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Recommendations
See what La Grange Public Library staff members have to recommend.
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Invitation to a Bonfire
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by Adrienne Celt
Print copies available in catalog
Zoya Andropova, a young girl without family and a recent refugee from the Soviet Union, struggles to fit in at a New Jersey boarding school during the 1920s. Zoya later becomes curator of the school’s exotic plant conservatory and leads a solitary existence until she falls for Russian author Leo Orlov, a married professor with elevated status. This artfully written noir is full of clever… Continue
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The Old Woman and the River
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by Ismail Fahd Ismail
Print copies available in catalog
At the outset of an 8-year war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, Um Qasem, her husband and grown family are forced from their village of Sabiliyat in Iraq’s lush delta region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Years later, widowed and homesick, Um Qasem, accompanied by her donkey, Good Omen, journeys home to Sabiliyat to deliver her husband’s unearthed bones and his spirit to a… Continue
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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
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by Isabel Wilkerson
Available formats: Print and Overdrive e-book
Wilkerson tells the true story of six million African Americans who courageously left, or escaped, the Jim Crow South to live in Northern or Western parts of the U.S. This well researched book is the history of how many of these individuals thrived in the North despite institutionalized barriers that perpetuated widespread racism and resulted in overcrowded impoverished urban dwellings. This… Continue
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A Lesson Before Dying
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by Ernest J. Gaines
Available formats: Print and Overdrive e-book
This story takes place in a racially charged Southern community during the 1940s. The protagonist, Grant Williams is well educated and has the potential to succeed outside of this impoverished plantation community that he was born and raised in. Grant is reluctantly brought into a situation where he has an opportunity to help a more disadvantaged younger black man who has been wrongly accused of… Continue
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The Ballad of Black Tom
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by Victor LaValle
Available formats: Print and Overdrive e-book
Set in Harlem in 1924, Charles Thomas Tester is a young, Black and impoverished con artist who demonstrates little talent until he is enraged enough by racial injustices to tear down the veil of his existence. His transformation begins as he delivers an occult script to a reclusive witch for a few bucks in his pocket. This one act leads him into a strange, magical and dangerous beastly realm… Continue
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Gutenberg's Apprentice: A Novel
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by Alix Christie
Available now via Hoopla! https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12037079
This is a historical fiction story of the “dark art” of printing and the world’s printing predecessors from nearly six centuries ago set in a time of plague, superstition, the fall of Constantinople and extreme poverty. The year is 1450 and the place is the German city of Mainz. This late medieval city is part of the Holy Roman Empire and a central hub for long distance trade… Continue
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The Renaissance
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by Will Durant
No Wait on Hoopla! https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/11191179
Will and Ariel Durant's massive undertaking "The Story of Civilization" is a series of 11 completed books, roughly totaling 10,000 pages of historical narrative published between 1935 and 1975. The Durants' illustrious prose is breathtakingly sublime in style and prescient in their comments on the philosophy of understanding history. This volume supplies a healthy sense of awe at the art and… Continue
