Upcoming Events

Closed

1:00pm–8:00pm
Closing
Branches:
Waunakee Public Library

Closed

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

Saturday Social

9:00am–10:30am
Adults
Library Branch: Waunakee Public Library
Room: Den
Age Group: Adults

Get to know your neighbors at our Saturday Social!  Join us in the den on the first Saturday of the month to meet new people in a warm and welcoming space. There will be complimentary coffee/tea and donuts to enjoy while catching up with old and new friends.

This event is in the "Kids" group
This event is in the "Birth to Pre-K" group

Story Crafters

10:00am–10:30am
Kids, Birth to Pre-K
Library Branch: Waunakee Public Library
Room: Storytime Room
Age Group: Kids, Birth to Pre-K
Program Type: Storytime

Meet at the library for a story, song, and a craft! 

This program is recommended for all ages and their caregiver. No registration required.

This event is in the "Kids" group
This event is in the "School Age" group

Pokémon Club

3:30pm–4:30pm
Kids, School Age
Library Branch: Waunakee Public Library
Room: Storytime Room
Age Group: Kids, School Age

Join fellow Pokémon players and fans to enjoy all things Pokémon. Bring your Pokémon card collection to battle, share or trade. Play a Pokémon board game, do a Pokémon themed craft or activity, talk with fellow players, and just hang out. Don’t own any cards? You can use ours! 

For grades K-4. No registration required.

This event is in the "Kids" group
This event is in the "Birth to Pre-K" group
This event is in the "School Age" group

Jammie Jams

6:30pm–7:00pm
Kids, Birth to Pre-K, School Age
Library Branch: Waunakee Public Library
Room: Storytime Room
Age Group: Kids, Birth to Pre-K, School Age
Program Type: Storytime

Wear your coziest pajamas and join us in the Library for an evening storytime! We’ll share favorite stories, rhymes, activities, and more. 

This storytime is recommended for all ages and their caregiver (siblings always welcome!). All storytimes are inclusive and welcoming. You are encouraged to attend the storytime that best meets your needs. Registration is not required.

Recommended Reads

Image for "The Library of Curiosities"

The Library of Curiosities

11-year-old Rowan Fitzgerald discovers the library her estranged grandfather runs is filled with magical objects--but only one holds the key to her family's mysterious past.

After being expelled from boarding school--again--Rowan isn't sure what to expect upon arriving at Fitzgerald Manor. But it sure isn't this. 

The estate is opulent. Lush. Grand. Mind-boggling. And at the heart of it all is Cillian Fitzgerald, her enigmatic grandfather, and his pride and joy: the Library of Curiosities.

Now, everyone knows that libraries are the best. But the Library of Curiosities is the best of the best, because its collection contains a vast trove of magical objects from which lucky patrons can borrow to fix their everyday problems. Still stuck on that language arts story assignment? Try writing it on the enchanted typewriter and see if that doesn't get the words flowing. Hoping to land the lead in the school musical? Check out a wishing sock. (Use high heat to activate.)

It doesn't take long for Rowan to realize that in this wondrous place, her own problems--her painful want of family, her deep desire for friends--might actually be solved for the first time in her life. 

Except. 

Except that library curiosities have started going missing, and suspicion is falling squarely on Rowan's shoulders. 

Except that Cillian's dangerous archenemy, the vengeful and slippery Silverjack, now has Rowan in his sights, too. 

Except that there is the ongoing matter of the Everhart curiosity, which hasn't been seen in years, but if found could help Rowan at last unsnarl her family's tangled, strange history.

To clear her name, to avoid capture, to locate the Everhart, Rowan will have to fight forces both within and outside of the library that threaten everything she's only just begun to hold dear.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

Image for "Rodham"

Rodham

In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Life magazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she’s attending Yale Law School, and she’s on the forefront of student activism and the women’s rights movement. And then she meets Bill Clinton. A handsome, charismatic southerner and fellow law student, Bill is already planning his political career. In each other, the two find a profound intellectual, emotional, and physical connection that neither has previously experienced.
 
In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton.
 
But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s powerfully imagined tour-de-force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road. Feeling doubt about the prospective marriage, she endures their devastating breakup and leaves Arkansas. Over the next four decades, she blazes her own trail—one that unfolds in public as well as in private, that involves crossing paths again (and again) with Bill Clinton, that raises questions about the tradeoffs all of us must make in building a life.
 
Brilliantly weaving a riveting fictional tale into actual historical events, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers an uncannily astute and witty story for our times. In exploring the loneliness, moral ambivalence, and iron determination that characterize the quest for political power, as well as both the exhilaration and painful compromises demanded of female ambition in a world still run mostly by men, Rodham is a singular and unforgettable novel.

Image for "Breathing Fire"

Breathing Fire

A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires.

Shawna was overcome by the claustrophobia, the heat, the smoke, the fire, all just down the canyon and up the ravine. She was feeling the adrenaline, but also the terror of doing something for the first time. She knew how to run with a backpack; they had trained her physically. But that’s not training for flames. That’s not live fire.

California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year — fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews. 

In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate — a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting.

Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril.

Image for "Murder by Memory"

Murder by Memory

Becky Chambers meets Miss Marple in this sci-fi ode to the cozy mystery, helmed by a formidable no-nonsense auntie of a detective

A mind is a terrible thing to erase...

Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty's most luxurious interstellar passenger liner! Room and board are included, new bodies are graciously provided upon request, and should you desire a rest between lifetimes, your mind shall be most carefully preserved in glass in the Library, shielded from every danger.

Near the topmost deck of an interstellar generation ship, Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers—just as someone else is found murdered. As one of the ship’s detectives, Dorothy usually delights in unraveling the schemes on board the Fairweather, but when she finds that someone is not only killing bodies but purposefully deleting minds from the Library, she realizes something even more sinister is afoot.

Dorothy suspects her misfortune is partly the fault of her feckless nephew Ruthie who, despite his brilliance as a programmer, leaves chaos in his cheerful wake. Or perhaps the sultry yarn store proprietor—and ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy is currently inhabiting—knows more than she’s letting on. Whatever it is, Dorothy intends to solve this case. Because someone has done the impossible and found a way to make murder on the Fairweather a very permanent state indeed. A mastermind may be at work—and if so, they’ve had three hundred years to perfect their schemes...

Told through Dorothy’s delightfully shrewd POV, this novella is an ode to the cozy mystery taken to the stars with a fresh new sci-fi take. Perfect for fans of the plot-twisty narratives of Dorothy Sayers and Ann Leckie, this well-paced story will leave readers captivated and hungry for the series’s next installment.