Staff Selections - Victoria
Victoria W. – Library Director
What I like about our Library: I meet different people every day from all walks of life and different countries. It makes me happy that we can help fulfill their needs.
Favorite Book Genres:Â Historical fiction, nonfiction (especially history and biographies).
Current Bookmark: Don’t need one if you read e-books. 😀
Just Finished: I just finished reading The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris. Â
With the 75th Anniversary of the D-Day Invasion, many books, both fiction and non-fiction, on the subject are being published. This is perhaps in part because the numbers of people that lived through that period and are still alive today are quickly dwindling. This is a novel, but the story behind the main characters is true. It tells the story of Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, and Gita, also a Jew. They met in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in 1942. Both survived the camp to be liberated by the Russians. The author had the good fortune to interview Lale for this book. I don’t think that anything I have read on the subject has given me this personal view of living through this horror and how much the will to survive and having a goal meant to the survivors. It is a fascinating account of a love story between two people, but also gives you an in-depth look at many people who went into those camps and how some of them survived.
I also read the Big Read selection on Overdrive; I’m not Dying with you Tonight, by Gilly Segal and Kimberly Jones. This was a short read written primarily for the YA audience. This novel tells the story of two teenage girls, one black and one white, who survive a race riot in their town—together. They both happen to be attending a Friday night football game when the end of the football game devolves into a riot. Even though these girls have little in common and hardly understand each other’s points of view, they manage to stay together and work for the common goal of getting home before anything more happens to them. This is a great book that shows how terrifying circumstances can reduce us all to basic human beings that need to find safety. The girls’ strengths and weaknesses play off each other. In the end, they each do things they thought they would never have done to protect each other.