Books & Bites Podcast, Ep. 97
JCPL librarians bring you book recommendations and discuss the bites and beverages to pair with them.
Start the new year with the Winter-Spring Books & Bites Bingo reading challenge! We hope our prompts will inspire you to read and have fun while doing it.
Up first, we share wintry books perfect for reading by the fire. Our picks include an Irish Christmas story, a horror novel set in a Pennsylvania orphanage, and a YA fairy tale.
Enjoy a hot beverage while you read and you can cross two squares off your bingo card. Listen below!
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Carrie’s Pick
Time of the Child by Niall Williams
Like several of Williams’s other books, Time of the Child is set in Faha, a small parish in western Ireland, this time in 1962.
The night of the Christmas fair, 12-year-old Jude Quinlan finds a baby abandoned at the church. She appears to be dead, but when Jude and the Talty brothers bring her to Dr. Troy, she revives.
The doctor swears Jude and the Taltys to secrecy. For now, he and his 29-year-old daughter, Ronnie, will care for the girl.
This lyrical, multi-voiced novel captures both the despair and joy of the holiday season.
Pairings: Fish and Chips, classic Irish pub food. Or sip an Irish tea.
Michael’s Pick
Boys in the Valley by Philip Fracassi
In the early twentieth century, 32 boys are preparing for the harsh Pennsylvanian winter at the isolated St. Vincent Orphanage for Boys.
Under the strict supervision of the priests, these boys work the land, clean, worship, and learn.
Then one snowy night, the normalcy of the orphanage is shattered when the sheriff and a group of deputies arrive with a bound and hooded man, carved head to toe in occult symbols.
This coming-of-age story grabs you and doesn’t let go.
Pairing: Smoked Over-the-Top Chili, one of Michael’s favorite wintertime dishes.
Jacqueline’s Pick
Wintersong is a young adult fantasy novel set in eighteenth century Bavaria and filled with lyrical prose, music, and magic.
The main character is eighteen-year-old Liesl, the oldest of three children and an innkeeper’s daughter.
She has always had to live in the shadows of her musically gifted brother and beautiful sister, who is engaged to Liesl’s best friend.
Liesl has the gift of musical composition, but because she is a girl, her father dismisses her musical creations.
With little to look forward to, Liesl clings to her childhood and her grandmother’s fantastical tales of the Goblin King and other creatures who live in the woods beyond their Bavarian village.
Pairing: German Vanilla Crescent Cookies