First Posted: 5/18/2012

Imagine you are a 10-year-old boy sitting in the limbs of an old oak tree. Your older sister and her friends are perched above you and your sister is bouncing acorns off your back to annoy you. “Truth or dare?” she taunts at you. “Dare!” is your answer and you prepare yourself to take on the challenge. “Sneak into the Night Circus and bring something back to prove you’ve been there.” You look down the hill and there are the tents all striped black and white. It is absolutely still in the daylight. Baily Clarke slips through the iron fence into the circus and begins an adventure that will change his life forever. Baily is only one character that is swept into the intrigue of Erin Morgenstern’s “The Night Circus.” Mystery, romance, magic and suspense swirl throughout this impressive debut.

It’s 1940 and war correspondent Frankie Bard is standing in the dark with the gunners waiting for the bombs to rain down on London. “Come on,” the men growl. The familiar drone of the planes is heard to the east. “Take posts!” cried the spotter and the men take their stations at the guns. The shells hurl into the sky toward the unseen planes, the men cursing the pilots willing them to fly straight and knowing that each shot betrays their position. They fire again and again until the spotters tell them to stop. It’s over and Frankie is electric with fear, danger, and excitement. Here the war is immediate and unrelenting and she wants to bring that message home to the Americans listening to Edward Murrow on the radio. In her novel “The Postmistress,” Sarah Blake examines the war from the eyes of three women whose lives intersect.

These are just snippets of a couple of books that I read recently. Good fiction has the power to carry you out of your everyday experience and show you worlds you have never imagined. What are you reading?

Catie Roche is the director at the Robeson County Public library. You can reach her at [email protected]. Catie is reading “Captain Pettigrew’s Last Stand” by Helen Simonson.