Author Archives: GPL

Choose Your Own Adventure through Creative Writing

Posted on by

It may seem hard to find adventures since we’ve been cooped up at home. But reading and creative writing are a couple of ways to escape to anywhere you want! Some great books to check out right now are the Choose Your Own Adventure and similar series. Right now, you may only get to decide which room in your house to do e-learning. But with these books, your choices lead to so many different adventures! If you have never read one before, each book starts out introducing the main characters and setting. At the bottom of each page you are instructed on which page to turn to next. On many pages, however, you are given two different options. For example, it may say something like “If you decide to stay on the beach, turn to the next page. If you decide to board the pirate ship, turn to page 30.” The way the story ends depends on the choices you make. What makes these books fun is that you can read them more than once, and come up with different endings!

We have several adventure books available to check out through our curbside service! Some recommendations include “Owl Tree” and “Smoke Jumpers” by R.A. Montgomery, or “Your Grandparents Are Zombies!” by Anson Montgomery. E-books to checkout on Overdrive include “Clawed!” by Dottie Enderle, “A Really New School” by Jan Fields, or “The Terror of the Bigfoot Beast” by Laurie S. Sutton.

If you are looking for an even bigger adventure, try creating your own story! Here are some tips to get started:

  1. Create your main character. What is her name? How old is he? Where does she live?
  2. Think about your first setting. What is your character doing?
  3. Now, come up with two or more choices for your character to make.
  4. Continue writing your story for each choice. Add additional choices from each of these, and create multiple endings. The chart below shows an example of choices and sub-choices. You can write as many as you want!
  5. Put it all together! Number your pages so that they match up with each choice.
  6. Have even more fun with it by creating a cover and illustrations.

Have fun with your reading and writing adventures! Comment below and share a little bit about the story you’ve created, or a favorite book you’ve read!

Sample plot chart for your story: 

The Studio At Home: Make and Takes now available curbside!

Posted on by

As you may have heard, we are now offering curbside service! We are excited to announce that The Studio is also getting in on the curbside act.

Each week, we are offering a different kit with the materials you need to make a fun craft.

This week, you can pick up a kit to make your own rainbow with popsicle sticks and foam. Next week, we will have a kit to make friendship bracelets with a cardboard loom available. It’s a really easy way to get started with friendship bracelet making. It doesn’t require fancy knots or patterns, and you end up with a really neat bracelet.

If you’d like to request a kit, just let us know when you call in for curbside service.

If you’re curious about the craft of the week, just check The Studio webpage, which will includes a picture of the finished craft.

Our webpage also includes links to some GPL Pinterest boards with inspiration for kids, adults, and DIY games. We hope these ideas keep you making while you’re at home.

We look forward to seeing what you make! Post your finished projects on Instagram with #GPLStudioAtHome

 

Review: An American Marriage

Posted on by

An American Marriage
by Marisa De Los Santos
4 stars

Celestial and Roy, a young, successful couple from Atlanta, have been married for just over a year when Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years in jail for a crime he did not commit while visiting his parents in Louisiana. The author lets the reader know he is innocent because he was with his wife at the time. With both of their lives upturned, Celestial remains loyal to her husband, but after a few years, she finds herself adrift and turns to her childhood friend Andre for comfort. Then suddenly, after five years, Roy’s conviction is overturned and he returns to face Celestial and Andre while trying to figure out where he belongs. Roy, Celestial and Andre are each given a voice in alternating chapters, which pulls the reader back and forth weaving a complex of emotions for the reader on who to side while tugging at our emotions. I really thought this book was going to be about our broken judicial system in regards to racial inequality and mass incarceration, and while those topics were explored some, the story is really about the quiet devastation of a marriage that maybe wasn’t as solid as we all thought. I thought the story was beautifully written and I found myself rereading different passages because I was moved by the strength and flow of her words. Recommend.

 

Read alikes:

The Mars Room: a novel by Rachel Kushner

The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

 

Emily’s Top 5 Quarantine Reads

Posted on by

Time at home with nothing much to do is sort of a booklover’s dream.  I had high reading hopes for my time social distancing – so much time, so many books brought home from the library and filling my personal bookshelves.  Did I read as much as I thought I would?  Not really, no.  But there were a few books that I did read that quickly made it to my top reads of 2020 (and maybe all-time) reading list.

Emily’s Top 5 Quarantine Reads

#5: A Stroke of Malice (A Lady Darby Mystery #8)
by Anna Lee Huber

This is one of my favorite ongoing series.  Set in England and Scotland, it follows the escapades of Lady Kiera Darby, an artist and former wife of a renowned anatomist, who now spends her time solving murders with the dashing Sebastian Gage.  Bucking cultural norms and standing firm in her beliefs, Kiera is a force to be reckoned with and the last person you would want to stumble upon a dead body at a holiday party.

 

 

#4: Aurora Rising (The Aurora Cycle #1)
by Jay Kristoff and Amie KaufmanThis was a re-read to prep for the recently released Aurora Burning. Kristoff and Kaufman are masters of writing science fiction with dynamic character, thrilling suspense, snappy dialogue.  The Aurora Cycle follows Squad 312, recent graduates of the Aurora Academy, as they discover a force that is threatening the entire galaxy…and they may just be everyone’s last hope.
 

#3: The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep
by H.G. ParryNext to space fiction (see above) books about books may just be my favorite literary trope.  H.G. Parry creates a world in which the fictional world is closer than we think.  Charley Sutherland has a unique gift – the ability to read fictional characters into existence.  When he reads Uriah Heep, from Charles Dickens’s classic David Copperfield into our world, he finds himself in the center of a growing war between the fiction and reality.
#2: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires
by Grady Hendrix

I don’t normally gravitate toward books with a lot of buzz, but the premise of this one just screamed “read me!”  Set in the 90s, the story follows a group of women who find solace from their lives and husbands in their true-crime book club.  When a mysterious man moves in just down the street, the club quickly becomes entangled in conspiracy theories and are convinced he is not quite what he seems.  A bit gory and graphic, Hendrix weaves a story of friendship, loyalty, and resilience.

 

 

#1: The House in the Cerulean Sea
by T.J. KluneSo good I read it all in a day.  Linus Baker is a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth – an organization that monitors establishments that care for children with magical abilities.  Baker is tasked with evaluating a particular orphanage run by Arthur Parnassus who is raising the antichrist (Lucifer, known as Lucy) and an entourage of other special kids.  Linus discovers that the life he was living wasn’t really life at all, not everyone is as they seem, and sometimes we can choose our family.  This one is filled with heart and humor with special detail given to creating well-rounded, empathetic, complicated characters you fall in love with immediately.

What did you read during quarantine?

Review: Oona Out of Order

Posted on by

Oona Out of Order
by Margarita Montimore
5 stars

As a cataloger at GPL I don’t have a lot of patron interaction, but I do have a lot of one-on-one time with the books.  In fact, the best part of my job is opening all of the boxes that come into the library and seeing every new title that will be added to the collection. I get to see the books again, at least everything in the teen and adult collection, when I enter all of the information into the computer to make finding what you are looking for easier.  Many books come across my desk but only a few catch my interest.  Here I must confess that I judge books based on covers and titles all the time.  One of the books that recently caught my attention was Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore.  This one had a fun cover plus the title had me asking “Why and how is this lady out of order?’

Have you ever thought “What if I could fast forward to a few years from now?” Or conversely, have you ever wanted to go back to a time when you were younger to relive past mistakes or choose to live a more daring life?  For some reason this is what life is like for Oona Lockhart. At the New Yea’rs Eve party celebrating the end of 1982, and the last day Oona is 18, she passes out at midnight and ends up ringing in a new year, just not the one she thought she would. Oona is now celebrating her 19th birthday in 2015 in a 51 year old body.  No longer is she at a party in a basement adorned with fairy lights and loud music but rather in a quiet, posh Brooklyn residence that the stranger sitting next to her explains belongs to her. The stranger is her personal assistant, Kenzie.  He has known her for years, though she is meeting him for the first time. Kenzie hands Oona a letter that her future past self (this gets less confusing the further you are immersed within the books) wrote her explaining her unique condition and hands her a  binder of key stock market tips that Oona gave to herself that make it possible for her never to have to worry about money again. Her mother, Madeleine, knows that since the age of 19, Oona has been an unwilling time traveler. Madeleine helps Oona learn to navigate her new life because as the ball drops in Times Square at the end of the year it will all happen again.

Montimore wrote such an inventive and unique book that plays so deliciously with the time continuum that once I started it did not take long to be immersed fully into Oona’s life and her crazy order of living it. I loved every second of the book after I stopped trying to wrap my head around the logistics of the time travel. The book makes you look at family and relationships, even temporary ones, as something not to be taken for granted.  Montimore also explores the idea of time and relishing moments that most would consider insignificant.  She also helps the reader see that happiness and heartache are two sides of the same coin. It has been a while since I read a five star book, and while I know tastes vary drastically, Oona Out of Order was the book that propelled me out of my reading slump.

Read-alikes

The Dinner List by Rebecca Serle

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty