Big Library Read is back! Join millions of eBook readers around the world and download two titles, no holds, no waiting! From Overdrive: "Offered several times throughout the year, Big Library Read provides participating OverDrive library and school partners free simultaneous access to a selected title that any reader with a library card can instantly start reading without holds or waitlists. For the first time ever we’re offering two titles."
Overdrive's Big Library Read program is featuring two Young Adult novels -- Robin McKinley's A Door in the Hedge and Cat Winters's In the Shadow of Blackbirds -- that you can download between October 7th and October 21st, no holds, no waiting! Both books would make excellent Halloween reading, so grab yours today from our digital catalog!
THE DOOR IN THE HEDGE
BY ROBIN MCKINLEY
Suitable for ages 10 and up.
“The last mortal kingdom before the unmeasured sweep of Faerieland begins has at best held an uneasy truce with its unpredictable neighbor. There is nothing to show a boundary, at least on the mortal side of it; and if any ordinary human creature ever saw a faerie—or at any rate recognized one—it was never mentioned; but the existence of the boundary and of faeries beyond it is never in doubt either.” So begins “The Stolen Princess,” the first story of this collection, about the meeting between the human princess Linadel and the faerie prince Donathor. “The Princess and the Frog” concerns Rana and her unexpected alliance with a small, green, flipper-footed denizen of a pond in the palace gardens. “The Hunting of the Hind” tells of a princess who has bewitched her beloved brother, hoping to beg some magic of cure, for her brother is dying, and the last tale is a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses in which an old soldier discovers, with a little help from a lavender-eyed witch, the surprising truth about where the princesses dance their shoes to tatters every night.
IN THE SHADOW OF BLACKBIRDS
BY CAT WINTERS
Suitable for ages 14 and up.
Note: Contains mature themes/language.
In 1918, the world seems on the verge of apocalypse. Americans roam the streets in gauze masks to ward off the deadly Spanish influenza, and the government ships young men to the front lines of a brutal war, creating an atmosphere of fear and confusion. Sixteen-year-old Mary Shelley Black watches as desperate mourners flock to séances and spirit photographers for comfort, but she herself has never believed in ghosts. During her bleakest moment, however, she’s forced to rethink her entire way of looking at life and death, for her first love—a boy who died in battle—returns in spirit form. But what does he want from her? Featuring haunting archival early-twentieth-century photographs, this is a tense, romantic story set in a past that is eerily like our own time.