AT THE LIBRARY
New items are available at the Hancock County Public Library.
The following items are available at the Hancock County Public Library, 900 W. McKenzie Road. For more information on the library’s collection or to reserve a title, visit hcplibrary.org.
Adult Fiction
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“The Night Watchman,” by Louise Erdich
Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at a factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member trying to understand a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953, and the council members know the bill isn’t about freedom. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”? Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike the other girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She works at the plant, barely making enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.
Adult Nonfiction
“The In-Betweens: The Spirituals, Mediums and Legends of Camp Etna,” by Mira Ptacin
“They believed they would live forever.” So begins Mira Ptacin’s haunting account of the women of Camp Etna, a community in the woods of Maine that, since 1876, has played host to generations of Spiritualists and mediums dedicated to preserving the links between the mortal realm and the afterlife. Beginning her narrative in 1848 with two sisters who claimed they could speak to the dead, Ptacin reveals how Spiritualism first blossomed into a national practice during the Civil War and how it continues to thrive even today. Immersing herself in this community and its practices — from ghost hunting to releasing trapped spirits to water witching, Ptacin sheds new light on our ongoing struggle with faith, uncertainty, and mortality. Blending memoir, ethnography, and investigative reportage, “The In-Betweens” offers a portrait of Camp Etna and its enduring hold on a modern culture that continues to search for a deeper sense of connection and otherworldliness as ever.
