@ Your Library
Tuesday, August 13th at 3pm, Willow Brae, a Celtic music duo will perform at the library. Willow Brae “The Magic of Celtic Music” Andrea Stern (Celtic harps) and Laura MacKenzie (wooden flutes, concertina, whistles, various bagpipes, and voice) form the duo Willow Brae. “Brae” is a Lowland Scots word meaning hillside by a river, and their name refers to a bank of willow trees swaying alongside a Scottish stream. Andrea and Laura skillfully convey traditional music from the Scottish and Irish countrysides, featuring their unique array of instruments while providing light history and stories about those instruments and their music. The Magic of Celtic Music will charm and uplift youth and adults with beautiful slow airs, joyful jigs and reels, and fascinating instrumentation! This performance is sponsored by Arrowhead Library System and funded in part or in whole with money from Minnesota’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund (ACFH).
Books provide us with a way to understand other perspectives, cultures and viewpoints. We can learn and grow by reading about other’s lives and experiences. Here are some new fiction titles that expand our horizons. Honey by Victor Lodato explores love in all its forms through the eyes of Honey, the daughter of a notorious mobster. She re-invented herself in the world of art and beauty by working for a high-end auction house across the country. But now, at the end of her life she decides to return home and falls unexpectedly in love while nothing has changed in her family. She finds herself quickly asking the question about the limits of compassion.
Frieda McFadden makes Brooke ask questions in Inmate as she serves as a new nurse practitioner in a maximum-security prison. She is taught three crucial rules that her bosses don’t know she has already broken as she has an intimate connection to one of the most notorious and dangerous inmates. This thriller is propulsive and mind-binding and will force readers to ask questions about guilt and who pays.
Native Love Jams by Tashia Hart is a delightful romance story about a village hosting an Indigenous Food Days. Winnow has been hired to forage and cook for the festival. She arrives in the rural Minnesota community and finds her host Niigaanii as annoyingly attractive as he is unwelcoming.
Tommy Orange’s second highly anticipated novel Wandering Stars is a follow-up to There There. He asks what it means to be the ancestors of the Sand Creek massacre and the trauma that follows.
One of the reasons I love science fiction is for the questions it allows us to explore in a way that both challenges but also provides safety. Naomi Kritzer is a Hugo, Locus, Lodestar and Edgar award winning author whose Liberty’s Daughter allows us to ask questions about the cost of keeping secrets, the cost of being comfortable and sheltered and the what is outside that sheltered existence we don’t know about but maybe should. This while providing a riveting story of a future world we sort of recognize.