July 8, 2021

Press release from Shreve Memorial Library:

July 8, 2021

Each year, Shreve Memorial Library’s One Book One Parish campaign unites Caddo Parish by promoting one book title throughout the month of October. This year, the library is asking the public to help select one of four novels to be the 2021 One Book One Parish title. Beginning Monday, July 12, the public will be able to cast their vote for one of the following titles: Educated by Tara Westover, The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, or The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett.

Voting for the One Book One Parish title will take place Monday, July 12 through Sunday, July 25. Shreve Memorial Library patrons and the public can cast their vote in branches or online at https://bit.ly/OBOPvote21. The winning title for One Book One Parish will be announced shortly after voting closes. 

One Book One Parish encourages adults to read and join a parish-wide conversation about one particular book. Throughout the month of October, special programs, including book discussions, author talks, craft event, interactive displays, and additional themed-programs related to the selected book title, are held at Shreve Memorial Library branches throughout Caddo Parish and online.

Summaries of the titles up for One Book One Parish are listed below. For more information, please visit www.shreve-lib.org.

One Book One Parish Title Selections

Educated by Tara Westover

Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

From Kristin Hannah, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone, comes an epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America’s most defining eras – the Great Depression. Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with a vengeance. In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli – like so many of her neighbors – must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life. The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American Dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission – and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery – and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he? An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could deliver, Project Hail Mary, is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian – while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect? Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins. As with her New York Times bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.

This press release was produced by Shreve Memorial Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.