Recommendations from Dalton Hardwick, Information & Research Manager at the Pickerington Public Library
What Does It Feel Like?
By Sophie Kinsella
Eve is a successful novelist who wakes up one day in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there. Her husband, never far from her side, explains that she has had an operation to remove the large, malignant tumor growing in her brain. As Eve learns to walk, talk and write again – and as she wrestles with her diagnosis, and how and when to explain it to her beloved children – she begins to recall what’s most important to her: long walks with her husband’s hand clasped firmly around her own, family game nights and always buying that dress when she sees it.
Grossology: The Science of Really Gross Things!: Commemorative Edition: Celebrating Over 30 Years of Grossology!
By Sylvia Branzei, Jack Keely (Illustrator)
Discover the science behind the sickeningly cool stuff that comes out of our bodies! Complete with hilariously disgusting illustrations and fun activities, this guide to all things gross covers everything from barf to farts to scabs.
Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World
By Lauren Fleshman
Lauren Fleshman has grown up in the world of running. One of the most decorated collegiate athletes of all time and a national champion as a pro, early in her career she was a major face of women’s running for Nike. She went on to shake up the industry as a rep for feminist running brand Oiselle and now coaches elite young female runners.
Although she witnessed how empowering sports can be, she also saw every step of the way how those very sports systems – originally designed by men, for men and boys – fail young women and girls.
Statistics have shown that girls drop out of sports at alarming rates once they hit puberty, and female collegiate athletes routinely fall victim to injury, eating disorders or mental health struggles when they don’t get the support they need.
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By Jonathan Haidt
In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that simultaneously struck many countries. He investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults.
Haidt shows how the play-based childhood began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the phone-based childhood in the early 2010s.
He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison and perfectionism.
He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families and their societies.
Take All of Us
By Natalie Leif
Five years ago, a parasite poisoned the water of Ian’s West Virginia hometown, turning dozens of locals into dark-eyed, oil-dripping shells of their former selves. With chronic migraines and seizures limiting his physical abilities, Ian relies on his best friend and secret crush Eric to mercy-kill any infected people they come across. Until a new health report about the contamination triggers a mandatory government evacuation, and Ian cracks his head in the rush. Used to hospitals and health scares, Ian always thought he’d die young... but he wasn’t planning on coming back. Much less facing the slow, painful realization that Eric left him behind to die.