, with a pond above it (since badly silted in by the flood of 1982). And by the pond, above the waterfall, were two stone pillars. My father, who not only had two degrees in history but whose babysitter so many eons ago had been the Prospect Town Historian, who could possibly have been born in the 1600’s, told me back then that the pillars had belonged to a mill, to hold a mill wheel driven by the waterfall. The fact there could have been industry nearby made sense to me, since the land and trees between our house and Darcey suggested an old road, and we had come across old coal deposits and odd bits of rusty tools buried in the dirt, waiting for child archeologists to treasure them.

They were fond memories, but that was all. No information seemed to exist about it. Most old maps of Cheshire stopped at the Notch, since that was where trolley and train stops were (check out the old track humps on Pamela Lane, or the bridge by Mixville Park). The Historical Society had never heard of it.

But the pillars remained. They knew they existed, and they remembered the history better than I did. Although in my teen years we played in that stream, walked up it to the big waterfall, the thick brush, briars, and mud discouraged us from further exploration (as well as the man who owned the property, who liked to fire his gun if he saw anyone so much walk down the road. And I was his papergirl.).

*This view of Cuff Brook became a bookcover*

But I am a determined researcher, and after decades of waiting for an internet to be built and the right information to be loaded onto it, I hit paydirt. I came across an old map of Cheshire, from 1868, that not only showed a cider mill, but two cider mills on what is actually known as Cuff Brook (no one ever knew it had a name, it was just The Brook). The T. H. Barnes Homestead still stands, built in 1817 (we knew it as the Bear’s House, because the Bears lived in it at the time, but the Barnes family took it back, and I know this because one of the Barnes was my babysitter), and these pillars may very well have been part of their old property (they have a small pond by the house, but no waterfall to turn a wheel). I believe the house marked Jos. Barnes is the one on the corner of Huckins and Hickory Lane, which dates from 1742, and has an entire tree as a crossbeam (because I used to babysit the kids in that house. Maybe we need a book called The History of Cheshire Through Babysitting). I find it amusing that the same streets are already there, including the unpaved Moneta Lane across from Winslow, and that across the street from the newly built Barnum School at Marion and Jarvis is a label of “School No. 5.” (The Hotchkiss house across from it dates from 1805, and still stands). The more things change, the more they remain the same.

So plant some apple trees this year, and bring back a piece of Cheshire history (I had two at my old house on Marion, and one was certainly old enough to date back to at least 1920). It’s good for the bees, and heirloom apples are a treat (there are more than 7500 varieties!). Cheshire is ripe with orchards, the oldest being the now-closed Norton Brothers Farm (1757), followed by Bishop Farms (circa 1780, where, in that other century, before houses seized the land, I worked picking apples, peaches, and cherries). If you need help, check out these books on apples and Cheshire!