Reading With Libraries Episode 10-03: A book with mythical creatures

Reading With Libraries season ten logo

Welcome to Reading With Libraries! Thank you for joining us again on our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

Our organization is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we work with all types of libraries. We are here to talk about books and share library ideas!

This season we are exploring all new ideas for books and book suggestions, so you can expand your reading horizons, and share more information with your library community. We are looking at prompts from the 2023 PopSugar reading challenge this season. You can read along with their challenge, linked in our show notes, or just enjoy some different books. 

We are ready to have a good time this week, as we explore books with mythical creatures! If you can dream it up, it’s in a book somewhere; so let’s explore some stories that will be filled with adventures.

Check out our show notes page for links to our beverages, our resources, and the books we share today.

Beverages:

This is, of course, a book group. And every book group needs to have beverages, so you really get the feel for your reading! 

This week’s beverages are from the article 10 Mythical-Themed Cocktails for National Unicorn Day! Enjoy several different beverages, with a wide variety of very pretty colors

Green Peach Princess

All you dessert cocktail lovers out there definitely need to check out this Green Peach Princess cocktail. This awesome candy cocktail combines green apple vodka, Sour Apple Pucker, and Strawberry Kiwi Kool-Aid. It’s rimmed and garnished with green sugar and Candy Apple Sugar Rings to maximize that sweet cocktail factor.

GREEN PEACH PRINCESS

1/2 oz. (15 ml) Green Apple Vodka

1/2 oz. (15 ml) Sour Apple Pucker

1/2 oz. (15 ml) Strawberry Kiwi Kool-Aid

Rim: Green Sugar

Garnish: Candy Apple Sugar Rings

PREPARATION

1. Rim the edge of a rocks glass using green sugar.

2. Build the glass using ice and green candy apple sugar rings.

3. Add green apple vodka, sour apple pucker, and strawberry kiwi kool-aid.

4. Add some more green apple sugar rings as garnish. DRINK RESPONSIBLY! 

Pixy Dust Margarita

Candy margarita recipes do not get sweet or more ridiculous than this Pixy Dust Margarita, trust us. This incredible candy tequila cocktail mixes up tequila, Triple Sec, sweet n’ sour, lime juice, and margarita mixer, and is topped off with Pixy candy dust for maximum sweet margarita action.

PIXY DUST MARGARITA

1 oz. (30ml) Tequila

1 oz. (30ml) Triple Sec

1/2 oz. (15ml) Sweet N Sour

1/2 oz. (15ml) Lime Juice

1 oz. (30ml) Margarita Mixer

Garnish: Pixy Dust

PREPARATION

1. Shake ingredients with ice and set aside.

2. Filled margarita glass with crushed ice and pour mix over. Pour each flavor of pixie stir on top.

3. DRINK RESPONSIBLY!

Genre Discussion:

Mythological creatures are so fun to read about, because there is such a huge variety of possibilities for what you can find to enjoy. They also go across all kinds of genres: obviously fantasy, but also scifi, romance, mystery and everything else. It can also be a fun way to learn about other cultures and the creatures they think are interesting to talk about in stories.

As an author, it must be both fun and challenging to talk about mythological creatures in your book. On the one hand, you can pretty much make it whatever you want and come up with any kinds of rules you want to have for that world. But on the other hand, you need to think about how much you want your story to fit into the accepted set of rules that already exist. Finding a balance will make your work not only part of a mythological world, but also express your own voice in your story.

Suggested Reading Resources:

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. You can click on any of these links to go to Amazon.com for more information.  

Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison

The youngest, half-goblin son of the Emperor has lived his entire life in exile, distant from the Imperial Court and the deadly intrigue that suffuses it. But when his father and three sons in line for the throne are killed in an “accident,” he has no choice but to take his place as the only surviving rightful heir.

Entirely unschooled in the art of court politics, he has no friends, no advisors, and the sure knowledge that whoever assassinated his father and brothers could make an attempt on his life at any moment.

Surrounded by sycophants eager to curry favor with the naïve new emperor, and overwhelmed by the burdens of his new life, he can trust nobody. Amid the swirl of plots to depose him, offers of arranged marriages, and the specter of the unknown conspirators who lurk in the shadows, he must quickly adjust to life as the Goblin Emperor. All the while, he is alone, and trying to find even a single friend . . . and hoping for the possibility of romance, yet also vigilant against the unseen enemies that threaten him, lest he lose his throne–or his life. 

No Gods No Monsters, by Cadwell Turnbull

One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother has been shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it.

As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend’s trail of breadcrumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters.

At the center is a mystery no one thinks to ask: Why now? What has frightened the monsters out of the dark?

The world will soon find out.

When Women Were Dragons, by Kelly Barnhill

Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers sprouted wings, scales, and talons; left a trail of fiery destruction in their path; and took to the skies. Was it their choice? What will become of those left behind? Why did Alex’s beloved aunt Marla transform but her mother did not? Alex doesn’t know. It’s taboo to speak of.

Forced into silence, Alex nevertheless must face the consequences of this astonishing event: a mother more protective than ever; an absentee father; the upsetting insistence that her aunt never even existed; and 

watching her beloved cousin Bea become dangerously obsessed with the forbidden.

In this timely and timeless speculative novel, award-winning author Kelly Barnhill boldly explores rage, memory, and the tyranny of forced limitations. When Women Were Dragons exposes a world that wants to keep women small—their lives and their prospects—and examines what happens when they rise en masse and take up the space they deserve.

The Devourers by Indra Das

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST

On a cool evening in Kolkata, India, beneath a full moon, as the whirling rhythms of traveling musicians fill the night, college professor Alok encounters a mysterious stranger with a bizarre confession and an extraordinary story. Tantalized by the man’s unfinished tale, Alok will do anything to hear its completion. So Alok agrees, at the stranger’s behest, to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins.

From these documents spills the chronicle of a race of people at once more than human yet kin to beasts, ruled by instincts and desires blood-deep and ages-old. The tale features a rough wanderer in seventeenth-century Mughal India who finds himself irrevocably drawn to a defiant woman—and destined to be torn asunder by two clashing worlds. With every passing chapter of beauty and brutality, Alok’s interest in the stranger grows and evolves into something darker and more urgent.

Shifting dreamlike between present and past with intoxicating language, visceral action, compelling characters, and stark emotion, The Devourers offers a reading experience quite unlike any other novel.

Ariel, by Steven R. Boyett

Five years ago the lights went out, cars stopped in the streets, and magical creatures began roaming the towns and countrysides of Earth.

Pete Garey, a young loner who survived the Change and the madness that followed, spent two years wandering and scavenging the near-deserted cities and towns alone — until the day he encountered an injured unicorn. He nursed her back to health and named her Ariel, and an unlikely friendship was formed.

But unicorns are rare even in a Changed world — and the power of their magic is highly prized. A necromancer in New York City covets that power and will stop at nothing to possess Ariel, dead or alive.

Sought by bounty hunters both human and inhuman, Pete and Ariel decide to make a stand against their enemy — and journey to confront the dark sorcerer in the ruined heart of the city he has made his own twisted kingdom.

The Silence, by Tim Lebbon 

A suspenseful masterpiece from New York Times bestselling author Tim Lebbon. In the darkness of a underground cave system, blind creatures hunt by sound. Then there is light, there are voices, and they feed… Swarming from their prison, the creatures thrive and destroy. To scream, even to whisper, is to summon death. As the hordes lay waste to Europe, a girl watches to see if they will cross the sea. Deaf for many years, she knows how to live in silence; now, it is her family’s only chance of survival. To leave their home, to shun others, to find a remote haven where they can sit out the plague. But will it ever end? And what kind of world will be left? 

The Golem and the Jinni By Helene Wecker

Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay by a disgraced rabbi knowledgeable in the ways of dark Kabbalistic magic. She serves as the wife to a Polish merchant who dies at sea on the voyage to America. As the ship arrives in New York in 1899, Chava is unmoored and adrift until a rabbi on the Lower East Side recognizes her for the creature she is and takes her in.

Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert and trapped centuries ago in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard. Released by a Syrian tinsmith in a Manhattan shop, Ahmad appears in human form but is still not free. An iron band around his wrist binds him to the wizard and to the physical world.

Chava and Ahmad meet accidentally and become friends and soul mates despite their opposing natures. But when the golem’s violent nature overtakes her one evening, their bond is challenged. An even more powerful threat will emerge, however, and bring Chava and Ahmad together again, challenging their very existence and forcing them to make a fateful choice.

Compulsively readable, The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, in a wondrously inventive tale that is mesmerizing and unforgettable.

Awakened, by James Murray

After years of waiting, New York’s newest subway line is finally ready, an express train that connects the city with the burgeoning communities across the Hudson River. The shining jewel of this state-of-the-art line is a breathtaking visitors’ pavilion beneath the river.  Major dignitaries, including New York City’s Mayor and the President of the United States, are in attendance for the inaugural run, as the first train slowly pulls in.

Under the station’s bright ceiling lights, the shiny silver cars gleam. But as the train comes closer into view, a far different scene becomes visible.

All the train’s cars are empty.

All the cars’ interiors are drenched in blood.

As chaos descends, all those in the pavilion scramble to get out. But the horror is only beginning. High levels of deadly methane fill the tunnels. The structure begins to flood. For those who don’t drown, choke or spark an explosion, another terrifying danger awaits—the thing that killed all those people on the train. It’s out there…and it’s coming.

There’s something living beneath New York City, and it’s not happy we’ve woken it up.

Tithe By Holly Black

Discover the dark and seductive realm of faerie in the first book of New York Times bestseller Holly Black’s critically acclaimed Modern Faerie Tales series, where one girl must save herself from the sinister magic of the fey courts, and protect her heart in the process.

Sixteen-year-old Kaye is a modern nomad. Fierce and independent, she drifts from place to place with her mother’s rock band until an ominous attack forces them back to Kaye’s childhood home. But Kaye’s life takes another turn when she stumbles upon an injured faerie knight in the woods. Kaye has always been able to see faeries where others could not, and she chooses to save the strange young man instead of leaving him to die.

But this fateful choice will have more dire consequences than she could ever predict, as Kaye soon finds herself the unwilling pawn in an ancient and violent power struggle between two rival faerie kingdoms—a struggle that could very well mean her death.

The Bone Mother, by David Demchuk

For two hundred years, the Grazyn porcelain factory built its reputation on its magnificent thimbles. It is said that even the Czarina Anastasia Romanova had received one in her trousseau. The workers come from the three neighboring villages on the border of Romania and Ukraine. Nourished, dressed and educated, they are the envy of all at a time when a famine programmed by Stalin sweeps the countryside and cannibalism rages from city to town to farm. But what is the secret of this factory and why does the Grazyn family protect its employees so scrupulously?

The Bone Mother revives the great figures of Slavic mythology on the eve of the Second World War, from rusalka and Baba Yaga–The Bone Mother herself–to the golem. The existence of mortals is intimately linked to that of witches and vampires, in a universe where strigois rub shoulders with mermaids, ghosts and seers…and all are in peril from the Nichni Politsiyi, the Night Police, which wish to eradicate them.

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! Join us next Thursday with another topic or genre and many more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! 

And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries or expand your library skills, check out our podcast Linking Our Libraries! Right now that is dropping short episodes with a few book suggestions; so subscribe to get that every Tuesday.

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!