Upcoming Events

This event is in the "Adults" group
Library Branch: Waunakee Public Library
Age Group: Adults
Event Details:

Celebrate National Library Card Sign-Up Month by using your library card All Around Town!

Closed for Labor Day

All Day
Closing
Branches:
Waunakee Public Library
This event is in the "Adults" group

A Good Yarn

10:00am–12:00pm
Adults
Library Branch: Waunakee Public Library
Room: Living Room
Age Group: Adults
Event Details:

Bring your current knitting/crochet project for a social hour with a group of like-minded fiber friends! Meets in the Library's cozy Living Room.

This event is in the "Adults" group
Virtual Event
Library Branch: Waunakee Public Library
Room: Zoom / Virtual
Age Group: Adults
Program Type: Virtual
Event Details:

Embrace your dark side (and your best evil laugh) and join us in conversation with Hannah Nicole Maehrer, creator of the New York Times bestselling Assistant to the Villain

This event is in the "Teen / Preteen" group

Preteen Book Club

6:30pm–7:30pm
Teen / Preteen
Library Branch: Waunakee Public Library
Room: Living Room
Age Group: Teen / Preteen
Program Type: Book Club
Event Details:

Preteens (grades 5-8), come join us as we discuss this month's book club choice. This month, we're reading The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman by Gennifer Choldenko. Books are available in the library. 

This event is in the "Adults" group

Good Morning Games

9:00am–11:00am
Adults
Library Branch: Waunakee Public Library
Room: Community Hall
Age Group: Adults
Event Details:

Join us for an adult game group where we play Mahjong (Filipino style)! Don't know how to play, but want to learn? We are happy to teach! See you there!

Recommended Reads

Image for "Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries"

Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

A curmudgeonly professor journeys to a small town in the far north to study faerie folklore and discovers dark fae magic, friendship, and love in the start of a heartwarming and enchanting new fantasy series.

“A darkly gorgeous fantasy that sparkles with snow and magic.”—Sangu Mandanna, author of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world’s first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small talk at a party—or even get invited to one. And she prefers the company of her books, her dog, Shadow, and the Fair Folk to other people.

So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hrafnsvik, Emily has no intention of befriending the gruff townsfolk. Nor does she care to spend time with another new arrival: her dashing and insufferably handsome academic rival Wendell Bambleby, who manages to charm the townsfolk, muddle Emily’s research, and utterly confound and frustrate her.

But as Emily gets closer and closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones—the most elusive of all faeries—lurking in the shadowy forest outside the town, she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: Who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want? To find the answer, she’ll have to unlock the greatest mystery of all—her own heart.

Image for "Warrior Girl Unearthed"

Warrior Girl Unearthed

An Instant New York Times bestseller! A #1 Indies Bestseller! Six Starred Reviews! 

#1 New York Times bestselling author of Firekeeper's Daughter Angeline Boulley takes us back to Sugar Island in this high-stakes thriller about the power of discovering your stolen history.

Perry Firekeeper-Birch has always known who she is - the laidback twin, the troublemaker, the best fisher on Sugar Island. Her aspirations won't ever take her far from home, and she wouldn't have it any other way. But as the rising number of missing Indigenous women starts circling closer to home, as her family becomes embroiled in a high-profile murder investigation, and as greedy grave robbers seek to profit off of what belongs to her Anishinaabe tribe, Perry begins to question everything.

In order to reclaim this inheritance for her people, Perry has no choice but to take matters into her own hands. She can only count on her friends and allies, including her overachieving twin and a charming new boy in town with unwavering morals. Old rivalries, sister secrets, and botched heists cannot - will not - stop her from uncovering the mystery before the ancestors and missing women are lost forever.

Sometimes, the truth shouldn't stay buried.

Angeline Boulley's award-winning canon of books puts compelling characters and fast-paced action at the center of narratives rich in historical context. Read Firekeeper's Daughter, Warrior Girl Unearthed, and the soon-to-be-released Sisters of the Wind in any order, but like the world itself, there are echoes within each for the other stories.


Pick this up if you love:
high stakes heist
will-they-won't-they romance
family secrets spanning decades


 

Image for "Night Magic"

Night Magic

From a New York Times bestselling nature writer comes a celebration of what goes on outside in the dark, from blooming moon gardens to nocturnal salamanders, from glowing foxfire and synchronous fireflies that blink in unison like an orchestra of light. 

In this glorious celebration of the night, New York Times bestselling nature writer Leigh Ann Henion invites us to leave our well-lit homes, step outside, and embrace the dark as a profoundly beautiful part of the world we inhabit. Because no matter where we live, we are surrounded by animals that rise with the moon, and blooms that reveal themselves as light fades. Henion explores her home region of Appalachia, where she attends a synchronous firefly event in Tennessee, a bat outing in Alabama, and a moth festival in Ohio. In North Carolina, she finds forests alight with bioluminescent mushrooms, neighborhood trees full of screech owls, and valleys teeming with migratory salamanders. Along the way, Henion encounters naturalists, biologists, primitive-skills experts, and others who've dedicated their lives to cultivating relationships with darkness. 

Every page of this lyrical book feels like an opportunity to ask: How did I not know about this before? For example, we learn that it can take hours, not minutes, for human eyes to reach full night vision capacity. And that there are thousands of firefly species on earth, many with flash patterns as unique as fingerprints. In an age of increasing artificial light, Night Magic focuses on the amazing biodiversity that still surrounds us after sunset. We do not need to stargaze into the distant cosmos or dive into the depths of oceans to find awe in the dark. There are dazzling wonders in our own backyards. And readers of World of Wonders, Entangled Life, and The Hidden Life of Trees will discover joy in Night Magic.

Image for "How to Say Babylon"

How to Say Babylon

With echoes of Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them. 

How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.