Blog Entries

The Legend of Pedestrio by Abner Serd

This author’s pseudonym is very apt. Abner Serd has written an “Ab Serd” tale, indeed. His folksy story of two wandering outdoorsmen searching for a legendary traveler “who roams the Earth by day and the sky at night” is full of dry humor and fantastical landscapes.

The author visited Butman-Fish Library last June, spinning some of the yarns from his book and sharing what it’s like to hike cross-country. His stories are just as entertaining in written form.

Abner, the character who narrates this novel, merely wants his favo...

The Golden Couple by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

If your marriage was on the rocks, would you seek advice from a recently “unlicensed” therapist?

How about if she guarantees she can fix your issues in only 10 sessions?

This compelling story begins with a successful, wealthy, seemingly perfect couple and parents, Marissa and Matthew. Their idyllic marriage takes a turn when they attempt to navigate the fallout from her infidelity. A game of cat and mouse ensues and you are never quite sure who is playing who.

“Therapist” Avery swoops in to ...

Never Fall for Your Fiancée by Virginia Heath

There is nothing the Dowager Countess of Fareham would like more than to see her son, the current earl, happily married. 

Hugh hates to disappoint her, but he knows he would make any woman a terrible husband. It’s far better for everyone that he stay single. Fortunately, his mother lives thousands of miles away in America, so Hugh can placate her by writing many letters about Minerva, the beautiful and accomplished woman he has fallen in love with and intends to marry – someday.

Minerva is completely fictional,...

In The Nineties, Gen X author Chuck Klosterman takes a whirlwind tour through a decade that birthed a lot of the trends that shape our modern world. 

The Nineties seemed to play by the same rules that made the rest of the late 20th Century work, but there was a shift happening in the way we interacted with technology and with each other. Those of us who lived through the decade probably didn’t realize the significance of what was happening in real time, but Klosterman takes us back to reflect on how and when things started to change.

However, that introduction makes...

This June, we're asking what kinds of programming for adults you would like to see offered at the Public Libraries of Saginaw. Take the brief online survey here, scan the QR code for the link, or stop in to any of our branches to participate. 

Thank you for your input!

The Unsinkable Greta James By Jennifer E. Smith

Singer/songwriter Greta James has finally made the big time. After years of struggling, her first album hit the charts and life is good, but it all seems meaningless after her mother dies unexpectedly while Greta is performing out of the country.

Helen was her daughter’s number one fan and the referee in Greta’s antagonistic relationship with her father, Conrad. Conrad has never supported Greta’s music career, but maybe that’s not surprising, since her best-known hit was a song raging against him.

After Greta bre...

Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley

If you haven’t read one of the best books of 2021 yet, what are you waiting for? Although Firekeeper’s Daughter was published as a young adult novel, it’s a rich story that adults can appreciate, too.

The author, Angeline Boulley, is an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Her protagonist, Daunis Fontaine, is a recent high school graduate who has always felt like she’s lived between the worlds of her mother’s rich, white family and her late father’s Ojibwe relatives. Daunis had been looking forward ...

The Music of Bees By Eileen Garvin

Forty-four-year-old Alice Holtzman grew up thinking she would one day become a third-generation Oregon fruit grower, but then her parents sold the family orchard to a land developer, she took an office job, and found herself beekeeping on the side. Her hives pollinate nearby fruit trees and give her something to nurture after the sudden, devastating losses of her husband and parents. When she’s taking care of her bees, she doesn’t have time to remember that she’s the last-living member of her family.

Months ahead of his death last July at age 80, John Lewis informed few people that his cancer of the pancreas was terminal.

One of them was a biographer he highly trusted, a historian and student of the civil rights movement. To add to the attraction, Jon Meacham is also a religious soul who had invested an intense inquiry into Jesus Christ's final words from the cross. This made Meacham a soul mate.

The pair collaborated on His Truth is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, which ultimately was a rush job, because the civi...

     Gravel spewed in every direction as the truck careened the corner from smooth pavement to dirt road. A quarter mile away, the sound of screeching tires and lumber thudding against the truck bed caused more than gravel to fly in the wee hours of the morning; seven children flew from their beds. Faces pinched and every muscle taut, their bodies flooded with stress-induced cortisol. Trembling, eyes dilated with dread, they awaited the truck’s headlights to illuminate the two massive pine trees standing sentry to the drive. Hope faded to despair once again as the h...

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, written by Robert Kolker, delves into the world of mental illness, specifically schizophrenia and our country’s attempt to understand and treat people suffering from it. When researchers tried to investigate whether or not there is a genetic origin of schizophrenia, they were astonished to hear of the Galvin family living in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Galvin family...

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance by Zora Neale Hurston

This collection of short fiction by the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God includes several of her “lost” works that are back in print for the first time since they were published in the early 20th Century. Hurston is best known today for her fiction featuring her real hometown of Eatonville, Florida – but in the middle of the Roaring 1920s, Hurston lived in Harlem and moved in the same circles as Langston Hughes and other writers. The eight r...

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

Like all of Mantel’s work, The Mirror & the Light is a weighty, well-researched novel.  It is the final installment in a magnificent trilogy (Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies) that traces the life of Tudor courtier Thomas Cromwell.  From his humble beginnings as a blacksmith’s son to his meteoric rise to the right hand of King Henry VIII, Cromwell uses his wits to ascend.  The Mirror & the Light picks up with Cromwell at the peak of his power, orch...

A Last Survivor of the Orphan Trains by William Walters and Victoria Golden

A Last Survivor of the Orphan Trains is a memoir depicting William Walters’s life as one of the last survivors of the famous Orphan Trains that transported over 250,000 children from the East Coast streets and orphanages, from 1854 until the early 1930’s. Walter tells of his experience being separated from his brother at one of the many stops, and of the abuse he suf...

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James
 

Something is not right at the rundown Sun Down Motel in the outskirts of Fell in upstate New York.  It is 1982 and Viv Delaney finds herself passing through on her way to NYC and gets a job as the night clerk at the Sun Down to make some extra money.  After dark, the place comes alive with a sinister, haunting presence.  Could this hotel be hiding secrets tied to a possible serial killer who has been abducting women in the area for years?  Viv is determine...