Saturday
October 12
All Events at Old Town Hall - 3999 University Drive, Fairfax
Kids' Events - Downstairs
11 AM
In Pat Tanumihardja’s picture book, The Sugar Plum Bakers: A Tale of 12 Holiday Treats, kids follow the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Gingerbread Man, and their team of bakerinas as they create yummy treats from around the globe and learn to work together. Children will love learning how to make brigadeiros, a traditional Brazilian dessert, and coating the fudge balls in sprinkles to eat.
12 PM
In the picturebook, Wind is a Dance, author Debra Shumaker takes kids on an exciting exploration of wind as they learn about its many different characteristics. Shumaker combines ethereal illustrations with scientific facts to support young readers’ learning. Immerse yourself and your child in wind science by using paper cups and straws to make your very own anemometer. Kids will love observing the speed of wind with this simple device!
1 PM
John Gallagher is the art director of Ranger Rick magazine, cofounder of “Kids Love Comics,” and the author/artist of the heroically funny graphic novel series Max Meow. Jamar Nicholas is an award-winning writer and educator whose newest sequel is Leon: Worst Friends Forever. Gallagher and Nicholas will teach you how to draw their characters and will discuss the creative process and the journey of graphic novels from first idea to finished product. Sponsored by the Fairfax Library Foundation.
Adult Events - Upstairs
11 AM
Marina Budhos and Joe Milan, Jr. follow teen characters whose lives are disrupted by the U.S. immigration system. Budhos’ We Are All We Have follows teenage Rania, who must learn how to look out for herself and her younger brother after their mom is seized by ICE. In Milan’s The All-American, high schooler Bucky Yi, who knows next to nothing about his birth country, is deported by the U.S. government to South Korea.
12:30 PM
Katharine Schellman and Jenny Adams bring readers to the glamorous, and dangerous world of the Roaring Twenties in these historical murder mysteries. Schellman’s The Last Note of Warning, the third book in her Nightingale mystery series, follows a young woman working at a speakeasy who’s suspected of murder. Adam’s novel, A Deadly Endeavor, follows a woman sleuth on the hunt for a serial killer in 1921 Philadelphia’s high society.
2 PM
Alisa Alering and Keith Donohue astound readers with mysteries, thrills, and otherworldly secrets. Alering’s Smothermoss tells the story of two troubled sisters pulled into a hunt for a killer. Barnes & Noble says, “For those obsessed with Appalachian lore comes a hauntingly atmospheric tale toeing the line of a twisted fairy tale.” In Donohue’s The Girl in the Bog, a farmer digs up a two thousand year old body of a young woman, which has been preserved in a bog in Ireland. When the woman awakens in modern times, she must go on the run from the natural and supernatural forces that are out to get her.
3:30 PM
Ananda Lima and Constance Sayers take readers to dark and surprising places. In Lima’s linked story collection Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, a writer sleeps with the devil at a Halloween party, and then continues seeing him for the rest of her life. Publishers Weekly says, “The stories, and the stories within those stories, connect to some of the cruelest portions of the human experience with uncommon warmth and wit.” In Sayers’s The Star and the Strange Moon, an actress is pulled into an experimental horror film in 1968. Almost forty years later, a film student is obsessed with uncovering the truth of the actress’s disappearance. Paulette Kennedy calls it, “At once a sweeping tale of dark magic, artistic obsession, and a love unbound from the limits of time.”
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