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Cascade Public Library

Welcome to Cascade Public Library

Current Hours (as of June 1 2020) :
Mon-Fri: 11:00 am - 5:00 pm
Sat: 10:00 am - 2:00 pm
Address: 105 N Front St Cascade, ID 83611
Phone: (208) 382-4757
Email: [email protected]
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

June 30, 2020 By Cascade Library Staff

Cover Art for "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" Black and white photo of arms wrapped around knees in sitting positionBook: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Author: Ocean Vuong

Reviewed by: Amelia Valasek, Library Manager

Who should read it: Anyone who appreciates poetry, stories about immigration, LGBT issues, coming of age, and what it means to be an American. Anyone who won’t get bored by a book that is light on “plot” but deep in feeling. Note: this book does contain a few scenes that are sexually explicit in nature.

Personal Impression: There were times I cried and re-read a sentence or paragraph several times just to enjoy the sheer beauty of language. There were other times I got a bit bored and started skimming.

Review: The plot of the book is fairly limited. A family from Vietnam immigrates to the United States after the Vietnam War, where a grandmother, mother, and son navigate through their new life, and where the son falls in love with a local farm boy. What this book lacks in conflict or plot, it more than makes up for with a profound reflection on the human experience.

It’s clear that Ocean Vuong is first and foremost a poet. The book wanders between coherent narrative, in which the protagonist “Little Dog” comes of age and experiences first love, and a less coherent prose-poetry in which the narrator (and one might be forgiven for thinking, perhaps the author himself) explores an often fraught relationship with his family, most especially his mother. Woven between these two main threads are a host of other themes such as the trauma of war, the opioid crisis, and the immigrant experience.

This is a book that works best when it is absorbed. To enjoy this book, I recommend not trying to focus on the story at a rational level, but instead to let it work through you and cling to your subconscious like the cobwebs of a dream.

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Filed Under: Library Staff, Reading Tagged With: book review

The Disappearing Earth

June 30, 2020 By Cascade Library Staff

Disappearing Earth Cover Art - Two small human figures ruwalking across the snow field with a large blue mountain in the backgroundBook: The Disappearing Earth

Author: Julia Phillips

Reviewed by: Amelia Valasek, Library Manager

Who should read this: Anyone who enjoys short stories, rugged landscapes, fully realized characters, small human dramas, and a dark mystery puzzled together in intricate parts.

Personal impression: I could NOT put this book down. At first, I felt a little off kilter because I was expecting a standard mystery thriller, but got something much different, and much better.

Review: This book, set on the rugged Kamchatka peninsula of Russia’s eastern shore, hovers in the dreamy space between a novel and a collection of related short stories. Circling the periphery of the book are the stories of three missing people: a pair of young sisters who have been abducted from the center of Kamchatka’s only metropolitan city, and a young Indigenous woman who disappears from a northern village. These missing children haunt the edges of each individual story, where a wide cast of fully realized characters experience their own struggles and triumphs.

For mystery lovers, fear not. The author does not abandon the thread of the missing girls, and those who pay close attention will be rewarded with a tightly woven web that comes to a very satisfying conclusion. Rather than giving us another book in which missing girls serve as a canvas for a clever detective to save the day by following his gut and breaking all the rules, this book instead gives us a mystery that plays out in kitchens and streets and hallways, in the conflict between cultures, and the pull of fully realized humanity.

Julia Phillips, who spent two years living on the Kamchatka peninsula in 2011, infuses the story with small cultural details that transport the reader to this distant and gorgeous landscape. Her writing, both clear and beautiful, lacking in artifice or self-importance, allows the reader to loose themselves within the small unfolding dramas of each new chapter.

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Filed Under: Library Staff, Reading Tagged With: book review

What We’re Reading – Welcome to our blog

June 29, 2020 By Cascade Library Staff

We’d like to try a little something that we think might help our patrons and avid readers: A book review feature! To begin, these reviews will primarily be written by library staff, but we’d love to include reviews from our patrons as well. If you’d be interested in reading and reviewing books available at the library, please contact us at [email protected].

Filed Under: Library Staff, Reading Tagged With: book review

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