 Hi. Welcome to Book Buzz. My name is Jade and I work at the Billy Jean King Main Library. Book Buzz is our monthly feature that highlights new and interesting books aimed at adult audiences. So this month I'm going to highlight a couple of titles that were published mostly in November and recent months and they can all be found in our catalog. So you can check them out from the library. I'm also going to highlight a range of nonfiction and fiction as well. So without further ado let's go ahead and get into it. So the first title that I want to highlight is called Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Hawn. This is Hawn's debut novel. He was actually born in China but he was raised in various cities around Texas. So as you'll see he was able to really pull from personal experience for some of this novel. This novel focuses on Patty and Liang Cheng who are from China and when Patty gets a tech job in Dallas they immigrate to America. They leave their child in China with their grandparents just until they can get set up in America, get a house, and sort of become model immigrants if you will. And when they do they bring over their kid to live in Dallas with them. Things really start to ramp up when Annabelle, their young daughter, starts sleepwalking. And this starts off like a string of misunderstandings in the community that really threatens to turn their community against them. There are a lot of themes in this book, familial bonds and trust, unconditional love, how to stop bearing your history and then still move forward especially as an immigrant in America. What's very timely about this novel is that it takes a look at the contemporary immigration experience in America and it really looks at the sometimes very subtle suburban racism and Zahan really does just a really great job of depicting it here. So great novel to start with. The next book I want to talk about is actually a non-fiction cookbook. It's called The Flavor Equation, The Science of Great Cooking Explained in More Than 100 Essential Recipes by Nick Sharma. Nick Sharma is actually a writer, a photographer, and the recipe developer for a brown table. He's based in Santa Monica. What's really cool about this cookbook is that Sharma also has a background in molecular biology which he brings to this cookbook and he really takes a look at the foundations of science and how it affects cooking and our eating experience. He takes what I consider like a five senses approach. So obviously he looks at like the aroma and the colors and the shapes of our food and the importance of texture but he also looks at the emotions that come into play in our cooking and eating experiences as well and really delves into like the components of flavor and what it all is made up to. This book has beautiful photographs. Some of them are even taken from a microscope so you can really see the texture. So really mouth-watering stuff. So if you're interested, if you like cooking or eating or interested in like how our eating experiences are shaped in the science behind it, this is a great title for you. The next book I want to highlight is called Ties that Tether by Jane Igharo. Igharo was born in Nigeria and immigrated to Canada at age 12. Similar to Han's book you'll see she's able to draw from a lot of personal experiences in this. It's also her debut novel. The protagonist of this book is Azir who also born in Nigeria and at 12 years old she makes a promise to her dying father that she will marry a Nigerian man and preserve the Nigerian culture in her family even after they immigrate to Canada. Her mom jumps right in on this and really tries to keep her in the Nigerian dating pool in Canada but after one too many match made by moms gone wrong, Azir ends up at a bar where she has a one night stand and that one night stand starts to develop into more and she starts to develop a relationship with Raphael who is tall and handsome and white. So Azir ends up kind of in the cross section of really obeying her mother and keeping her culture alive and keeping that promise to her father but then also following her heart. So this is a romance with a little twist. It's a very beautifully written, Mikaro does a wonderful job depicting the complexity of an interracial relationship even in contemporary times. So well worth three. The next title I want to talk about is called Paper Bullets to Artists Who Risk Their Lives to Defy the Nazis by Jeffrey Jackson. I know obviously there's a ton of literature both fiction and nonfiction out there on World War II and Nazi resistance and sometimes it feels like maybe every story's been told but this is one that I hadn't heard. I think this might be the first time it's being highlighted. It's about two French women, Lucy Schwab and Suzanne Malherm who are better known today as Claude Kahoon and Marcel Moore, relatively famous artists in their own right. They were Parisian avant-garde artists who during World War II lived on the island of Jersey in the British Channel which of course was Nazi occupied and their active resistance was to create paper bullets which were little pieces of paper that they wrote insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, really anything to demoralize the Nazi troops and they would slip them into soldiers pockets or in magazines on newsstands anything to kind of push the idea of rebelling and really hope out to the people. They were eventually betrayed, imprisoned, court-martialed and sentenced to death. They did survive but even while they were in prison they still pushed that message of hope to the fellow prisoners. What's even more impressive for this story and for their resistance was that they were lesbian partners who were known for their cross-dressing and for creating really gender-bending artwork that was degenerate artwork in the Nazi regime. So really impressive story on their part. Again it can be very hard in some points but much very worth the read. The next title I want to highlight is called Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth. This is Danforth's first adult novel and there is there's a lot going on in this novel I won't lie. It is a it's really a book about a film adaptation of a book about another book and if that seemed hard to follow just go with me because it's worth it. It takes place in two different timelines and in today's timeline you have Merritt Emmons who's written a book based on a New England boarding school called the Burkans School for Girls and the book that Emmons has written is based on a tale from 1902 at this school for girls in which two students Flo and Clara are inseparable and they are obsessed with this young writer named Mary McClain who's written a biography as an autobiography and they have created a secret club called the Plain Bad Heroines Society and they meet in this nearby apple orchard but unfortunately that's also where their bodies are found swarmed by stinging yellow jackets. Very mysterious stuff and in the next five years there's multiple more mysterious deaths that happen at this boarding school and so eventually it's shut down. So again back in time this is what Emmons has written the book on. The book is a huge success so they're going to turn it into a film and the film's got huge acclaim they're everybody's waiting on it it's cast the lesbian achryl at the time Harper Harper and a formal child star Audrey Wells and they all go down to the ruins of this boarding school to film this tale but that is when a past and present starts to blur and the line between Hollywood and reality starts to blur um if that sounded like a lot that going on it's because there is a lot going on in this book but it's really it's chock full of all the tropes of a Victorian novel and it's very like meta novel it's well worth it um it it's a very fast read as well for um as many pages it is it's a very fast read but I highly suggest this one as well and the last book that I want to highlight is called Singular Sensation the Triumph of Broadway by Michael Riedel um Riedel was a New York Post theater columnist for a very long time and he has other books about Broadway this title is specifically about the decade of the 1990s on Broadway um so when we entered the 1990s Broadway was kind of in a slump um most of our our um theatrical hits at that time were in points imports from london um cats remember the opera Miss Saigon um but Broadway was really bright for reservation at that point so uh Riedel really focuses each chapter on a different play and story of of the plays that really um brought Broadway back so he's got an entire chapter that follows Jonathan Larson as he really turns Lobo M into rent so obviously hugely popular uh he's got a chapter on the infinite infamous um 42nd street feud between Cineplex, Odium's Ragtime and Disney's The Lion King and their respective theaters that they redid in order to house the plays um he discusses Tony Kushner's Angels in America and Mel Brooks The Producers and really all of the plays um that brought Broadway back and made Broadway um what it is right now and it leads all the way up to 2001 in September 11th and um Broadway really coming back only a couple days later to kind of help um support the economy and and the city this is a really fun book with really behind the scenes in depth stories uh Riedel really knows stuff so lots of facts and fun stuff and especially if you're a theater fan this is a great book to kind of get you um past the hump until the the curtain rises again and we're able to see theater again um so on that note that will wrap up book buzz for the month of November um I've tagged all of these titles in our catalog um with uh the tag book buzz 1120 so if any of these sounded interesting just go ahead and uh go to our catalog and search book buzz 1120 um a lot of these books come in audio and digital formats as well uh and so even though we aren't open to the public right now we do have lb lbpl to go at seven different locations so if you like a physical copy um you can just go put one of the items on hold we'll let you know it's available and you can even schedule your pickup uh time online from our website at this point um and if you are interested in other programs that we're putting on digitally you can go to our home page and um under online library events um there is always an event going on we've got them for all ages and something for everybody and with that uh we will see you next month with your next book buzz and I hope you enjoy these thanks