New Playaways for Your Enjoyment

The titles I'm featuring this week are available in the Audio/Visual Department on our Playaway Audio players. These are compact and extremely convenient all-in-one audio books that make listening to your favorite authors a breeze. Enjoy!

In the novel Little Nothing by Marisa Silver, Pavla Janacek is the much-longed-for, late-in-life child of a plumber and his wife, who are chagrined to discover the daughter they tried so hard to have is a dwarf. Nicknamed "Little Nothing ," she is beloved for her ethereal beauty and good nature. Worrying about her fate after their passing, the elderly Janaceks decide to "fix" her, employing dubious folk and pseudo-medical "remedies." Danilo is a tinkerer indentured to a charlatan, Dr. Smetanka, in order to repay a family debt. Smetanka orders the handy Danilo to build a moving table that becomes an instrument of torture, transforming Pavla into a decidedly lupine creature. First, she begins traveling with a circus sideshow and eventually, she joins a wolf pack. Here the tale becomes as much that of Danilo, the teenage "doctor's assistant" who first meets Pavla in the midst of a brutal "stretching" attempt and falls in love with her. Their paths diverge and cross as war and terror envelop the land, leaving Danilo to wonder if Pavla—in any form—was ever real at all.

The Sun is Also a Star is a novel by Nicola Yoon. One summer morning in New York City, Daniel and Natasha wake up as strangers. Natasha, whose family is facing deportation to Jamaica, and Daniel, a first-generation Korean American with a poet’s sensibility will ponder the age-old question, “Is it fate or chance that brings people together?” The teens’ eventful day begins at a New York City record store, where they see someone shoplifting.  Despite the rest of the day being packed with Natasha’s desperate race against time and a tangled system, and Daniel’s difficult tug-of-war between familial pressures and autonomy, love finds a way in, takes hold, and changes them both forever.

The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks takes place during the years immediately following the Civil War. Mariah, a successful midwife in Franklin, Tennessee, becomes an “orphan mother” when her politically ambitious son is shot at a rally. In the early days of Reconstruction, justice for blacks might be a dubious concept, but Mariah is determined she will have hers. Mariah becomes acquainted with George Tole, a free black New Yorker whose reputation as a sharp-shooting assassin precedes him to Franklin. However, she doesn’t know George has been coerced by an evil Franklin magistrate, Elijah Dixon, to assassinate Mariah’s son, Theopolis. This story is about a mother fighting deeply ingrained racism to get justice for her beloved son and what that means for those determined to hold onto backward beliefs and prejudices.