After 40 years in Los Angeles, New York, and Portland, a prairie town in Minnesota and a college town in Oregon, the author inherits a family farm and returns to her hometown—population 1,500—on the far northern California coast. There, for 15 years, she has written a weekly newspaper column, “From the Back Pew,” for the Ferndale Enterprise. Many of the stories in this humorous and personable memoir were first told as columns.

A Bit of Earth

Biographies & Memoirs

Lestina, Wendy Crisp

Memoirs

Lychgate Press

An intimate, moving, often funny portrait of the relationship between an older father and his disabled son. A saga of day-to-day challenges, large and small triumphs, friendship, adventure, devotion, and love. For people who have been there, this book will ring true. For those who haven’t, Life with Jake will take them on a journey they won’t soon forget.

Life with Jake: A Father's Story

Parenting & Relationships

Wilkins, Kirby

Disabilities & Hyperactivity

The dark side of college championship sports hits the news far too often, highlighting a world of driven coaches, academic cheating, rule-breaking boosters, and failed dreams. In a new mystery by the author of the acclaimed Death Pans Out, the murder of a star basketball forward propels journalist Neva Leopold into the troubled heart of this deeply competitive world. The boosters “want to touch us, they want to put their hands on us, to feel our muscles,” player Frankie Budd tells Neva, his hand cinching tight on her shoulder. “That’s why we call them grippers. That’s why I hate the bastards. That’s why I took everything I could get.” Cars, cash, housing, travel, clothes, passing grades—the players get it all while they’re hot. But when it’s over, when the scholarships end and 98.8% of the players fail to make the NBA draft, what happens then? What happens when they go from being heroes to nobodies overnight and find themselves wielding a broom instead of a basketball? Is such a downfall grounds for murder? Or is the gripper situation at PAC-12 Conference member Valley State University a long way—a very long way—out of hand?

Gripper

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Graves, Ashna

Mystery

In the Keep of Time

Four siblings spending the summer with their aunt in Scotland find mysterious adventure in an ancient tower that is a portal through time.

Children's Books

Anderson, Margaret J.

Science Fiction & Fantasy

On Elizabeth’s first discovery of the tumbledown cottages at the far edge of the woods, all she saw was the rotting thatched roof and crumbling walls. Inside the air was dank and the wallpaper was stained with damp and mold. But on the next visit, escaping from the misunderstandings and misery of being the new girl at the village school, everything has changed. The decayed thatch has been replaced by new straw, the crumbling walls are intact and smoke curls from the chimneys. Most confusing of all is the girl in the faded ragged dress who is feeding the chickens. Could the girl be a ghost child who has come back to haunt the woods where she once played? Somehow Elizabeth can’t believe in a ghost who feeds chickens. Or in ghost chickens, for that matter. There must be another answer, but it is just on the edge of her understanding. Elizabeth has to see her again. On their next meeting, when the ghost child, Ann, reaches out and touches Elizabeth something happens that Elizabeth can never understand, though it was to happen again and again. They simply become one person and only Ann walks through the door of the cottage, yet Elizabeth is still there, thinking and looking and feeling as Ann did. As Elizabeth moves back and forth between the two worlds, the past becomes a vivid reality. She enjoys being part of a lively family of six children compared to her own only child status, but she soon realizes that her trouble fitting in at school is nothing compared to not having the chance to go to school at all. And there’s also the fear that she may not find her way back to the present.

To Nowhere and Back

Memoir by children's book author Margaret J. Anderson covering her childhood in Scotland before and during WWII.

From a Place Far Away

Searching for Shona

Literature & Fiction

With the return of material lost for decades, the story of a nearly forgotten Northern California lumber strike is told with immediacy, drama, passion, humor, and relevance to events happening today. The 1935 strike, in which three workers were killed, cast a long shadow over Humboldt County in Northern California. First-person narratives, excerpts from letters and strike bulletins, period photographs, and even a fascinating detour through 1960's San Francisco, make this colorful chapter of American labor history compelling reading.

Organize! The Great Lumber Strike of Humboldt County 1935

History

Harris, Rachel

Onstine, Frank

Historical Study & Educational Resources

The mist gathered slowly, just a faint coolness and dampness around the stones. . . Then Robert noted the silence. . . fog blanketed the ground within the circle of stones. Jennifer was just a gray shadow of herself, still digging down toward the hidden slab of rock. The coldness of the fog soaked into Robert and he suddenly wanted to push the soil back into the hole he had dug, but the cold seemed to have reached his brain and he had no more power over his thoughts.In this compelling time-slip novel, a girl and a boy from the present day are carried through the Circle of Time to the twenty-second century. There they are caught up in the struggle of a peace-loving people trying to protect their simple and humane way of life from the assaults of a barbaric mechanized society who would conquer and enslave them. Through rich layers of time and meaning, Margaret Anderson has woven an intriguing tale in which the present becomes the past and the future is now. When the book was first published in 1979, it was well ahead of its time for young adult fiction in dealing with climate change as a significant problem—a theme that has since produced a genre known as “cli-fi.”

In the Circle of Time

In August 1907, when Jenny's father went off to America with the two oldest Jardin children, leaving the rest of the family behind, Jenny realized there was "a heap of things you couldn't change just by wishing." The Plan was for the others to join him, when they'd saved enough money for their fares. Two years later when Jenny was faced with having to leave school to work in the tweed mill to further the Plan, she again realized you couldn't change things just by wishing. But then Mrs. Lodge, who had her own plan for Jenny, stepped in. Anthea Lodge was an ardent suffragette who knew that it was going to take more than wishing to get women the vote. She believed in the suffragette motto of Deeds, not Words. By both words and deeds she would change the course of Jenny's life.

A Window on Bond Street

Genre Fiction

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