Title: The New Town Librarian
Author: Kathy Anderson
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 01/31/2023
Heat Level: 2 – Fade to Black Sex
Pairing: Female/Female
Length: 63300
Genre: Contemporary, contemporary, lit/genre fiction, humorous, lesbian, LGBTQA, library, librarian, small town, East Coast, New Jersey, second chances, starting over, over 40, book clubs, readers, friends as family
Add to Goodreads
Description
Queer middle-aged librarian Nan Nethercott, a wisecracking hypochondriac with a lackluster career and a nonexistent love life, needs to make a drastic life change before it’s too late. When she lands a job as librarian in a seemingly idyllic small town in southern New Jersey, Nan quickly discovers unforeseen challenges.
Nan’s landlady, Immaculata, launches daily intrusions from below. The library, housed in the former town jail, is overrun by marauding middle-schoolers. A mysterious reader leaves distressing messages in book stacks all over the library. Thomasina, the irresistible butch deli owner, is clearly a delicious affair and not the relationship Nan craves.
There’s no turning back though. Nan must come up with her own wildly unorthodox solutions to what the town and its people throw at her and fight for what she wants until she makes a shiny new life—one with her first true home, surprising friends, a meaningful career, and a promising new love.
The New Town Librarian
Kathy Anderson © 2023
All Rights Reserved
Pinetree, New Jersey, could have been the setting for every movie set in an idyllic small town that Nan had ever seen, with a wide, walkable Main Street flanked by stately sycamore trees and stores people actually needed—grocer, liquor, barber shop, hardware, coffee shop, dry cleaner, bakery, furniture and antiques, pharmacy, and several delis—with an actual town clock looming over the scene. How cool was that?
Nan found the library easily, on the corner of Main Street and Central Avenue. The squat gray concrete building epitomized utilitarianism in a no-nonsense, no-frills square shape, with steep entry steps and a dented, faded book return drop box on the curb. Not very inviting. It clashed with the whole rest of Main Street, in fact.
She took a deep breath, pulled the heavy door open too fast, and smashed herself hard in the shoulder with it. Do not react, swallow that searing pain. You do not want SHIT to be the first word these people hear from your mouth.
Nan felt instantly at home, and she knew why. Although the library’s exterior was not like the majestic Wilmington Public Library she had loved as a child growing up in Delaware, the inside summoned up all of the same delights as her hometown library. The smell of old books, that delicious mushroomy fragrance. The solid curve of a mahogany chair softened by decades of human rumps settling in for a long read. The pleasure, as intoxicating as a sexual thrill, of being surrounded by walls and walls of shelves packed tight with hardback books.
Nan breathed it all in and felt herself wanting this place to be hers. Her palms itched with the desire to touch everything, to mark this territory as her own.
Desire was not her friend though. Wanting brought disappointment; she had learned that the hard way.
The library board of trustees were gathered around a large mahogany table in the Reference Room. Pip (short for Phillip, he announced, as if she cared) Conti, the fortyish board president who was also the superintendent of schools, was conducting the interview. He had a head as big as a moose’s and carried himself like a former high school football star, cocking his head and pausing as if he heard applause every time he spoke. Nan disliked him immediately and intensely; she could recognize a blowhard a mile away.
She almost never got interviews for jobs she applied to, so she was quite rusty at the whole ask-me-a-question-and-I’ll-answer-it-intelligently-and-persuasively-yet-charmingly bullshit. She limped her way through most of the interview, hating the sound of her own lame answers.
Valiantly, she tried to make substituting for the children’s librarian once a year sound like she was indeed an accomplished storyteller and youth program organizer. She puffed up her required annual perfunctory technology training into a specialty in IT and all its mysterious manifestations. For budget preparation and finance management, she hauled out examples from her long-ago graduate school classes, throwing buzzwords around in the hopes of dazzling board members who knew even less than she did. Sweating profusely, she hoped her black turtleneck hid the flood.
“I will be frank with you,” Pip said finally, jumping up to pace around the table, pointing at Nan. “We need new blood. We need the latest and the greatest new ways. We need to be drop-kicked into the twenty-first century. We need you to convince us that you are up to the challenge.” He sat down, arms folded, and waited.
Nan figured her competition for the job were recent library school graduates because who the hell else would work for the absurdly low salary? And if they were aiming for recent graduates, no wonder they hadn’t put any experience requirement in the job posting. So he was using new to mean young. He was really asking if she was too old to do this job. An undulating pain shot up her fifty-year-old backbone in response.
This was so unfair. After all, she was clearly a cool librarian. She had an arty, jagged, super-short haircut, colored with streaks of turquoise and pink; she wore all black clothes and hefty Doc Martens boots. Apparently, none of that counted with Pip.
But he wasn’t the only one on this board. There were six others staring at her. None of them were exactly in the springtime of life. Everyone except Pip looked to be well over fifty, and several looked over seventy. They each got a vote on her being hired too.
Nan had learned one thing in all her years at the bottom. Often it paid to go around an obstacle rather than try to batter it down. She leaned forward, ignored Pip, made eye contact one by one with the other board members, and lowered her voice as if she were telling them a very important secret.
“New is all well and good. But as you all know, there is absolutely no substitute for experience.” She felt as if she was bowling with one pin left standing at the end of the alley, and she had knocked it down with her last ball. She saw in their eyes that they yearned for someone their own age, someone they could connect with in the shorthand of shared understandings and vocabulary, someone who didn’t make them feel old and stupid. Vote for me, she begged silently.
Purchase
NineStar Press | Books2Read
Amazon
Kathy Anderson is the author of the short story collection, Bull and Other Stories (Autumn House Press), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards for Lesbian Fiction, Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and Foreword INDIES Book of the Year in Short Stories. The New Town Librarian is her first novel. Kathy holds a Master of Library Science degree and worked as a librarian for over twenty-five years in small-town public libraries in southern New Jersey. Her home is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her wife, who is her exact opposite in every way and therefore her perfect match.
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
One lucky winner will receive a $50.00 NineStar Press Gift Code!
