Simcoe Reads is back and this year there are seven amazing books from seven amazing authors. Based on Canada Reads, Simcoe Libraries have joined forces to create a summer reading program for adults. Each library has selected a Champion to read and defend their book choice at the final debate in the fall. Read one, any or all 7 of the chosen titles this summer and cast your vote for who should win #SimcoeReads2021 in this friendly competition.
The libraries participating this year are: Barrie, Bradford, Essa, Innisfil, Midland, New Tecumseth, and Ramara.
This year Essa Public Library is proud to introduce Grace Baker as our Champion. Meet Grace here in this YouTube interview. Grace has chosen to defend Jael Richardson's 2021 novel, Gutter Child. Below is a list of all the great books offered for Simcoe Reads.
Gutter Child by Jael Richardson, 2021. Fiction
Essa Public Library's selection.
Set in an imagined world in which the most vulnerable are forced to buy their freedom by working off their debt to society, Gutter Child uncovers a nation divided into the privileged Mainland and the policed Gutter. In this world, Elimina Dubois is one of only 100 babies taken from the Gutter and raised in the land of opportunity as part of a social experiment led by the Mainland government.
But when her Mainland mother dies, Elimina finds herself all alone, a teenager forced into an unfamiliar life of servitude, unsure of who she is and where she belongs. Elimina is sent to an academy with new rules and expectations where she befriends Gutter children who are making their own way through the Gutter System in whatever ways they know how. When Elimina’s life takes another unexpected turn, she will discover that what she needs more than anything may not be the freedom she longs for after all.
Join last year's Community Choice Champion, Emily Nakeff, as she introduces Gutter Child on YouTube.
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott, 2019. Non-Fiction Barrie Public Library's selection.
In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with inter-generational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, writing and representation, and in the process makes connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political--from overcoming a years-long battle with head lice to the way Native writers are treated within the Canadian literary industry; her unplanned teenage pregnancy to the history of dark matter and how it relates to racism in the court system; her childhood diet of Kraft Dinner to how systemic oppression is directly linked to health problems in Native communities.
Visit our YouTube page and watch Essa Public Library's CEO, Laura, introduce Barrie Public Library's selection.
Ayesha At Last by Uzma Jalaluddin, 2019. Fiction
Bradford West Gwillimbury Public Library's selection.
A modern-day Muslim Pride and Prejudice for a new generation of love.
Ayesha Shamsi has a lot going on. Her dreams of being a poet have been set aside for a teaching job so she can pay off her debts to her wealthy uncle. She lives with her boisterous Muslim family and is always being reminded that her flighty younger cousin, Hafsa, is close to rejecting her one hundredth marriage proposal. Though Ayesha is lonely, she doesn't want an arranged marriage. Then she meets Khalid, who is just as smart and handsome as he is conservative and judgmental. She is irritatingly attracted to someone who looks down on her choices and who dresses like he belongs in the seventh century.
When a surprise engagement is announced between Khalid and Hafsa, Ayesha is torn between how she feels about the straightforward Khalid and the unsettling new gossip she hears about his family. Looking into the rumors, she finds she has to deal with not only what she discovers about Khalid, but also the truth she realizes about herself.
Join our Manager of Library Services, Glenda, on YouTube as she introduces Bradford's selection.
The Company We Keep by Frances Itani, 2020. Fiction
Innisfil IdeaLAB and Library's selection.
Hazzley is at loose ends, even three years after the death of her husband. When her longtime friend Cassandra, café owner and occasional dance-class partner, suggests that she start up a conversation group, Hazzley posts a notice on the community board at the local grocery store.
Four people turn up for the first meeting: Gwen, a recent retiree in her early 60s who finds herself pet-sitting a cantankerous parrot; Chiyo, a 40-year-old fitness instructor who cared for her unyielding but gossip-loving mother through the final days of her life; Addie, a woman preemptively grieving a close friend who is seriously ill; and Tom, an antiques dealer and amateur poet who, deprived of home baking since becoming a widower, comes to the first meeting hoping cake will be served. Before long, they are joined by Allam, a Syrian refugee with his own story to tell.
These six strangers are learning that beginnings can be possible at any stage of life. But, as they tell their stories, they must navigate what is shared and what is withheld. Which version of the truth will be revealed? Who is prepared to step up when help is needed?
Join our Coordinator of Children and Family Experiences, Holly, on YouTube as she introduces Innisfil's selection.
The Centaur's Wife by Amanda Leduc, 2021. Fiction
Midland Public Library's selection.
Heather is sleeping peacefully after the birth of her twin daughters when the sound of the world ending jolts her awake. Stumbling outside with her babies and her new husband, Brendan, she finds that their city has been destroyed by falling meteors and that her little family are among only a few who survived.
But the mountain that looms over the city is still green--somehow it has been spared the destruction that has brought humanity to the brink of extinction. Heather is one of the few who know the mountain, a place city-dwellers have always been forbidden to go. Her dad took her up the mountain when she was a child on a misguided quest to heal her legs, damaged at birth. The tragedy that resulted has shaped her life, bringing her both great sorrow and an undying connection to the deep magic of the mountain, made real by the beings she and her dad encountered that day: Estajfan, a centaur born of sorrow and of an ancient, impossible love, and his two siblings, marooned between the magical and the human world. Even as those in the city around her--led by Tasha, a charismatic doctor who fled to the city from the coast with her wife and other refugees--struggle to keep everyone alive, Heather constantly looks to the mountain, drawn by love, by fear, by the desire for rescue. She is torn in two by her awareness of what unleashed the meteor shower and what is coming for the few survivors, once the green and living earth makes a final reckoning of the usefulness of human life and finds it wanting.
Join our Public Engagement Representative, Victoria, as she introduces Midland's selection on YouTube.
Greenwood by Michael Christie, 2020. Fiction
New Tecumseth Public Library's selection.
It's 2034 and Jake Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests. It's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, fallen from a ladder and sprawled on his broken back, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It's 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father's once vast and violent timber empire. It's 1934 and Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple syrup camp squat when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: thrumming a steady, silent pulse beneath Christie's effortless sentences and working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival.
Join Victoria on YouTube, as she introduces this selection from New Tecumseth.
Indians on Vacation by Thomas King, 2020. Fiction
Ramara Public Library's selection.
Meet Bird and Mimi in this brilliant new novel from one of Canada’s foremost authors. Inspired by a handful of old postcards sent by Uncle Leroy nearly a hundred years earlier, Bird and Mimi attempt to trace Mimi’s long-lost uncle and the family medicine bundle he took with him to Europe.
By turns witty, sly and poignant, this is the unforgettable tale of one couple’s holiday trip to Europe, where their wanderings through its famous capitals reveal a complicated history, both personal and political.
Visit our YouTube page and watch Karly, our Coordinator of Children and Family Experiences, as she introduces Ramara's selection.
But wait! Join us on Thursday, August 26th for an author talk with Grace Baker and Jael Richardson as they discuss Richardson's book Gutter Child. This is a registered event and you can sign up here to attend. Stay tuned for the September Live Debate on Rogers TV--more details on the way.
Dawn Travers
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