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Mentioned in the Media May & June 2025 |
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Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the "Pill Mill Killer"
by Philip Eil
Based on 12 years of correspondence and interviews, an award-winning journalist investigates his father's old high school classmate, Dr. Paul Volkman, who was the central figure in a massive “pill mill” scheme in southern Ohio, which led to the overdose deaths of 13 patients and at least 20 other deaths.
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Uptown Girl: A Memoir
by Christie Brinkley
Although the popular model and actress has lived more than 50 years in the public eye, the full story of her roller-coaster life has never been told—until now.
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The River Is Waiting
by Wally Lamb
Corby Ledbetter, grappling with addiction, prison life, and the tragedy that shattered his family, finds unexpected kindness and connection behind bars, as he seeks redemption and hopes for forgiveness from those he's hurt the most.
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The Manor of Dreams
by Christina Li
Mexican Gothic meets The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo in this haunting novel about the secrets that lie in wait in the crumbling mansion of a former Hollywood starlet, and the intertwined fates of the two Chinese American families fighting to inherit it.
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Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools
by Mary Annette Pember
From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their families to attend boarding schools that claimed to help create opportunity for these children to pursue professions outside their communities and otherwise "assimilate" into American life. In reality, these boarding schools—sponsored by the US Government but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation—were an insidious attempt to destroy tribes, break up families, and stamp out the traditions of generations of Native people. Children were beaten for speaking their native languages, forced to complete menial tasks in terrible conditions, and utterly deprived of love and affection. Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember's mother was forced to attend one of these institutions—a seminary in Wisconsin, and the impacts of her experience have cast a pall over Mary's own childhood, and her relationship with her mother. Highlighting both her mother's experience and the experiences of countless other students at such schools, their families, and their children, Medicine River paints a stark portrait of communities still reckoning with the legacy of acculturation that has affected generations of Native communities. Through searing interviews and assiduous historical reporting, Pember traces the evolution and continued rebirth of a culture whose country has been seemingly intent upon destroying it.
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Notes to John
by Joan Didion
In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had "a rough few years." She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods. There were discussions about her own childhood--misunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe--and the question of legacy, or, as she put it, "what it's been worth." The analysis would continue for more than a decade. Didion's journal was crafted with the singular intelligence, precision, and elegance that characterize all of her writing. It is an unprecedently intimate account that reveals sides of her that were unknown, but the voice is unmistakably hers--questioning, courageous, and clear in the face of a wrenchingly painful journey.
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We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life's 20 Questions
by Glennon Doyle
Explores twenty essential life questions, offering wisdom, personal insights, and transformative lessons designed to help readers confront challenges, find healing, and share inspiration through courage, solidarity, and meaningful conversations.
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The Cafe with No Name
by Robert Seethaler
Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner cafe in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived. The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now a new wind has been blowing, and the air is filled with an inexplicable energy and a desire for renewal....Robert refurbishes the cafe and, rewarding him for his efforts and search of a congenial place to gather, talk, read, or just sit and be, customers arrive, bringing their stories of passions, friendships, abandonments, and bereavements.
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The Director
by Daniel Kehlmann
A tale inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to be forced to return to his homeland and create propaganda films for the German Reich.
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The Emperor of Gladness
by Ocean Vuong
In the struggling town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai is saved from despair by Grazina, an elderly widow with dementia, forging an unexpected bond that reshapes their lives and reveals dynamics of love, memory, and resilience on the margins of society.
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Gingko Season
by Naomi Xu Elegant
After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days cataloging a museum's vast collection of Qing Dynasty bound-foot shoes and in the comfortable company of close friends. One day, she happens to meet Hoang, who confesses to releasing mice from the cancer research lab where he works. Hoang's openness catches Penelope off guard; from then on, she finds her carefully constructed life slowly start to unravel. Told in Penelope's witty, vulnerable, and thoroughly endearing voice, Gingko Season captures three seasons of reawakening, challenges, and transformation.This wise and tenderhearted novel explores the nature of our deepest friendships as seriously as it does the dizzying terror and thrill of falling in love, and the complications of trying to live a life that matches your ideals.
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The Original Daughter
by Jemimah Wei
In turn-of-the-millennium Singapore, sisters Genevieve and Arin navigate intense familial and societal pressures to achieve academic perfection, but a devastating betrayal forces Genevieve to confront the cost of ambition, loyalty, and the bonds that define her identity.
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Sleep
by Honor Jones
Single mom to two young girls, Margaret lives in an apartment in the city. She's dealing with the aftermath of her divorce and having great sex with her new boyfriend--even if she is surprised by her thrill in being submissive. Margaret's parents, passive Hugh and quick-to-judge Elizabeth, who's loving but impossible to please, still live in the big house (on big land) where Margaret and her brother were raised. While her kids love the house with its many rooms and pool, Margaret dreads their visits there, always falling into the same patterns of behavior with her mother and being forced to confront long-hidden secrets. When Elizabeth's health deteriorates, Margaret must reckon with her past and how it has affected her, especially as a mother of daughters herself. Beautifully written, with flashes of humor to break up Margaret's suffocating intensity and dread, this will appeal to readers of slow-burn, character-driven fiction. Kathy Sexton.
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Sour Cherry
by Natalia Theodoridou
Agnes is called to nurse the local lord's son, but something is wrong with him—a plague follows him through his life, as every woman he touches becomes a ghost, and the ghosts call to the narrator as she explains what has happened to her in the real world.
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The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780.
by Rick Atkinson
Chronicles the pivotal middle years of the American Revolution, tracing the Continental Army's fight for survival, George Washington's struggles for resources, Benjamin Franklin's diplomacy in Paris, and British attempts to suppress the rebellion in the face of mounting costs. Illustrations. Maps.
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Mark Twain
by Ron Chernow
Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, including thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures the man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and the only white author of his generation who grappled so fully with the legacy of slavery.
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Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age
by Amanda Hess
As an internet culture critic for The New York Times, Amanda Hess had built a reputation among readers as a sharp observer of the seductions and manipulations of online life. But when Hess discovered she was pregnant with her first child, she found herself unexpectedly rattled by a digital identity crisis of her own. In the summer of 2020, a routine ultrasound detected a mysterious abnormality in Hess's baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking for answers. But rather than allaying her anxieties, her search sucked her into the destabilizing morass of the internet, and she was vulnerable-more than ever-to conspiracy, myth, judgment, commerce, and obsession. As Hess documents her escalating relationship with the digital world, she identifies how technologies act as portals to troubling ideologies, ethical conflicts, and existential questions, and she illuminates how the American traditions of eugenics, surveillance, and hyper-individualism are recycled through these shiny products for a new generation of parents and their children. At once funny, heartbreaking, and surreal, Second Life is a journey that spans a network of fertility apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, rare disease Facebook groups, "freebirth" influencers, and hospital reality shows. Hess confronts technology's distortions as they follow her through pregnancy and into her son's early life. The result is a critical record of our digital age that reveals the unspoken ways our lives are being fractured and reconstituted by technology.
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When the Wolf Comes Home
by Nat Cassidy
One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy's father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives. As they attempt to evade the boy's increasingly desperate father, Jess slowly comes to a horrifying understanding of the butchery that follows them―the boy can turn his every fear into reality. And when the wolf finally comes home, no one will be spared.
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Matriarch: A Memoir
by Tina Knowles-Lawson
This is a page-turning chronicle of family love and heartbreak, of loss and perseverance, and of the kind of creativity, audacity, and will it takes for a girl from Galveston to change the world. It's one brilliant woman's intimate and revealing story, and a multigenerational family saga that carries within it the story of America-and the wisdom that women pass on to each other, mothers to daughters, across generations.
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Twelve Post-War Tales
by Graham Swift
Explores the personal reverberations of war and global crises through vivid characters, from a Jewish soldier searching for lost family after WWII to a retired doctor revisiting formative memories during a pandemic, blending humor, grief, and grace.
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The Bombshell
by Darrow Farr
The story of a young woman who is kidnapped by Corsican separatists, forms intense bonds with her captors, and becomes the global face of a radical movement in the early nineties.
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The Girls of Good Fortune
by Kristina McMorris
A half-Chinese woman passing as white, Celia awakens imprisoned in the Shanghai Tunnels of 1888 Portland, Oregon, and must escape to protect a child and confront dangerous secrets tied to her abduction and a goldminers' massacre.
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Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil
by Oliver Darkshire
In a tiny farm on the edge of the miserable village of East Grasby, Isabella Nagg is trying to get on with her tiny, miserable existence. Dividing her time between tolerating her feckless husband, caring for the farm's strange animals, cooking up "scrunge," and crooning over her treasured pot of basil, Isabella can't help but think that there might be something more to life. When Mr. Nagg returns home with a spell book purloined from the local wizard, she thinks: what harm could a little magic do?
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My Name is Emilia del Valle
by Isabel Allende
In 1800s San Francisco, young writer Emilia, daughter of an Irish nun and a Chilean aristocrat, journeys to South America with talented reporter Eric to uncover the truth about her father—and herself.
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The Names
by Florence Knapp
Traces one boy's three alternative lives, one for each baby name that his mother is choosing between. Each name shapes his life, as well as his mother's, over the course of 35 years.
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Silver Elite
by Dani Francis
On the Continent, being Modified like Wren means certain death; forced to join the Continent's elite training program, she's handed the perfect opportunity to strike a blow from inside their ranks, but her commanding officer is the ruthless and irresistible Cross—how far will she go to protect herself?
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The True Happiness Company
by Veena Dinavahi
In this darkly humorous and wrenchingly sincere memoir, a young Indian American woman's dreams of being a well-adjusted college student get wildly derailed when her struggles with mental health land her in the office of a charismatic alternative therapist and his self-help cult.
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Centerville Library
111 W. Spring Valley Rd
Centerville, OH 45458
(937) 433-8091
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Woodbourne Library
6060 Far Hills Ave Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 435-3700
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Creativity Commons
895 Miamisburg Centerville Rd
Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 610-4425
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