This is Michael Maxwell with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I am recommending Helm by Sarah Hall a novel featured on the 2026 Adult Summer Reading book list. We Midwesterners are known for our relationship with the wind. Our largest regional metropolis is nicknamed the “Windy City”, and you’ll often hear us remark that the weather would be nice “if it weren’t for the wind”. Midwesterners know that the very air we live in can be a character of its own. In Helm, Sarah Hall takes this characterization a step further by anthropomorphizing a particularly gusty breeze in Northern England named Helm.
Readers see humanity from Helm’s perspective, but we also get to interact with Helm through a cast of characters from across human history. Sarah Hall intertwines tonally varied tales of the Neolithic Age, the Middle Ages, the Victorian era, and even the 1970s that all show how different people have interacted with Helm. Some have worshipped the wind, some have sought to control it, and others have even loved it like a partner. Hall has also included images that work as artifacts for each of these stories, and this unexpected visual storytelling element was a treat for me as a reader.
For the first couple of chapters, I honestly wasn’t sure if I liked Helm. After I crested that first bit and got settled into the structure of Hall’s storytelling, I found myself utterly swept away and blew through the second half.
Check out Helm by Sarah Hall at the Sioux City Public Library today!
Support for Check It Out on Siouxland Public Media comes from Avery Brothers.