OAHS Book Club: 2017-18

Patrick Ness's #1 New York Times bestseller and Carnegie Medal-winning masterwork is poised to attract a discerning crossover audience. The monster in Conor's backyard is not the one he's been expecting -- the one from the nightmare he's had every night since his mother started her treatments. This monster is ancient. And wild. And it wants something from Conor. Something terrible and dangerous. It wants the truth. From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd -- whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself -- Patrick Ness has spun a haunting and darkly funny novel of mischief, loss, and monsters both real and imagined.

After their zoo was bombed, Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save over three hundred people from the Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty animal cages. With animal names for these "guests," and human names for the animals, it's no wonder that the zoo's code name became "The House Under a Crazy Star." Best-selling naturalist and acclaimed storyteller Diane Ackerman combines extensive research and an exuberant writing style to re-create this fascinating, true-life story--sharing Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife," while examining the disturbing obsessions at the core of Nazism. Winner of the 2008 Orion Award.