Check It Out

This is Jennifer Havlik with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to Check It Out.

This is Sarah Enright, with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

This is Jessi Wakefield with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

This is Barb Gross with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to “Check it Out.” 

Today, I’m recommending The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehesi Coates. You may have read this author’s powerful nonfiction, including Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power, but now Coates has focused his talent on fiction, and with a brilliance not often seen in a first novel.

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today, I’m recommending one of my new favorite authors, Rebecca Serle. An author and television writer who splits her time between New York and Los Angeles, Rebecca Serle codeveloped the hit TV adaptation of her YA series Famous in Love and is the author of six novels, including my two recommendations, The Dinner List and In Five Years.

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today, I’m recommending one of my new favorite authors, Rebecca Serle. An author and television writer who splits her time between New York and Los Angeles, Rebecca Serle codeveloped the hit TV adaptation of her YA series Famous in Love and is the author of six novels, including my two recommendations, The Dinner List and In Five Years.

This is Jessi Wakefield with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

With his newest novel, The Removed, National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson has created a moving tale of an Oklahoma Cherokee family fractured from the tragic and unjust death of their son and brother, Ray-Ray who was shot and killed by a police officer years earlier. 

This is Barb Gross with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to “Check it Out.” 

Today, I’m recommending Scaled, Book One of the Deep Skin young adult trilogy by J.T. Ashmore, which is a pen name for two brilliant local writers you may recognize. Tricia Currans-Sheehan and Jeanne Emmons, both well-known for their years at Briar Cliff University, teamed up to write Scaled and the other two books in this science fiction series. 

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today, I’m highlighting one of my new go-to nonfiction duos Dan Abrams and David Fisher. Dan Abrams is probably best known as the Chief Legal Affairs Anchor for ABC News and over the last thirty years, David Fisher has authored or co-authored over 80 books with a quarter of them having been New York Times Bestsellers. Together they make for one dynamic writing duo.

This is Jessi Wakefield from the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today I would like to recommend a high fantasy series, which has gained in popularity and produced many more readers in the past several months. When a prominent streaming service makes a big budget, series based off of a series of books and then spends hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing, you had better bet that it will create interest in the original source material.  This is what has happened with Andrzej Sapkowoski’s The Witcher Saga. 

This is Kristina Yezdimer from the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.  

This is Barb Gross with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to “Check it Out.” 

Today, I’m recommending Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Pulitzer-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson. A friend told me this book had “gobsmacked” her, giving her a profound new perspective on the racial constructs that divide America.

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.

This is Jessi Wakefield from the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today I would like to recommend the quickly paced 2019 thriller, No Exit by Taylor Adams. 

This is Barb Gross with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to “Check it Out.” 

Today, I’m recommending The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, an author you may remember for Station Eleven, the post apocalyptic novel that soared to the top of critics’ lists when it came out in 2014. In her new work, Mandel goes off in an entirely new direction, but with the same haunting intensity and intricate, interlocking characters and plot lines. 

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. Today, I’m recommending Little by Edward Carey. 

Though the title is short and sweet, this novel is anything but. Gregory Maguire, New York Times bestselling author of Wicked describes Little as, “An amazing achievement…a compulsively readable novel, so canny and weird and surfeited with the reality of human capacity and ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens and David Lynch? Defoe meets Margaret Atwood? Judge for yourself.” 

This is Jenn Delperdang with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.

Today, I’m recommending a book that has had a lot of ‘buzz’ this year—and has been on several of 2020’s “Best-of” Lists--including the NPR Book Concierge.  The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E Schwab is a sweeping fantasy and an intoxicating story of love and remembrance. 

This is Jessi Wakefield from the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.

What do the writings of Charles Dickens, an assassination attempt of Queen Victoria, and Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species all have in common? Well, besides all occurring in the mid 19th century in London, these elements are all the driving forces behind Tim Mason’s newest historical murder thriller, The Darwin Affair.

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.

This is Jessi Wakefield from the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.

Today I would like to recommend a fantasy that has been highly lauded and awarded over the past year. Author Naomi Novik is making quite a splash in the literary world with her fairy tale retellings, and in Spinning Silver, she has managed to create a magical, somewhat spooky, and very atmospheric loose retelling of Rumpelstiltskin.

This is Jessi Wakefield from the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.

This is Sarah Enright, with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today, I am recommending My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix. If you can appreciate a heavy dose of the 80s, mixed with everlasting friendship, and pinch of creepiness, this may be the perfect book for you. Although it’s considered “horror”, it’s so much more. The nostalgic vibe reeled me in, the unique plot kept me going, and the unexpected endearing conclusion had me wishing it wasn’t over.

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. It’s been four long years since Emma Straub published the wildly successful Modern Lovers and I was so ready for her to write another book. Enter All Adults Here. Already a Today Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick, I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book.

This is Sarah Enright, with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

Today, I am recommending Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris. Can you picture that perfect couple? You know, the ones that have a flawless marriage and everything in their life seems to be enviable, from their house, yard, the clothes they wear, and even their parties? In Paris’ 2016 debut thriller, she introduces us to newlyweds Jack and Grace, who are exactly such a couple, or so it seems. 

This is Jenn Delperdang with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.

   I recently read an article in Library Journal magazine that the horror genre is trending.  The reasons were simple enough—readers often crave stories about situations and monsters worse than the world outside their doors--that comfort can be found in fiction that explores and even validates our deepest fears. Today, I’m recommending The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman—an eerie and disturbing ghost story that’s not quite like anything I’ve read before.  

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. Today, I’m recommending my newest favorite romance novel, No Judgments by Meg Cabot. 

This is Sarah Enright, with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to Check It Out. 

This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. Today, I’m recommending A Bad Day for Sunshine by bestselling author Darynda Jones. Best known for her Charley Davidson series (which I’ve recommended previously on Check It Out), Jones is back with an all-new series, starring a snarky and sassy new heroine, Sheriff Sunshine Vicram. Turning her talents to the police procedural genre, Darynda Jones has written a wickedly funny first installment to the series.  

This is Jenn Delperdang with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to Check It Out.

I love it when a book surprises me—when the story is not at all what I expected, but the writing and storytelling is so good that it draws me in.  Today I am recommending The Reckless Oath We Made by Bryn Greenwood--a novel that caught me completely by surprise—and I couldn’t put it down.  

This is Sarah Enright, with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to Check It Out. Today, I am recommending We Are the Luckiest by Laura McKowen.