Helen Plum Library

""Rhaina Cohen's moving, intimate portraits of people in unusually devoted friendships upend our cultural narratives about which relationships matter . . . an arresting work of compassion and insight." -Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and co-host of Dear Therapists podcast Why do we assume romantic relationships are more important than friendships? What do we lose when we expect a spouse to meet...

"Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez's ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others,...

"When I Was Your Age is a hilarious, heartwarming and surprising ode to growing up, getting older and wiser, and luck, life, and learning from the school of hard knocks, from SNL's longest-serving actor, Kenan Thompson"-- Thompson provides an ode to growing up, getting older and wiser, and learning from the school of hard knocks. He is the longest-ever-service cast member of Saturday Night Live, as well as the survivor of early 2000s television programs...

"When classmates Baxter, Abigail, Turner and Emerson break a school rule, they're forced to travel to the middle of nowhere for an extra credit project. They think things can't get much worse. After all, how will learning to survive in the wilderness help them stay out of trouble in school? What starts off as a weekend of team building takes a scary turn when their instructor goes missing and they are given nothing but pages of a survival guide...

Helping her popular next-door neighbor Gayil set up what she thinks are harmless pranks, 12-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl Shaindy must figure out how to stop them before she becomes the next target when the pranks escalate and turn malicious "Shaindy is a twelve-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl who struggles in school and has no good friends. She watches with envy as her next-door neighbor, Gayil, excels socially and academically. They have little to...

Tired of being good, Bunny and Clyde, a rabbit and a chipmunk, set out to be baddies--rotten to the core--but their best attempts at mastering dastardly deeds and becoming criminals go hilariously awry

"In his first illustrated book created specifically for readers of all ages, Oliver Jeffers shares a very brief history of humanity and shares his dreams for where we go from here. With his bold, iconic art, Oliver Jeffers follows the human path from the dawn of our species through history, sharing profound, sometimes poignant, commentary on our present, and then offers a challenge: Where do we go from here? How can we create new stories and new systems...

"Few things will change your trajectory in life or business as much as learning to make effective decisions. Yet few of us recognize opportunities to decide in the first place. The moments that matter do not always announce themselves. No one pulls you aside and says, slow down and think, you are about to do something stupid. And yet the decisions we make in these moments move us closer or further away from the results we ultimately seek--love, belonging,...

Mayor Good Boy might not be as good as the town of Greenwood thought, as Abby and Aaron begin to consider he may have been a bad boy this whole time

"Pieces of a Girl is a memoir about abuse and addiction and the power of storytelling and community that helped zine creator and novelist Stephanie Kuehnert survive and thrive. Told in journal entries, original illustrations, and pages torn from her actual diaries and zines, this is the story of Stephanie's life as a struggling outsider who survived substance and relationship abuse to become a strong young woman after years trapped in a cycle that...