Adult Services
Friends Book Club
Join us for the Friends of the Library Book Club (FOL Book Club)!
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Book Selection: Summer of the Monkeys
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Location: Glenwood City Public Library
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Time & Date: 7:00, May 18, 2026
October Book Selection
Summer of the Monkeys
By: Wilson Rawls
DESCRIPTION:
From the author of the beloved classic Where the Red Fern Grows comes a timeless adventure about a boy who discovers a tree full of monkeys.
The last thing fourteen-year-old Jay Berry Lee expects to find while trekking through the Ozark Mountains of Oklahoma is a tree full of monkeys. But then Jay learns from his grandpa that the monkeys have escaped from a traveling circus, and there’s a big reward for the person who finds and returns them.
His family could really use the money, so Jay sets off, determined to catch them. But by the end of the summer, Jay will have learned a lot more than he bargained for—and not just about monkeys.
From the beloved author of Where the Red Fern Grows comes another memorable adventure novel filled with heart, humor, and excitement.
Cost: Free
This is a free event open to everyone.
Afternoon Book Club
Please come and join us for the Afternoon Book Club
Book Selection: Before We Were Yours
Author: Lisa Wingate
Location: Glenwood City Public Library
Time & Date: 12:30 on Monday, June 1
June Book Selection
Before We Were Yours
By: Lisa Wingate
The description is from goodreads
Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty.
Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption.
Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.
This is a Free Event and everyone is welcome.
Summer Reading Program – Adventure Begins at Your Library
Once you conquer a book from this epic list, bring back this sheet for a stamp and a chance to win big! This year’s jackpot is a dazzling gift basket valued at $75. The Reading Challenge runs from June 10 to August 9. Let the reading games begin!
Meets the third Thursday each month @ 6:00 pm for dinner, discussion begins at 6:30.
A new Traveling Book Club will rotate each month between different restaurants.
Join friends from around St. Croix County! Explore different towns and eateries while you meet new people and try new books.
May – Located at DJ’s 740 Main St.; Baldwin | Hosted by Baldwin Public Library
Book: A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan
Description: A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan’s rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.
The Roaring Twenties–the Jazz Age–has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.
Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows – their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.
A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.
Watch for 2025 Community One Read information.
Supporting A Community
with Kindness
Our vision is to inspire groups of volunteers around the country to crochet/knit, collect, and donate bar soap to their local food pantries, homeless shelters, relief efforts, mission trips, social service agencies, and veterans clinics. (soapsacks.com)
The GCPL supports the “Click for Babies” program (https://www.clickforbabies.org/about-click-for-babies-campaign.php).
What is entailed:
- We are asking knitters and crocheters to make baby hats, booties or both to be donated to the program.
- The baby hats and booties need to be 50% or more purple in any shade.
- You can get patterns from the link above.
- Pick out a newborn size baby cap or baby booties pattern! Please refrain from including any potential choking and strangling hazards to babies such as pom-poms, tassels, straps, bows, ribbons, or buttons.
- Drop them off at the GCPL and will ship them in late September to Madison.