The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

WELLER PUBLIC LIBRARY

212 Main Street, Waitsburg

Hours: Mon. and Thurs. 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Storytime: Mon. 10:30 a.m.

“The Bear and the Nightingale,” by Katherine Arden (adult fiction) – At the edge of the Russian wilderness Vasilisa spends long winter nights listening to her nurse’s fairy tales. After her mother dies, her father brings home a new wife from Moscow. The fiercely devout, city-bred stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family agrees, but Vasilisa is frightened and senses that more hinges on their rituals than anyone knows. Soon, crops begin to fail, evil creatures of the forest creep nearer, and misfortune stalks the village. As danger circles, Vasilisa must defy the people she loves and call on dangerous gifts she has long concealed in order to protect her family from a threat that seems to have stepped from her nurse’s most frightening tales.

“History of Wolves,” by Emily Fidlund (adult fiction) – Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the beautiful, austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and an outlander at school, Linda is drawn to the enigmatic, attractive Lily and new history teacher Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is charged with possessing child pornography, the implications of his arrest deeply affect Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong.  And then the young Gardner family moves in across the lake and Linda finds herself welcomed into their home as a babysitter for their little boy, Paul. It seems that her life finally has purpose but with this new sense of belonging she is also drawn into secrets she doesn’t understand. Over the course of a few days, Linda makes a set of choices that reverberate throughout her life. As she struggles to find a way out of the sequestered world into which she was born, Linda confronts the life-and-death consequences of the things people do—and fail to do—for the people they love.

“Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story,” by Douglas Preston (Native American history) – In 1940, journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story fo having found the Lost City of the Monkey God – but then committed suicide without revealing its location. In 2012, bestselling author Doug Preston, climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn’t until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease. Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune,”The Lost City of the Monkey God” is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.