May Book Club Pick: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman!

Join us Thursday, May 15 at 6pm to discuss Neil Gaiman's

The Ocean at the End of the Lane!

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

Place a hold on the book here, or download the audiobook here! 

Ishpeming Carnegie Public Library featured in The Mining Journal!

Carnegie updates children’s room

April 3, 2014

ZACH JAY - Journal Ishpeming Bureau (zjay@miningjournal.net) , The Mining Journal

 

 

ISHPEMING - More kids in Marquette County's west end are checking out books and taking part in special programs at the Ishpeming Carnegie Public Library children's room, thanks to recent interior upgrades and an ambitious and invested children's librarian.

The children's room has a new stage for puppet shows built as a wood-framed window in the west wall and a number of pieces of new furniture, including some sized for parents who want to stay and interact with their youngsters.

And Roger Junak, whom Library Director John McNaughton called a "local artist and local legend" for his handful of murals throughout the area painted a mural featuring a doe and her fawn and a few other fauna in the midst of a forest on the west wall.

"We're really, really happy with it," McNaughton said. "(Junak) wanted to do it free of charge. I guess the story goes, when he used to come to this library when he was a kid, one of the librarians here at the time gave him his first set of paints."

Heather Lander was given the librarian job in the children's room last June, and has since improved program attendance and doubled the children's circulation numbers.

"She has a lot of ties to the community, she added a lot more programs and I think she's been really listening to the public and trying to bring new and innovative ways to get people in - and her programs have been really popular," McNaughton said. "It's been great."

"I really try whenever patrons come in to talk to them about what they're looking for ... and finding out what kinds of things they like," Lander said. "If children come in and they're, for instance, looking for books about trains ... then I'll not only point them to picture books of trains, but then nonfiction books about trains, and then they check out a lot more, because they see how many different things there are to offer."


Lander is planning an upcoming "LEGO Storytime" special program at 5 p.m. April 24, where, after reading stories, kids will build things out of LEGOS that fit the stories' themes. If successful, she said, it will become a regular event.

For more information on the children's room programs, visit the blog at www.ishpemingpubliclibrarykids.blogspot.com.
Zach Jay can be reached at 906-486-4401.