Author Talk with Matt Cost

Saturday, July 24 at 2:00pm on the library lawn

Meet Matt Cost (a 2021 Maine Humanities Council Read ME author) and hear about his latest book Wolfe Trap, as well as his Mainely Power series, featured for statewide summer reading!

Wolfe Trap is Cost’s debut novel in a new series surrounding a PI, Clay Wolfe, in the fictional coastal town of Port Essex, Maine. Instead of a large white shark threatening the populace, it is heroin being smuggled through lobster traps that is endangering the town.

What evil lurks in Port Essex, Maine?

Clay Wolfe is a former Boston homicide detective who has left the police department to return home to Maine to care for his elderly grandfather and open a private detective agency. Haunted by being orphaned at an early age, and jaded by the corruption of the big city, Clay is happy to hit pause and investigate minor crimes.

“I want you to find the person who sold the drugs that killed my grandbaby.”

When he is hired to find out who sold the drugs that killed a six-month-old baby girl, he has no idea of the evil that he is going to uncover in the underbelly of his hometown.

Wolfe Trap is a thrilling ride set in a small Maine town with rich characters and shocking plot twists that will keep the reader rapt until the final pages.

About the author:  Matt Cost a.k.a. Matthew Langdon Cost

Over the years, Cost has owned a video store, a mystery bookstore, and a gym. He has also taught history and coached just about every sport imaginable.

During those years, since age eight actually, the true passion has been writing. I Am Cuba: Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution (Encircle Publications, March, 2020) was his first traditionally published novel.

Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A chocolate Lab and a basset hound round out the mix. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.

Author Talk with Mary Cerullo

Sharks at Your Service

Thursday, August 5 at 5:00pm via Zoom

This virtual event is presented by Tumbleocity. Find more information about the event and the book and register for the event.

Sharks are at the very top of the list of animals that fascinate children and adults alike, but they are usually depicted as ferocious and destructive hunters. These negative portrayals miss the point that these top predators play an essential role in maintaining the health of the world’s oceans. Sharks at Your Service highlights the positive side of sharks—as the ultimate service providers in the sea!

Join author Mary Cerullo as she explores many of the different kinds of sharks and rays and the roles that they perform in the sea — some of which even resemble jobs that humans do on land. She will use exciting video, whimsical illustrations, and dramatic photographs by the award-winning underwater photographer Jeff Rotman. Mary hopes you will see some of the things we have in common with these sea giants, and maybe it will make you want to work to protect sharks from their top predators: us!

Mary Cerullo teaches and writes about the ocean. She has written 23 books on ocean life for children, including City Fish, Country Fish (a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year), Octopus: Phantom of the Sea (a Junior Library Guild Selection), Giant Squid: Searching for a Sea Monster (an Outstanding Science Trade Book selection by the NSTA and the CBC), and The Truth About Great White Sharks (IRA Teacher’s Choice Award).

Author talk with Hilary Bartlett

The Thistle Inn: A Wee Bit of Scotland in Maine

Saturday, August 14 at 10:00am on the library lawn

Join us on the library lawn to hear author Hilary Bartlett discuss her new book.

Hilary E. Bartlett was born and raised in Liverpool, England, with belching chimneys, street gangs and perpetual damp. When the Beatles first played at the Cavern she was there, but that was as good as it got. Good grades were her means of escape. Hilary studied microbiology at University College London and received her doctorate. She came to Bigelow Laboratory in Midcoast Maine in her late twenties to determine a predictive index for toxic red-tides. Her intention was to return to London but Boothbay Harbor bewitched her. She took a full-time research position at Bigelow Lab and lived opposite the Thistle Inn during the 1970s. Hilary made lifelong friends at the back corner table in the pub, where Bigelow sisters first shared stories about feisty grandmothers. Those young women changed Hilary’s life. Yet she was the only one who stayed in Boothbay Harbor. Once she found her true home, she never wanted to leave.

Hilary changed careers after she became a mother and started a home-based art business. Her reputation as an artist is well established and her ink paintings have won awards. She received a writing fellowship from Waypoint Foundation to spend time at one of their Key Largo retreats. The Thistle Inn is her first book.

Book description:

Colorful tales of the Thistle Inn paint a vivid portrait of a Maine fishing village during the 1960s and ‘70s. When shrimp boats filled the harbor, martinis were less than two dollars and famous actors, musicians and ballplayers dropped by. Photos and vintage menus spice up the pages, plus the secret ingredient for the Thistle’s Downeast steak is finally revealed.

“Boothbay locals that frequented The Thistle Inn during the Leonie/T’Donald years who read this highly entertaining book of tales – those that could be printed, anyway – will smile, laugh, and remember when. The rest of us will read it, smile, laugh . . . and wish to God we remembered it too!”

Lisa Kristoff, Boothbay Register

“My wife and I wrote weekly travel columns for 7 years, and loved Boothbay Harbor, but I had no idea of the fascinating history of the Thistle Inn until I read this book. And you will love all the interesting stories of the inn’s owners and guests, especially the patrons in the bar.”

George Smith, award-winning journalist and Maine author

Follow the clues in this online search to find the culprit behind this fictional caper. All the clues are online so you can search from the coziness of your own abode. Figure out the answer to this whodunit and you are entered into a prize drawing!

Official Quest Briefing:

We’ve received tips from throughout the state of Maine that bees are missing this summer. None have been spotted anywhere. This is a disaster!  Bees are necessary to pollinate our plants, and pollination is what makes more and more plants! So, you see, without our bees, our food supply will quickly dwindle. The bees were just here in the spring, so we suspect someone may have stolen them all.

We’ve narrowed it down to 10 suspects, but we simply don’t have the staff available to run down all our leads. This is where you come in. Can you help us explore all our leads and figure out which of our suspects has the bees?

Curious to learn more about your roots? Use your library card to access Ancestry.com at home and fill out your own family tree.

Use this free resource to explore billions of archival records like census data, military records and immigration records. Plus, download helpful charts and forms to help track your research.

This digital research tool is available through Digital Maine Library. Visit our Digital Resources page to find more information about Digital Maine Library and our other online resources.

*Please note: this resource is available at home until December 31, 2021. After that date, continue to use Ancestry resources in the library.

Author talk with Colin Woodard

Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood

Friday, July 16 at 6:00pm on the library lawn

Come hear bestselling author Colin Woodard discuss his new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood. Plus, you’ll be able to buy a copy of your own and get it signed by the author.

Colin Woodard is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, where he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.

A native of Maine, he has reported from more than 50 countries and seven continents and lived for more than four years in Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet empire and the transition that followed. A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago he is past Pew Fellow in International Journalism at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a recipient of the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for Excellence in Public Advocacy.

Book description:

Union tells the story of the struggle to create a national myth for the United States, one that could hold its rival regional cultures together and forge an American nationhood. On one hand, a small group of individuals—historians, political leaders, and novelists—fashioned and promoted the idea of America as nation that had a God-given mission to lead humanity toward freedom, equality, and self-government. But this emerging narrative was swiftly contested by another set of intellectuals and firebrands who argued that the United States was instead the homeland of the allegedly superior “Anglo-Saxon” race, upon whom divine and Darwinian favor shined.

Colin Woodard tells the story of the genesis and epic confrontations between these visions of our nation’s path and purpose through the lives of the key figures who created them, a cast of characters whose personal quirks and virtues, gifts and demons shaped the destiny of millions.

“Woodard traces a gradual, emerging consensus of American unity. It’s a dark tale. This country purchased its sense of itself as a unified whole at a high price, he writes: that of racial equality. . . . In Woodard’s hands, [history] leaps to life. He shows just how powerful a form popular nonfiction can be in the hands of a disciplined writer who won’t tolerate generality or abstraction. . . . The writing is relentlessly accessible. . . . This is that rare history that tells what influential thinkers failed to think, what famous writers left unwritten. . . . Woodard demonstrates that something more complicated than reason is always afoot, some swirl of politics, events, and wordless popular sentiment that sweeps the hapless thinker in its wake.”

Jill Leovy, The American Scholar

“Compelling. . . . George Bancroft’s portrait is only one of many utterly gripping depictions scattered throughout Union. . . . The stakes are nothing short of determining how a nation thinks about itself, how it teaches posterity about itself. In Union, that battle sprawls out of the narrow confines of academia and embroils the entire country – and the fight is ongoing.”

The Christian Science Monitor

Summer Reading 2021:  June 29 – August 14!

Between now and August 14, all BHML patrons are encouraged to take part in our Summer Reading programs. There are lots of prizes to win and even more fun to be had by all!

Summer Reading Passport

Hey kids! Head to the library and ask a librarian to issue you a Summer Reading Passport.

You’ll get your picture taken and we’ll mark your passport with an official issue stamp.

Throughout the summer, time your reading, visit the library and complete reading challenges to earn treats and prize tickets.

When you reach passport checkpoints during your reading journey, come back to the library to get prize tickets and enter them to win amazing prizes like bikes, book bags filled with fun things, a pizza and movie party at the library, or the chance to be librarian for the day!

Come back for Summer Reading Wrap-Up on Saturday, August 14 at 1:00pm on the library lawn.

Prize raffles will be drawn on this day and we’ll have special activities to celebrate a summer filled with reading!

Share photos of your reading journey.

Take pictures while completing passport challenges and use #BHMLSummerReading to document your journey. Tag us on Facebook and Instagram @bbhlibrary.

Adult Summer Reading Bingo

Hey adults! We have a special reading challenge for you. Grab a Reading Bingo card at the front desk of the library or ask for one at our walk-up window. Don’t worry…there will be prizes for you, too!

Have questions? Call the library at 207-633-3112 or email Jen at youth@bbhlibrary.org (Kids’ Summer Reading Passport) or Bethany at tech@bbhlibrary.org (Adult Reading Bingo).

Visit the library on Thursdays this summer for fun on the library lawn!

Thursdays from July 1-August 12 (weather permitting).

10:30am: Storytime
Join our Children’s Coordinator, Jen, on the library lawn for Storytime! She will read a special book each week and will be on site to help you learn more about the book and author.

Our Friday, July 2 film has been cancelled due to, well…unfair weather. We don’t have rescheduling plans as of yet, but stay tuned for more information about our August 6th film.

Shout it from the rooftops…Fair Weather Films return this summer!

Join us on the library lawn this summer for a socially-distanced big-screen special—weather dependent, of course.

Friday, July 2 at 8:00 pm. We’ll be watching The Goonies!

Friday, August 6 at 8:00 pm: Film TBD

Bring your own blankets, comfy lawn chairs and snacks.

Grow with Google: Learn the Basics of Google Ads

Tuesday, July 27, 12:00 pm-1:00 pm online via virtual webinar

In this workshop, you will learn how to reach more customers and grow your business with Google Ads. Learn tips on writing great ads, refining keywords, and including ad extensions. You’ll also learn how to measure success of an advertising campaign.

Join our presenter, Sixcia Devine, in learning how to how to create an account and set up an ad campaign. Don’t forget to install the free GoToWebinar app if you plan to attend via a mobile device.

RSVP for this FREE workshop

BHML is partnering with Grow with Google to offer free community programs so you can learn how to make the most popular search engine in the world work for you!