The Brookfield Citizen

Brenda Metterville

We have new magazine titles added to the library collection for circulation: Bead and Button, Cook’s Magazine, Family Handyman, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation and Saturday Evening Post. Popular favorites still available (but not limited to) include: Real Simple, Bride’s, Parenting, ESPN, People Weekly, Oprah and Country Living. All the magazines circulate for two weeks, including the current issue. Newspapers available are: Worcester Telegram & Gazette (weekly and Sunday), Southbridge Evening News, and the Spencer New Leader.

The Friends of the Library are holding their Silent Auction! The final day for bids will be Friday, May 27 by 5 p.m. Winners will be called.

Spring Clean
Book donations are accepted year round for the Friends of the Library’s Apple Country Fair Book Sale. Boxes may be left in the foyer of the library during regular hours.

Banister Book Group
The group will meet at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 31 to discuss Hidden in Plain View by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard, Ph.D.

In Hidden in Plain View, historian Jacqueline Tobin and scholar Raymond Dobard offer the first proof that certain quilt patterns, including a prominent one called the Charleston Code, were, in fact, essential tools for escape along the Underground Railroad. In 1993, historian Jacqueline Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts in the Old Market Building of Charleston, S.C. With the admonition to "write this down," Williams began to describe how slaves made coded quilts and used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad. But just as quickly as she started, Williams stopped, informing Tobin that she would learn the rest when she was "ready." During the three years it took for Williams's narrative to unfold—and as the friendship and trust between the two women grew—Tobin enlisted Raymond Dobard, Ph.D., an art history professor and well-known African American quilter, to help unravel the mystery.

Part adventure and part history, Hidden in Plain View traces the origin of the Charleston Code from Africa to the Carolinas, from the low-country island Gullah peoples to free blacks living in the cities of the North, and shows how three people from completely different backgrounds pieced together one amazing American story. –Amazon.com

On Tuesday, June 28 at 7:30 p.m., the group discusses Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.
One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor.

Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learn to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic American odyssey—hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.

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