From the New York Times bestselling author of My Name Is Mary Sutter comes a rich and compelling historical novel about the disappearance of two young girls after a cataclysmic blizzard. When what happened to them is revealed, the uproar that ensues tears apart families, reputations, and even the social fabric of the city, exposing dark secrets about some of the most powerful of its citizens, and putting fragile loves and lives at great risk.
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Here, Robin Oliveria discusses what libraries mean to her:
“Libraries mean everything to me. In fact, I am getting tearful answering this question. The beginning of my love affair with libraries was in grade school. Library hour was my favorite hour of the school week. I would hunt down the books I wanted to read (and read again), curl up in one corner on the floor (under biographical fiction, usually), hook one leg around my pile of books so that no one else could take them, open one, and read for the entire hour. At the end of that hour, I would stagger to the checkout desk with my many selections, which I would then devour after school. My parents had five children. They could never have afforded to buy me all the books I wanted to read.
Now, I credit librarians and archivists with helping me to hunt down obscure research materials for my novels, obtain inter-library loans of even more obscure, sometimes very valuable books, and answering my many questions on the phone when I’ve hit a brick wall trying to answer, for instance, some arcane tidbit of 19th century law. Every sort of library—law, community, university, medical—has helped me. I’m always astonished and grateful that librarians go out of their way to offer assistance. And I always breathe a sigh of homecoming when I enter a library. I love books. I love their smell, their feel, and the treasures they hold inside. Yes, I gush. But libraries made me into a reader, and becoming a reader made me into a writer.”