Jessi Wakefield

What would you do if you were married to a potential killer? In Fiona Barton’s debut novel, The Widow, she tackles this exact question.

Before his demise, Glen was the number one suspect in the abduction and potential murder of two-year-old Bella Elliott, who was kidnapped from her front lawn –years ago, much to the dismay and heartbreak of her mother.

One of my all-time favorite stories is J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, so I take it to heart when someone was to add to the story. Peter Pan, while amazing, let me with a lot of unanswered questions.

How did Peter get to the island? Who taught him to fly? Where did the pirates come from? How did Peter and Tinkerbell meet? Why, if fairy dust allows people to fly, is Peter the only one who can fly without it?

Nothing new under the sun is a common sentiment when it comes to remakes or retellings of popular books and movies. And while oftentimes that feeling might ring true when we read a classic work that has been redone, Marissa Meyer’s teen series The Lunar Chronicles breaks through. 

Today, I’m recommending, the beautifully poetic and award-winning book, Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otuska.

It is the story of a generation of Japanese war brides who leave behind everything they’ve ever known in the hopes of finding a better life in America by marrying men who they’ve only seen in photos and heard from in a handful of letters, promising them good jobs, large houses, and plentiful bounty.

Today I am recommending the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning biography The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss.

In Slade House there is a curious phenomenon taking place: people are disappearing every nine years to the day…  

This is Jessi Wakefield with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. Today I am recommending the delightfully creepy horror story, The Slade House by David Mitchell

Before his death, video-game designer James Halliday created the virtual world known as the OASIS; a place where people could escape the humdrum of everyday life by creating an online persona to endlessly travel through the many worlds of the virtual universe. OASIS made Halliday one of the wealthiest people in the world, but he had no one to take over the company when he died. Upon his death in in the year 2044, Halliday had one last message for the world.

Today I am recommending, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard. It is the story of the 20th president of the United States, James Garfield.  Most people who know of him only really know that he was the president who was assassinated soon after taking office, but as with any true story, there is so much more involved.