Helen Plum Library

Genevieve (Gwen) Kingston's mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer when Gwen was just three years old. Defying the odds, she lived another eight years, during which time she filled a chest with gifts and letters to Gwen and her brother, Jamie, for every major milestone and birthday through age thirty. The day Gwen got her driver's license. The day she graduated from high school. Gwen is now in her thirties and, when Did I Ever Tell You? begins,...

"From the award-winning New York Times-bestselling author, Alexandra Fuller, comes a career defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child. "Fair to say, I was in a ribald state the summer before my fiftieth birthday." And so begins Alexandra Fuller's open, vivid new memoir, Fi. It's midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from...

Two kids from different worlds form an unexpected friendship. Cody's home life is a messy, terrifying story of neglect and abuse. Autumn is from a wealthy, loving Indigenous family, who is "in" with the popular crowd at school, even though it is hard for her to want to keep up

Wren's Nest is an intergenerational picture book about love, birds, and new life from author Heidi Stemple and illustrator Eugenia Nobati. When Wren was born, Grandpa put a wren box just outside the window of her tiny room. When she was a baby, the wrens sang her to sleep. Each spring, Wren and Grandpa watched the birds bringing sticks and grasses to the box and listened when the babies squealed for their dinner. When Wren's family moves...

"Twins Oliver and Trisha are on a canoe trip with their dad when a freak accident leaves their father badly injured. With no cell phone reception, their only choice is to continue down river and hope to find civilization. And they do-in a small village. Except the people there behave strangely, and weirdest of all is the giant scarecrow in the village square. The townspeople seem nervous-obsessed-with the scarecrow. 'He watches over us,' the twins...

"In the 1960s when Kalia's mother, Chue, was born, the US was actively recruiting Hmong Laotians to assist with CIA efforts in Laos's Secret War. By the time Chue was a teenager, the US had completely vacated Laos, and the country erupted into genocidal attacks on the Hmong people, who were perceived as traitorous for their involvement. Notably, from 1964-1973, Laos became victim to the heaviest bombardment by the United States against communist Pathet...

"Talking about consent can feel overwhelming, especially for young people who may be navigating their own boundaries for the first time. In Say More, consent culture activist Kitty Stryker guides teenagers in exploring what consent means to them. This timely and practical workbook allows the reader to work at their own pace and in their own way, with concrete examples from Kitty's youth, prompts inspired by questions teens have asked her and comprehensive...

"Ginny Masters manages a popular boutique hotel in Seattle, but the daily challenges and irritations of a fast-paced job and a demanding boss are starting to get to her. Jacqueline Potter manages her grandfather's fishing lodge in Idaho because it was the only job she could find after graduating with her hospitality degree. She's grateful for the work but longs for a more sophisticated and cosmopolitan life she's just not going to find in this backwoods...

Camera-shy Elise Branson is different from the other women in her maternal line. Her mother is an award-winning actress. Her late grandmother, Vivian Snow, is a beloved Hollywood icon. But when Elise's upcoming wedding coincides with a documentary being made about Vivian, Elise can't escape the camera's gaze. And neither can her grandmother, even in death. It's 1943 when Vivian, a small-town Indiana girl, lends her home front support to the war effort....

"Two sisters roll up their sleeves to run a dilapidated beach-town inn but must learn to work with the current tenants in this deliciously spicy reimagining of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility by Nikki Payne. Nora needs a reinvention fast. But where can you go when the entire Internet knows your face? (And ass... but Nora tries not to talk about that.) After discovering at her father's funeral that she and her sister, Yanne, have lived their entire...