Library News

A loaf of sourdough bread on a small wooden cutting board, next to a sprig of rosemary.
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Sourdough Recipe Roundup: Our Favorite Recipes, Plus Cookbooks!

Six months ago, one Cromaine staff member gifted a sourdough starter to another.

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A can of Elephant Juice IPA in front of a tray filled with beer sample cups during an Ale Together Now program.
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Ale Together Now: IPAs of the USA

IPAs, or India pale ales, are a beer style that can elicit strong reactions from beer drinkers-- most of us tend to absolutely love them or despise them because of their bold, hoppy flavor profile.

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A graphic of an orange cookbook with a measuring cup and a wooden spoon.
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Recipe Club and Potluck: June 2025

The dishes shared at this month's Recipe Club and Potluck program were cozy and delicious!

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New at Cromaine

Book cover for "Flip the Tables"

Flip the Tables

"Most of us want our lives to have meaning and purpose, but too often we don't know where to start. Each of us has unique gifts, talents, and perspectives that the world needs right now. We just have to find the courage to realize what they are. By disrupting ourselves first, we gain insights into what blocks us from opportunities to create change, from opening doors and breaking down walls. Once we're living ON purpose, we can step into a life that boldly challenges the world around us. Only then can we become a powerful catalyst for change. We are the light needed in a dark world, and that begins with shining our own. Flip the Tables is a guide for those who want to be disruptors. For people who have been told that they cannot change the world, even though they know otherwise. This is a manifesto for people who want to learn how to be visionary change makers, right where they are, no matter who you are. Alencia Johnson shares her personal stories-from working through insecurities and overcoming adversity, to advocating for women's rights at Planned Parenthood, and including advising presidential campaigns. She also dives into stories of powerful movements and people-known and unknown-who've challenged the way we think and show up in the world. Alencia takes readers behind-the-scenes to learn the ins-and-outs of living a purposeful and impactful life, embracing joy every step of the way. With self-assessments at the end of each chapter and actionable ideas to implement now, she shows readers how to create change by starting with their own dreams. Being a changemaker may sound like a lofty goal but, the truth is, the world is waiting for the greatness in every one of us. You can create change right where you are. Flip the Tables will show you how"--

Book cover for "Ordinary Time"

Ordinary Time

In her first book, the popular From the Front Porch podcast host and independent bookstore owner challenges the idea that loud lives are the ones that matter most, reminding us that we don't have to leave the lives we have in order to have the lives of which we've always dreamed.

Can life be an adventure, even when it's just . . . ordinary

Annie Jones always assumed adulthood would mean adventure: a high-powered career; life in a big, bustling city; and travels to far-flung places she'd longed to see. But her reality turned out differently. As the years passed, Annie was still in the same small town running an independent bookstore --the kind of life Nora Ephron dreamed.

During that time, she hosted friends' goodbye parties and mailed parting gifts; wrote recommendation letters and wished former shop staffers well. She stayed in her small town, despite her love of big cities; stayed in her marriage to the guy she met when she was 18; and she stayed at her bookstore while the world outside shifted steadily toward digital retailers. And she stayed loyal to a faith she sometimes didn't recognize.

After ten years, Annie realized she might never leave. But instead of regret, she had an epiphany. She awakened to the gifts of a quiet life spent staying put.

In Ordinary Time, Annie challenges the idea that loud lives matter most. Rummaging through her small-town existence, she finds hidden gifts of humor and hope from a life lived quietly. Staying, can itself be a radical act. It takes courage to stay in the places we've always called home, Jones argues, as she paints a portrait of possibility far away from thriving metropolises and Monica Gellar-inspired apartments.

We've long been encouraged to follow our dreams, to pack up and move to new places and leave old lives--and past selves--behind. While there is beauty in these kinds of adventures, Ordinary Time helps us see ourselves right where we are: in the middle of messy, mundane lives, maybe not too far from where we grew up. We don't have to leave to find what we yearn--we can choose to stay, celebrating and honoring our ordinary lives, which might turn out to be bigger and better than we ever imagined.

Book cover for "The Keeper of Lonely Spirits"

The Keeper of Lonely Spirits

"Anderson writes a curmudgeonly immortal protagonist and a (literally) haunting story full of heart; a delightful novel." --Library Journal starred review

"This heartwarming, thrilling book cleverly uses horror tropes to achieve a powerful effect, suffusing the reader with warmth and kindness." --The Washington Post

In this mesmerizing, wonderfully moving queer cozy horror fantasy, an immortal ghost hunter must confront his tragic past and solve a centuries-old mystery in order to embrace his found family. 

Find an angry spirit. Send it on its way before it causes trouble. Leave before anyone learns his name.

After over two hundred years, Peter Shaughnessy is ready to die and end this cycle. But thanks to a youthful encounter with one o' them folk in his native Ireland, he can't. Instead, he's cursed to wander eternally far from home, with the ability to see ghosts and talk to plants.

Immortality means Peter has lost everyone he's ever loved. And so he centers his life on the dead--until his wandering brings him to Harrington, Ohio. As he searches for a vengeful spirit, Peter's drawn into the townsfolk's lives, homes and troubles. For the first time in over a century, he wants something other than death.

But the people of Harrington will die someday. And he won't.

As Harrington buckles under the weight of the supernatural, the ghost hunt pits Peter's well-being against that of his new friends and the man he's falling for. If he stays, he risks heartbreak. If he leaves, he risks their lives.

Book cover for "Spell Freedom"

Spell Freedom

The acclaimed author of the “stirring, definitive, and engrossing” (NPR) The Woman’s Hour returns with the story of four activists whose audacious plan to restore voting rights to Black Americans laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.

In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.

Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights—and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists—many of them women—trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, “Mother of the Movement.”

In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a riveting, crucially important lens onto our past, and a deeply moving story for our present.

Book cover for "The Big Hop"

The Big Hop

In 1919, in Newfoundland, four teams of aviators came from Britain to compete in "the Big Hop": an audacious race to be the first to fly, nonstop, across the Atlantic Ocean. One pair of competitors was forced to abandon the journey halfway, and two pairs never made it into the air. Only one team, after a death-defying sixteen-hour flight, made it to Ireland.

Celebrated on both continents, the transatlantic contest offered a surge of inspiration--and a welcome distraction--to a public reeling from the Great War and the influenza pandemic. But the seven airmen who made the attempt were quickly forgotten, their achievement overshadowed by the solo Atlantic flights of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart years later. In The Big Hop, David Rooney grants the pioneering aviators of 1919 the spotlight they deserve. From Harry Hawker, the pilot who as a young man had watched Houdini fly over his native Australia, to the engineer Ted Brown, a US citizen who joined the Royal Flying Corps, Rooney traces the lives of the unassuming men who performed extraordinary acts in the sky.

Mining evocative first-person accounts and aviation archives, Rooney also follows the participants' journeys: learning to fly on flimsy airplanes made of timber struts and varnished fabric; surviving the bloodiest war that Europe had ever yet seen; and battling faulty coolant systems, severe storms, and extreme fatigue while attempting the Atlantic. Rooney transports readers to the world in which the great contest took place, and traces the rise of aviation to its daredevil peak in the early decades of the twentieth century. Recounting a deeply moving adventure, The Big Hop explores why flights like these matter, and why we take to the skies.