Graves Library Kennebunkport

Please join us, Alison Kenneway and Kim Noble, RNs from the Kennebunkport Public Health Department on Wednesday, August 17 @ 9:30 am (or via Zoom if you cannot make it in) to identify ways to improve healthy choices and overall well-being.  For the month of July, Finding Freedom by Erin French will be discussed.   Please call the Library to get on the list (967-2778).  Not able to read the book before the discussion, please feel free to join us and learn more about this month’s book pick.  Help set the course for a healthy and safer you!

From Erin French, owner and chef of the critically acclaimed The Lost Kitchen, a TIME world dining destination, a life-affirming memoir about survival, renewal, and finding a community to lift her up

Long before The Lost Kitchen became a world dining destination with every seating filled the day the reservation book opens each spring, Erin French was a girl roaming barefoot on a 25-acre farm, a teenager falling in love with food while working the line at her dad’s diner and a young woman finding her calling as a professional chef at her tiny restaurant tucked into a 19th century mill. This singular memoir–a classic American story–invites readers to Erin’s corner of her beloved Maine to share the real person behind the “girl from Freedom” fairytale, and the not-so-picture-perfect struggles that have taken every ounce of her strength to overcome, and that make Erin’s life triumphant.

In Finding Freedom, Erin opens up to the challenges, stumbles, and victories that have led her to the exact place she was ever meant to be, telling stories of multiple rock-bottoms, of darkness and anxiety, of survival as a jobless single mother, of pills that promised release but delivered addiction, of a man who seemed to offer salvation but in the end ripped away her very sense of self. And of the beautiful son who was her guiding light as she slowly rebuilt her personal and culinary life around the solace she found in food–as a source of comfort, a sense of place, as a way of bringing goodness into the world. Erin’s experiences with deep loss and abiding hope, told with both honesty and humor, will resonate with women everywhere who are determined to find their voices, create community, grow stronger and discover their best-selves despite seemingly impossible odds. Set against the backdrop of rural Maine and its lushly intense, bountiful seasons, Erin reveals the passion and courage needed to invent oneself anew, and the poignant, timeless connections between food and generosity, renewal and freedom. [Good Reads]

Please join us, Alison Kenneway and Kim Noble, RNs from the Kennebunkport Public Health Department on Wednesday, July 20 @ 9:30 am (or via Zoom if you cannot make it in) to identify ways to improve healthy choices and overall well-being.  For the month of July, Funny Farm by Laurie Zaleski will be discussed.   Please call the Library to get on the list (967-2778).  Not able to read the book before the discussion, please feel free to join us and learn more about this month’s book pick.  Help set the course for a healthy and safer you!

 An inspiring and moving memoir of the author’s turbulent life with 600 rescue animals.

Laurie Zaleski never aspired to run an animal rescue; that was her mother Annie’s dream. But from girlhood, Laurie was determined to make the dream come true. Thirty years later as a successful businesswoman, she did it, buying a 15-acre farm deep in the Pinelands of South Jersey. She was planning to relocate Annie and her caravan of ragtag rescues–horses and goats, dogs and cats, chickens and pigs–when Annie died, just two weeks before moving day. In her heartbreak, Laurie resolved to make her mother’s dream her own. In 2001, she established the Funny Farm Animal Rescue outside Mays Landing, New Jersey. Today, she carries on Annie’s mission to save abused and neglected animals.

Funny Farm is Laurie’s story: of promises kept, dreams fulfilled, and animals lost and found. It’s the story of Annie McNulty, who fled a nightmarish marriage with few skills, no money and no resources, dragging three kids behind her, and accumulating hundreds of cast-off animals on the way. And lastly, it’s the story of the brave, incredible, and adorable animals that were rescued.[Good Reads]

Please join us, Alison Kenneway and Kim Noble, RNs from the Kennebunkport Public Health Department on Wednesday, June 15 @ 9:30 am (or via Zoom if you cannot make it in) to identify ways to improve healthy choices and overall well-being.  For the month of June, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter (from The Swedish Art of Living & Dying Series) by Margareta Magnusson  will be discussed.   Please call the Library to get on the list (967-2778).  Not able to read the book before the discussion, please feel free to join us and learn more about this month’s book pick.  Help set the course for a healthy and safer you!

A charming, practical, and unsentimental approach to putting a home in order while reflecting on the tiny joys that make up a long life.

In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming. Margareta suggests which possessions you can easily get rid of (unworn clothes, unwanted presents, more plates than you’d ever use) and which you might want to keep (photographs, love letters, a few of your children’s art projects). Digging into her late husband’s tool shed, and her own secret drawer of vices, Margareta introduces an element of fun to a potentially daunting task. Along the way readers get a glimpse into her life in Sweden, and also become more comfortable with the idea of letting go.  [Good Reads]