Voting is now open for the Peterborough Public Library’s second annual “One Book, One Ptbo” initiative, which builds community through the shared experience of reading the same book.
Earlier this year, the library asked community members to recommend titles they thought would make a good choice for this year’s selection.
The three finalists for this year’s One Book, One Ptbo are What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad, River Mumma by Zalika Reid-Benta, and The Story of Us by Catherine Hernandez.
“We had an overwhelming number of responses,” says community development librarian Karen Bisschop in a media release. “It was hard to select only three titles to include in our shortlist.”
Voting is open until Tuesday, April 23rd in person at the library at 345 Aylmer Street North and online at ptbolibrary.ca/onebook.
After the winning book is selected, the library will run special programs and events inspired by the themes found within the narrative of the winning book. The initiative will culminate in a grand finale evening in the fall with the book’s author.
The selected book and author of the inaugural One Book, One Ptbo program last year was Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice.
The library says Rice’s book was checked out of the library 630 times, with a public reading by Rice on November 15 attended by more than 260 people — requiring the event to be moved from the library to the Market Hall.
“Last year’s book ended up appealing to teenagers — a whole different generation,” Bisschop says. “You never know which groups you will engage across your community.”
Below is a description of each of the books vying to be this year’s One Book, One Ptbo selection.
Written by Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad, the 2021 Giller Prize winning What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world, but it is also a story of empathy and indifference and of hope and despair — and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality. In alternating chapters, we learn about nine-year-old Amir’s life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the teenager Vänna, who rescued him as they make their way toward safety.
Canadian writer Zalika Reid-Benta’s debut novel River Mumma is an exhilarating contemporary fantasy novel about a young Black woman who navigates her quarter-life-crisis while embarking on a mythical quest through the streets of Toronto. One evening, the Jamaican water deity River Mumma appears to Alicia, telling her that she has 24 hours to scour the city for her missing comb. With the clock ticking, Alicia’s quest through the city broadens into a journey through time — to find herself and what the river carries.
Canadian writer, author, and playwright Catherine Hernandez, whose 2017 debut novel Scarborough was adapted into a feature film, published her latest novel The Story of Us in 2023. It follows overseas Filipino worker Mary Grace Concepcion who travels to Toronto where she becomes a personal support worker and begins caring for Liz, an elderly patient suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Narrated by the all-seeing eye of Mary Grace’s newborn baby, The Story of Us is a novel about sisterhood, about blood and chosen family, and about how belonging can be found where we least expect it.
Partial funding for One Book, One Ptbo was made possible by a grant from the Community Foundation of Greater Peterborough.
