Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.

 

Happy Wednesday! And, if you celebrate it, happy day before Christmas Eve. Are you all ready for Christmas?

Something a bit unusual this week, or maybe I should say more like, heading back to my pre-pandemic Library Loot posts… there are actual physical library books for the kids this week. 

Earlier this month, their school’s library started lending out library books again. The kids have to go place a hold online and parents have to drive by on Wednesday after school to pick up the books. I figured that since we were already doing that, I would finally give the city’s library’s contactless pick-up a go too. 

I put some books on hold, and then realised that the website had an option to add on a few more random books that the librarians would pick out. The general choices included picture books, beginning readers, chapter books etc for the kids. I didn’t pick out any books for myself but I’m now wondering if there’s an option to have random adult books put into the pile too. 

At any rate, the librarian’s picks were great for the kids. With the exception of one that they had read already. 

And here’s what I got this week. 

Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Toshikazu Kawaguchi

What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?

Pemmican Wars – Katherena Vermette

Echo Desjardins, a 13-year-old Métis girl adjusting to a new home and school, is struggling with loneliness while separated from her mother. Then an ordinary day in Mr. Bee’s history class turns extraordinary, and Echo’s life will never be the same. During Mr. Bee’s lecture, Echo finds herself transported to another time and place—a bison hunt on the Saskatchewan prairie—and back again to the present. In the following weeks, Echo slips back and forth in time. She visits a Métis camp, travels the old fur-trade routes, and experiences the perilous and bygone era of the Pemmican Wars.

Pemmican Wars is the first graphic novel in a new series, A Girl Called Echo, by Governor General Award–winning writer, and author of Highwater Press’ The Seven Teaching Stories, Katherena Vermette

Gimme Everything You Got – Iva-Marie Palmer

A feminist, sex-positive, and hilarious rom-com about a girl in 1970s Chicago trying everything she can to score—on and off the soccer field.

It’s 1979—the age of roller skates and feathered bangs, of Charlie’s Angels and Saturday Night Fever—and Susan Klintock is a junior in high school with a lot of sexual fantasies…but not a lot of sexual experience. No boy, at least none she knows, has ever been worth taking a shot on.

That is, until Bobby McMann arrives.

Bobby is foxy, he’s charming—and he’s also the coach of the brand-new girls’ soccer team at school and totally, 100 percent, completely off limits. But Susan decides she’s going to try out for the team to get close to him anyway. And over the course of an eventful season, she discovers that what she wants might not be what she first expected when Bobby McMann walked in the door—and that figuring out who she is means taking risks, both on and off the pitch.

 

Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay – Phoebe Robinson (audiobook)

Robinson’s latest essay collection is a call to arms. She tackles a wide range of topics, such as giving feminism a tough-love talk in hopes it can become more intersectional; telling society’s beauty standards to kick rocks; and demanding that toxic masculinity close its mouth and legs (enough with the manspreading already!), and get out of the way so true progress can happen.

The kids’ loot:

What did you get from your library this week?