Peachy Reads

The Virgin Suicides / Jeffrey Eugenides Click here to check for availability at AFPLS The title reveals the ending, so there is no surprise, but that is not to say there is no suspense. The Virgin Suicides recounts the story of the Lisbon sisters and the tragic gradual unraveling of their well-structured existence in suburban Detroit of the 1970s. Fate leads inevitably towards the final chapter of the book, which is also the final chapter of their short lives. Cecelia is the first to go (by self-defenestration) and her sudden death seems to set a chain of events in motion that eventually brings all her sisters with her (there is even speculation that Cecelia’s suicide released a contagion that infected her siblings). The story is told in the voice of the neighborhood boys who shared the same street and the same school with the Lisbon girls, secretly admiring them, mostly from afar, in life as well as after death. The identities of the boys remain somewhat mysterious to the reader, ...

Remarkable Creatures / Tracy Chevalier Click here to check for availability at AFPLS The best-selling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring brings us the story of Mary Anning, an early nineteenth century amateur paleontologist and discoverer of fossils. From her base in Lyme Regis in what is now known as Southern England’s Jurassic Coast, Mary Anning discovered amazingly complete fossilized skeletons of ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and prehistoric fish. Because she uncovered fossilized impressions of “monsters” of which people understood very little (this was years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or much understanding of geologic eras and extinctions), her discoveries challenged the prevailing view of God’s creation and plan, and caused her to be regarded with suspicion. (Fast forward 200 years to certain school districts in the US.) Mary Anning’s story is all the more remarkable because she was an unschooled woman from the lower class operating in a field dominated by educa...