Upcoming Events
Enjoy a take-home octopus craft that will be available at Hardin for the week of Spring Break.
Spend some time playing outside at the Hardin branch! We will have sensory play equipment set up outside by our Greenhouse for families to enjoy over the week of Spring Break. This is a come and go event.
Disclaimer(s)
Outdoor Program - Cancel
This program will be canceled in the event of bad weather.
Photos
Photos may be taken at this event and used for library promotional purposes. If you do not wish for you or your child's photo to be taken, please speak with the librarian hosting the program.
American Lung Association Freedom From Smoking Cessation Class
Join us for The American Lung Association's Freedom From Smoking Cessation Class. This will be presented by the Marshall County Health Department. This is a seven week course beginning on March 17, 2026.
Bookmobile Stop
The Bookmobile makes a stop at the Morgan-Trevathan Apartments.
Enter a world of magic and enchantments at our fairy garden tea party. Pet a real unicorn from Makin' Memories (weather permitting).
Disclaimer(s)
Photos
Photos may be taken at this event and used for library promotional purposes. If you do not wish for you or your child's photo to be taken, please speak with the librarian hosting the program.
Recommended Reads
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Killing Floor
Selected by Laurel at Benton and Calvert City
THE FIRST NOVEL IN LEE CHILD'S #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING JACK REACHER SERIES—NOW AN ORIGINAL SERIES ON PRIME VIDEO!
“From its jolting opening scene to its fiery final confrontation, Killing Floor is irresistible.”—People
Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher is a drifter. He’s just passing through Margrave, Georgia, and in less than an hour, he’s arrested for murder. Not much of a welcome. All Reacher knows is that he didn’t kill anybody. At least not here. Not lately. But he doesn’t stand a chance of convincing anyone. Not in Margrave, Georgia. Not a chance in hell. -
Tourist Season
Selected by Lexi at Calvert City
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brynne Weaver comes a wickedly delicious new series where dark romantic comedy meets thrilling suspense—and where falling in love can be a killer.
Welcome to Cape Carnage! Visit Once, Stay Forever.
You can hide in the farthest reaches of the deepest hell, and I will still drag you out. Even the devil can’t save you from me.
Cape Carnage is a seaside town of colorful houses, quirky shops, and an unusually high body count. But with tourists comes trouble, and Harper Starling won’t let anyone ruin her picture-perfect home. A skilled gardener with killer instincts, Harper protects her sanctuary at any cost—especially for her aging mentor with a fading memory. Troublesome tourists don’t check out of Carnage. They compost beneath Harper’s award-winning flowerbeds.
But Nolan Rhodes isn’t your average tourist. Devilishly handsome, disarmingly charming, and skilled with a blade, Nolan is relentless in the pursuit of revenge. On every anniversary of the hit-and-run accident that fractured his life, Nolan slays another target. And he’s saved the best for last: the undeniably beautiful Harper Starling. The problem? Harper isn’t the monster he expected. And she won’t go down without a fight.
When an amateur true crime investigator comes to Cape Carnage on the trail of a long-lost serial killer, Harper and Nolan strike an uneasy truce. If Nolan helps Harper protect her town, she’ll keep quiet about his hunting habits . . . for now. But their alliance soon spirals into obsession, one that threatens to shatter every secret in Carnage—including their fragile love.
Tourist Season is a darkly funny, slow burn enemies-to-lovers romance where destruction and desire are balanced on the edge of a blade—and where love is the most dangerous battleground of all.
Tropes:
Small-town romance
Fish out of water
Grumpy/grumpy
Forced proximity
He falls first
Touch her/him and die
Groveling -
Phantasma
Selected by Lexi at Calvert City
AN INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER & BOOKTOK SENSATION
Welcome to Phantasma. There are only two rules to the game: Stay alive. And don't fall in love.
When Ophelia's sister disappears, there is only one way to save her. Ophelia must enter Phantasma, a deadly contest inside a haunted mansion, and claim its prize--a single wish.
Phantasma is a maze of twisting corridors and lavish ballrooms, of demons and temptations. Ophelia will face nine challenges, each more dangerous than the last. There can only be one winner, and the other contestants will stop at nothing to eliminate their rivals.
Every day the house creates new monsters. But just as Ophelia's fears threaten to overwhelm her, a mysterious stranger offers her a bargain.
Charming, arrogant and infuriatingly attractive, Blackwell claims he can guide her through the lethal trials ahead. All he asks in return is ten years of her life.
Ophelia knows she shouldn't trust him. Blackwell doesn't seem dangerous, but appearances can be deceptive. Worse still, she feels a dark and irresistible attraction drawing them closer and closer.
Her life is on the line. But in Phantasma, the only thing deadlier than losing the game is losing your heart . . .
A Court of Thorns and Roses meets Caraval in this seductive fantasy adventure from #1 New York Times bestselling author of Enchantra. With steamy romance, a sexy morally gray love interest, OCD rep and jaw-dropping twists, Phantasma is perfect for fans of Rebecca Yarros, Nisha J. Tuli and Carissa Broadbent.
The print edition includes custom gold foiling on the cover! -
Enigma
Selected by Lexi at Calvert City
DELUXE EDITION--a deluxe hardback edition, featuring gorgeous dark teal sprayed edges, a foil case stamp, beautiful endpapers, a detailed map, and deliciously moody art throughout.
An instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller!
From New York Times bestselling author RuNyx comes Enigma, a twisted Hades and Persephone meets scorching dark academia romance―a tale of love and obsession between two rivals
There are secrets she must uncover.
There are secrets he must keep.
Salem Salazar is fascinated with death. The black sheep of her scandal-ridden, wealthy family, she arrives at Mortimer University as a legacy on the hunt for answers about what happened to her perfect, older sister. There, she discovers that her sister is far from the only girl to have gone missing at Mortimer. Salem will do anything to discover what dark forces are killing Mortimer's students...even if it means using herself as bait.
And Cazimir van der Waal has caught her scent. The mysterious artist and teaching assistant has a dark past, a hidden agenda, and a ravenous appetite for a beautiful, golden-eyed girl who seems determined to risk her life.
Where she is ice, he is fire. Where she is organization, he is chaos. Where she is precision, he is passion. Together they are explosive--their fates linked as secret societies and death stalk them both.
Enigma is a sensual, epic love story for those who also crave the frightful, the puzzling, the suspenseful, the dangerous and the dark.
Welcome to Mortimer.
Enigma
*Dark academia romance
*Steamy suspense
*Rivals to lovers
*Secret societies
*Forbidden love -
Mistakes Were Made
*The limited deluxe edition includes designed edges*
#1 New York Times bestselling author Lucy Score, whose smash hit Things We Never Got Over captured millions of hearts, invites you back to Story Lake for a swoon-worthy new small town romantic comedy.
He's looking for the perfect wife. She's looking for the perfect one-night stand.
Literary agent Zoey Moody doesn't like small town life, but here she is: exiled from Manhattan's publishing scene and trapped in a tiny Pennsylvania town with her BFF and only remaining client, Hazel. The problem? She's totally broke.
All she needs is for Hazel's next romance novel to become a gigantic hit, and Zoey will be back in New York. Nothing will stand in her way. Nothing except her six-foot-two-inch landlord, Gage Bishop. He's smart, serious, and sexy. Worst of all, he's ready to settle down.
Zoey might be the most beautiful woman Gage has ever met, but it's clear they're all wrong for each other. She's allergic to commitment and can't work a calendar app; he's looking for a wife and has the next five years all planned out. She's afraid of animals. He lives in a literal barn. But when Gage's world is rocked by a devastating family secret, he turns to Zoey for one night to forget everything. That one night just might change everything...or ruin it.
Perfect for fans of the heart, humor, and hope found in Things We Never Got Over and Things We Left Behind, Mistakes Were Made is a steamy escape to small town romance--full of emotional twists, slow-burn tension, and Lucy Score's trademark charm.
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Judge Stone
Academy Award winning actress Viola Davis and the world's #1 bestselling author James Patterson's Judge Stone "delivers first-class courtroom drama, small-town excitement, and strong characters all wrapped in a moral dilemma. Tense, readable, and relevant." (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
"Talk about a power combo! ... With Davis's razor-sharp emotional insight and Patterson's mastery of rocket-fuel pacing, this is the dream team to deliver an up-all-night read that will keep the group chat buzzing." --Oprah Daily
"Wonderfully satisfying ... This legal thriller from [a] superstar duo ... demands attention from its opening pages and never lets go." --Booklist, starred review
All rise... for Judge Stone.
The most respected citizen in Union Springs, Alabama (population 3,314), is Judge Mary Stone. She holds two responsibilities sacred: running her family farm and presiding over her courtroom. It's there she draws the most controversial case in the history of the South.
Criminally, it's open-and-shut.
Ethically, there is no middle ground. Essentially, it's a choice between life and death.
No judge can satisfy everyone. It would be dangerous to try. But Judge Stone is willing to fight to bring justice to the people and place she loves. -
Love Song
*The limited deluxe edition includes printed edges*
New York Times bestselling author Elle Kennedy returns with her signature heat and humor for a Briar universe standalone romance featuring the next generation Off-Campus characters--where one unforgettable summer changes everything.
After a brutal breakup, college junior Blake Logan escapes to her family's lake house in Tahoe, determined to shut out the world. Her plan is simple: no men, no drama. Until Wyatt Graham shows up. Four years older and far too good at getting under her skin, Wyatt is the living embodiment of a "bad idea," and the guy who shattered her pride when she confessed her crush at sixteen.
With his music career stalled, Wyatt has come to Tahoe for inspiration. The last thing he expects is to find it with Blake. He's spent years keeping his distance, convinced he's all wrong for her, but she's no longer the innocent girl he once knew. She's confident, captivating, and impossible to ignore. And the slow-burning tension between them? It's catching fire fast.
They both know this can't last, but one reckless kiss turns into another, and soon they're tangled in something that feels dangerously like more. Just as they finally give in to the pull, tragedy tears them apart, leaving their hearts in pieces.
But forgetting that one, nearly perfect summer? Not a chance. And when fate brings them together again, Blake and Wyatt must decide if this is a second chance...or the final verse.
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Bread of Angels
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A radiant new memoir from artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, THE NEW YORKER
“God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper,” writes Patti Smith in this moving account of her life. A post–World War II childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex where we enter the child’s world of the imagination. Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies.
The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative role models as she begins to write poetry then lyrics, ultimately merging both into the songs of iconic recordings such as Horses, Wave, and Easter.
She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. Here, she invents a room of her own, a low table, a Persian cup, inkwell and pen, entering at dawn to write. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start a family.
A series of profound losses mark her life. Grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again—the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Smith on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live. -
Want to Know a Secret?
From #1 internationally bestselling author Freida McFadden!
Everyone has secrets. Some are worse than others.
Influencer and baking sensation April Masterson knows the secret to the perfect gooey brownies. Or how to make key lime squares that will melt in your mouth. But if you keep watching her offline, you may find out some other secrets about April. Secrets she'd rather you didn't know.
Like… Where did her son go when he snuck out late at night? What was she doing with the local soccer coach behind fogged windows?
And what's buried in her backyard?
April's secrets are enough to destroy her.
I'll make sure of that.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Freida McFadden peels back the layers of a seemingly flawless life to expose a picture of obsession, deception, and the quiet menace that waits just beyond the frame.
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I Who Have Never Known Men
***THE RUNAWAY BESTSELLER***
"Each revelation is a small miracle."--The New York Times
Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.
As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl--the fortieth prisoner--sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.
Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman's modern classic is an essential addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.
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Kin
OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •
A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.
“Tayari Jones’s storytelling washed over me like a trip back home. . . . Kin is a masterpiece of a novel that will live with you long after you turn the last page.” —Oprah Winfrey
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction. -
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Burden’s searing, probing memoir explores . . . what she learned about intimacy and her own spirit.”—People
“A beautifully written instant classic. Strangers is gripping and heartbreaking and a must-read for every wife—and husband.”—Graydon Carter
“Asks us to examine life’s most perplexing questions: Can we see the invisible fault lines in a marriage or truly know the people closest to us?”—Lori Gottlieb
It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t.
In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.
In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was—someone nicknamed “Belle the Good”—gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice.
With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent. -
Dear Debbie
A brand new twisted thriller that will have you cheering "good for her!" from the #1 New York Times bestselling and global sensation Freida McFadden, author of The Housemaid!
Sometimes, enough is enough...
Debbie Mullen is losing it. For years, she has compiled all of her best advice into her column, Dear Debbie, where the wives of New England come for sympathy and neighborly advice. Through her work, Debbie has heard from countless women who are ignored, belittled, or even abused by their husbands. And Debbie does her best to guide them in the right direction.
Or at least, she did.
These days, Debbie's life seems to be spiraling out of control. She just lost her job. Something strange is happening with her teenage daughters. And her husband is keeping secrets, according to the tracking app she installed on his phone. Now, Debbie's done being the bigger person. She's done being reasonable and practical. It's time to take her own advice.
And now it's time for payback against all the people in her life who deserve it the most.
From #1 New York Times and international bestselling author Freida McFadden comes a biting, subversive thriller about what happens when women finally choose to take justice into their own hands - with killer results.
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Heated Rivalry
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NOW A #1 STREAMING SHOW
The epic enemies-to-lovers hockey romance from Rachel Reid, streaming on Crave in Canada and on HBO Max in the U.S.
"The book that got me into hockey romance." --NPR's Weekend Edition
Nothing interferes with pro hockey star Shane Hollander's game.
Now that he's captain of the Montreal Voyageurs, he won't let anything jeopardize that--definitely not the sexy rival he loves to hate.
Boston Bears captain Ilya Rozanov is everything Shane's not. The self-proclaimed king of the ice, he's as cocky as he is talented. No one can beat him--except Shane. Publicly, they're enemies. Privately, they can't stop touching each other.
The smart thing to do? Walk away, once a few secret hookups turn into a struggle to keep their relationship out of the press. The truth could ruin them both. But for Shane and Ilya, secrecy is soon no longer an option...
Game Changers
- Book 1: Game Changer
- Book 2: Heated Rivalry
- Book 3: Tough Guy
- Book 4: Common Goal
- Book 5: Role Model
- Book 6: The Long Game
Need more Reid?! Check out these other standalones from your favorite MM hockey romance writer:
- Time to Shine
- The Shots You Take
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Game Changer
THE SERIES THAT INSPIRED HEATED RIVALRY * NOW A #1 STREAMING SHOW
Enter the world of Game Changers, the series behind the epic enemies-to-lovers hockey romance Heated Rivalry, streaming on Crave in Canada and on HBO Max in the U.S.
It all starts here with Scott and Kip's steamy secret-relationship romance by New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Rachel Reid.
New York Admirals captain Scott Hunter takes his pregame rituals very seriously. When a particular smoothie precedes Scott's breaking his on-ice slump, he's desperate to recreate the magic...and to get to know the sexy, funny guy behind the counter.
Kip Grady knew there was more to Scott's frequent visits than blended fruit, but he never let himself imagine being invited back to Scott's penthouse. Or kissed with reckless abandon--and more. What goes on between them is hot, incredible and frequent...but also only on Scott's terms and always behind his closed apartment doors.
Scott needs Kip in his life, but with playoff season approaching, the spotlight on him is suddenly brighter than ever. He can't afford to do anything that might derail his career or the public's image of what a hockey captain should be. Kip is ready to go all in with Scott--but how much longer will he have to remain a secret?
Game Changers
- Book 1: Game Changer
- Book 2: Heated Rivalry
- Book 3: Tough Guy
- Book 4: Common Goal
- Book 5: Role Model
- Book 6: The Long Game
Need more Reid?! Check out these other standalones from your favorite MM hockey romance writer:
- Time to Shine
- The Shots You Take