Crete reads voting due April 16

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A community-wide read is being hosted by the Crete Public Library. A committee of nine community members met and determined the parameters of Crete Reads including that is be available in six formats – regular print, large print, AudioBook, eBook, eAudioBook and Spanish.

Voting is being done to determine the book for the community read. Voting ballots can be picked up at and submitted to The Crete Public Library or done online at the library's website by April 16.

The Four Winds” by Kristen Hannah

Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up and the dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with vengeance.

In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli- like so many of her neighbors- must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life. The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American Dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman who chose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation.

News of the World” by Paulette Jiles

In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, raising her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the United States army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows.

Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity throws away her shoes and refuses to act “civilized.”

Yet, as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forging a bond that makes the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.

Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy not welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember – strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden.

A respectable man, Captain Kiss is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become – in the eyes of the law – a kidnapper himself.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities.

Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretively passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined.

What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Looking well beyond issues of race, “The Vanishing Half” considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires and expectations and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.