In The Vanishing Half, the character Stella impulsively flees her life as a young Black woman in the segregated South to pass as white, leaving her family and friends behind. Join Main Library’s Adult Programming Coordinator Beth online as she reviews The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, a fictionalized account of the true-life story of J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, who passed as white from the age of sixteen. This program will be recorded and available to view on our website, our Facebook page, or our Youtube channel.

St. Johns Reads is the St. Johns County Public Library System’s annual “Community Reads” program. Presented for the 17th year, 2022’s program features four different books, unified by the theme “secrets”: ‘The Vanishing Half’ by Britt Bennett, ‘Crossing the Creek: The Literary Friendship of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ by Anna Lillios, ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ by Celeste Ng, and a title for young adults, ‘Children of Blood and Bone’ by Tomi Adeymi. The four titles are available to enjoy in print, large print, audiobook on disc, digital audiobook, and ebook formats. “St. Johns Reads: Secrets” also presents a variety of both in-person and virtual programming inspired by the selected books. Special thanks to our generous Friends of the Library groups for sponsoring our St. Johns Reads program.