Month: June 2023

Queer Young Adult Fantasy

Lose yourself in these ya fantasy titles with LGBTQ+ characters. Monsters, romance, fairy tale retellings, and adventure are just some of the things you will find in these stories.

Lucha of the Night Forest by Tehlor Kay Mejia

Sixteen-year-old Lucha Moya lives with her sister and sometimes present mother in a city in the world of Robado where she makes a living hunting monsters. Lucha and her sister Lis end up homeless after her mother disappears again and is forced to make a dangerous bargain. An inspiring, empowering story of fantasy, romance, and lyrical prose.

The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski

Nirrim is a girl from the ‘worst part of town’ in this epic fantasy of class difference, self-discovery, and greed, an indelible romance at the center makes this beautifully written first in a series a must read.

Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust

Get ready for this Persian fairy tale based on the sleeping beauty classic. Soraya has lived with a curse that keeps her hidden away in her gardens while her twin brother lives out his life, soon to be married. Soraya must find the truth in herself and fight the all too real dangers around and in her. Dark and twisty is this novel of antiheros, adventure, and queer fairy tale.

Book/eAudiobook

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

Bree Matthews, a black sixteen–year–old, decides to attend her mother’s alma Mater, UNC Chapel Hill, after her mother’s death from an accident. Bree witnesses a magical attack that sets her on a course to infiltrate a centuries old racist secret society of demon hunters, the Legendborn. A fantasy sure to be a cultural gem with its unapologetic, suspenseful, and haunting storytelling.

Book/CD Audiobook/eAudiobook

A Dark and Hollow Star by Ashley Shuttleworth

Four queer teens come together in a tenuous alliance in this fae and human fantasy that draws inspiration from Greek mythology, Irish folklore, and Dungeons and Dragons. The is Ashley Shuttleworth’s debut novel, one they thoughtfully lovely crafted with rich detail.

In the Ravenous Dark by A. M. Strickland

Lydea, a pansexual blood mage, is teamed up with a spirit in this story of court intrigue, magic, and revenge. The queer representation in this action-packed fantasy of found family is beautiful, a great work of queer normativity world-building.

The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas

Seventeen-year-old Teo is the trans son of Quetzal, the goddess of birds, living in a world that hosts the Sunbearer Trails. The Trials is a game that pits teens against teens in this energetic adventure fans of Hunger Games and mythology will relish.

Spies of the Female Persuasion

Because women have often been able to pass unnoticed, throughout history there have been many stories about real-life heroines who were spies! Here are a few favorites.

The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear

Set in Post WWII Britain in 1947, former wartime operative, Elinor White is drawn back into the world of menace she has been desperate to leave behind. Known as private and quiet, Elinor is haunted by her past and becomes involved in exposing corruption from Scotland Yard to the highest levels of government.

Book/ eBook/ Large Print/Audiobook

The Mozart Code by Rachel McMillan

Lady Sophia Huntington Villiers (code name Starling) is part of a covert team in post-war Vienna working to uncover information in the high stakes world of the mounting Cold War. Simon Barrington has been in love with Sophie Villiers since the moment he met her, Simon seeks answers about Sophie only to learn that everything he thought he knew is based on a lie.

Book/ eBook/ eAudiobook

Spy by Danielle Steel

A young woman is caught up in a dangerous double life on behalf of her country during World War II. As a first aid nursing volunteer in London, Alex has skills that draws her into the art of espionage, leading to life-and-death missions behind enemy lines and a long career as a spy in exotic places and historic times.

Book/ Large Print/ Audiobook/ eAudiobook

A Question of Betrayal by Anne Perry

The first in a new historical mystery series follows Elena Standish, a daring young photographer travels to Mussolini’s Italy to rescue the lover, and MI6 informant, who betrayed her.

Book/ eBook/ eAudiobook

The Chemist by Stephanie Meyer

An expert in her field, she was one of the darkest secrets of an agency so clandestine it doesn’t even have a name. And when they decided she was a liability, they came for her without warning. They’ve killed the only other person she trusted, but something she knows still poses a threat. They want her dead, and soon. When her former handler offers her a way out, she realizes it’s her only chance to erase the giant target on her back. But it means taking one last job for her ex-employers.

Book/ eBook/ Audiobook/ eAudiobook

The Hollywood Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal

In the foothills of Hollywood, a woman floats lifeless in the pool of one of California’s trendiest hotels. American-born secret agent and British spy Maggie Hope learns that this woman was engaged to her former fiancee, John Sterling and that he suspects her death was no accident. In 1943 Los Angeles, the Zoot Suit Riots loom large and the Ku Klux Klan casts a long shadow everywhere. Maggie discovers things aren’t always the way things appear in the movies, and the political situation in America is more complicated, and dangerous, than the newsreels would have them all believe.

Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy by Ben McIntyre

In 1942, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. Her neighbors didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. This true-life spy story is about the woman code-named “Sonya,” a dedicated Communist, Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb.

The Light of Days by Judy Batalion

The extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who became resistance fighters. The “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade and helped build systems of underground bunkers. Judy Batalion, the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, takes us back to 1939 to follow these women through an unforgettable true tale of war, the fight for freedom, exceptional bravery, female friendship, and survival in the face of staggering odds.  

Book/ eBook/ Large Print/ eAudiobook

Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler by Lynne Olson

In 1941 a thirty-one-year-old Frenchwoman, a young mother born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade became the leader of Alliance, a French spy network that supplied as crucial intelligence–including providing American and British military commanders with a 55-foot-long map of the beaches and roads on which the Allies would land on D-Day.

Spy by Paolo Coelho

As paranoia consumed a country at war, Mata Hari’s lifestyle as a dancer, shocked and delighted audiences and bewitched the era’s richest and most powerful men. Her notoriety brought her under suspicion. In 1917, she was arrested accused of espionage.
This is an unforgettable story of a woman who dared to defy convention and who paid the ultimate price.

Book/ eBook/ Large Print/ Audiobook/ eAudiobook

I Can’t Remember

Failing memory provides infinite stories, both fictional and factual, classic, and new. These are a collection of fiction, memoirs, and films with characters living with memory loss, working to reconcile the discovery with their ideas of their relationships, their lives, their identities, and the effects on family and friends.

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

50-year-old Alice Howland leads a very busy, productive life as a psychology professor at Harvard, the spouse of a biology professor, and the mother of two grown daughters. She learns that she is suffering from Alzheimer’s, and the subsequent months and years see a steady decline in her abilities. Still Alice, depicts both the unalterable course of the disease and the various ways family members can cope with it. Clearly explaining the testing, treatment options, and symptoms of the disease within the context of an absorbing family drama.

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Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson

What if you lost your memory every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love-all forgotten overnight. And your husband may be telling you only half the story. Welcome to Christine’s life.

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

Spending the summers on her family’s private island off the coast of Massachusetts with her cousins and a special boy named Gat, teenaged Cadence struggles to remember what happened during her fifteenth summer.

Book/eBook/Audiobook/eAudiobook

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

Suffering an accident that causes her to forget the last ten years of her life, Alice is astonished to discover that she is thirty-nine years old, a mother of three children, and in the midst of an acrimonious divorce from a man she dearly loves.

Book/eBook/Large Print/Español

Never Never by Colleen Hoover and Tarryn Fisher

Never stop…Never forget…Just remember. Charlie Wynwood and Silas Nash have been best friends since they could walk. They’ve been in love since the age of fourteen. But every memory has vanished. Now Charlie and Silas must work together to uncover the truth about what happened to them and why.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

Tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

2011 Man Booker Prize Winner. Memory, is imperfect, especially when it comes to the past. Tony Webster and Adrian Finn swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian’s life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.

Book/eBook/eAudiobook/DVD

The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian

Cassandra Bowden enjoys her job with the airline making it easy to find adventure, and the occasional binge-drinking blackouts seem to be inevitable. Then she wakes up in the wrong hotel, in the wrong bed, with a dead man – and no idea what happened.

Book/Large Print/Audiobook/eAudiobook/DVD/Original Television Soundtrack

Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting  by Lisa Genova

From the Harvard-trained neuroscientist and bestselling author of Still Alice. Forgetting is part of being human. Reading this book will help you appreciate the difference between normal forgetting and forgetting due to Alzheimer’s. You can set expectations for your memory not fear it anymore.

The Father

A man refuses all assistance from his daughter as he ages. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, he begins to doubt his loved ones, his own mind, and even the fabric of his reality.

Renewal Issue 002

Welcome to HPLD’s blog/newsletter/thing that we can use to spread the word about stuff we’ve got going on at HPLD!

Our first issue had a PRETTY awkward intro, but this one might have topped it.

Because items at HPLD check out and can be renewed 3 times, we’ve got a Checkout article for you, plus 3 Renewal articles.

It goes by pretty fast, so apologies to anyone who was hoping to burn a lot of time doing something “productive” while actually just relaxing and enjoying this piece of soft-hitting journalism.

Be a Part of Yes!Fest

We do a Yes!Fest every year, and every year we need a big ol’ group of community partners to come and set up interactive demos, exhibits, and other things that’ll help get young people excited about STEM (that’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math for people who aren’t hip to the exciting acronyms flying around the educational world).

If you’re an organization that does stuff like this, or hasn’t in the past but would like to in the future, fill out this form, won’t you?

And let’s be clear: You don’t have to be a mathematician in a lab coat to get kids interested in STEM. Say you’re, oh, I don’t know, a local maker of Halloween props and displays and things. That involves electronics. It involves chemistry. We’d love to see your application come in!

Renewal 1: You Haven't Signed Up For Summer Reading Yet!? Wha!?

Okay, every year we say that this year’s summer reading is the best ever.

Well, it’s confession time: In the past, we were wrong. Because this year is DEFINITELY, TOTALLY the best summer reading yet.

There’s plenty of library fun to have this year, all of it free, all of it open to anyone from birth to the oldest person reading this right now (whoever you are, you deserve a trophy. And maybe an apology. You’ve made it through all these years just to read THIS newsletter!? Where are the newsletters about flying cars? Where are the jetpacks? Shouldn’t a lot of things that are not current flying be flying by now?).

Sign up! It takes like 2 minutes, and then you’re good to go for the whole summer! Hey, if you want to, count the time it takes to sign up as reading time. I won’t tell.

Renewal 2: LINC is open!

Yeah, you heard that right. Or read it. Depends on whether you’re using a screen reader or reading in the eyeball way.

We’re getting way off track: LINC Library Innovation Center is open!

It’s got maker services, it’s got a cool genealogy area, an incredibly, climb-able children’s installation, and it’s got an amazing table made from one of the oldest trees on UNC’s campus (felled because it posed a danger, not just to make us a rad table). Plus, it’s got all the goodness you’ve come to expect from a library.

This is the perfect time to come see what all the fuss is about. It’s still shiny and new, and the opening day crowds…well, we’re still getting a good number of people through the door, but the place is so MASSIVE that there’s plenty of room for everyone. Stop by today!

Renewal 3: Knowledge Share. TERRIFYING Knowledge Share!

In some online travels, I came across this series of videos by Ed Edmunds, creator over at Distortions, that walk you through all the steps to create your very own masks, gloves, and other monstrous props!

Not to alarm anyone, but we ARE more than halfway to Halloween, and Monster Day is coming right up!

If you haven’t gotten started on a costume for 2023, you’re still okay, but you’re cutting it close. Too close.

Rainbow History

Do you know why Pride Month is held in June? On June 28th of 1969, police raided a gay club in Greenwich Village, New York City, called The Stonewall Inn. Instead of passively watching the raid, patrons of the club fought back and sparked what’s now known as the Stonewall Uprising. The uprising lasted over six days after the Stonewall raid and started the modern fight for gay rights.

Unfamiliar with this event? Want to learn more? Take time this June to learn about LGBTQIA+ history by reading a book from this list!

The Stonewall Reader by The New York Public Library; foreword by Edmund White; edited with an introduction by Jason Baumann

Because I mentioned the Stonewall Uprising in my introduction, The Stonewall Reader must be first on the list. 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, and the NYPL organized this anthology to coincide with an exhibition about Stonewall and gay liberation they showcased that year. This book is a collection of first-person accounts, diaries, literature from the time, and much more to showcase how life was five year before the uprising, the uprising itself, and five years after.

The Gay Revolution: the story of the struggle by Lilian Faderman

This 2015 Booklist’s Editors’ Choice – Best Social Sciences Books award winner is still an impactful book in 2023. Faderman, a prominent queer history scholar, digs deep into media and legislative archives to construct a comprehensive picture of the struggle for rights in the gay community. The sweeping and engaging narrative she presents starts during World War II and ends at the turn of the millennium.

Book / eAudiobook

Reclaiming Two-Spirits: sexuality, spiritual renewal, and sovereignty in Native America by Gregory Smithers

Queerness is a facet of every society, including native societies. Smithers draws on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling to create a sweeping history of indigenous traditions of gender and sexuality. He also depicts how despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in native nations.

Before We Were Trans: a new history of gender by Kit Heyam

Taking a global look at the history of gender non-conformity, Heyam examines the stories of people from antiquity to the present who defied categorization. These stories cover a wide variety of perspectives that are often left out of the trans narrative.

How to Survive a Plague by David France

Candid and moving, this definitive history of the battle against the AIDS epidemic shares the stories of gay activities who resolved to make their life battles purposeful. Covering things through a mix of memoir and reportage, France covers the spread of the disease, the ACT UP movement, and the drug that revolutionized treatment.

The Engagement: America's quarter-century struggle over same-sex marriage by Sasha Issenberg

Depending on your age, you may remember the day (June 26th, 2015) the Supreme Court ruled that bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional. The road to this decision is much longer than people know. Issenberg takes us back to Hawaii in the 1990s when that state’s supreme court began grappling with the issue and traces the fight for marriage equality from there.

Bad Gays: a homosexual history by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

Based on the hugely popular podcast series of the same name, this book seeks to identify the queer people whose sexuality and dastardly deeds have been overlooked. The authors of this book subvert the notion of gay icons and queer heroes in search of what can be learned through queer villains and baddies.

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The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. The United States of America by Eric Cervini

You might not have learned about the Lavender Scare in the 1950s, which happened in tandem with McCarthyism, in high school history class. In short, if government employees were found to be gay, they were dismissed under the guise of being easily manipulated by a foreign power (particularly Russia). This book covers the life of Frank Kameny, his humiliating dismissal from the Defense Department, and the group he founded that protested the systematic persecution of gay federal employees.

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A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski

Accessible and comprehensive, this text examines how American culture has shaped the queer experience, while outlining how queer people were pivotal in creating and shaping this country. Covering centuries of history through primary documents and other literature, this book is brimming with often unknown or ignored facets of American history. Thought-provoking, this book argues this history should be important to both the queer community and American at large.

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