Our youth Summer Reading program begins Friday, June 5 and goes until Saturday, Aug. 1. Simply register your child on our website at www.juniatalibrary.org or in-person at 498 Jefferson St., Mifflintown, then pick up or print a reading log for your child’s age or grade level, and read. As your child completes the reading log, they will be eligible for various prizes and will be entered into the end-of-summer raffle. To be eligible to participate in the prize raffle, each reader must be registered on our website or in person and complete their Reading Logs.

Program kick-off: Serpents and Claws Reptile Show, Friday, June 5 at 10 a.m.

We are pleased to welcome Serpents and Claws Reptile Rescue to the library for our summer reading kick-off event. Join us on Friday, June 5 at 10 a.m. in the community room. Afterward, learn more about our summer programs for all ages, register for the reading challenge and pick up reading logs.

Preschool storytime (ages 3 to 5): Mondays at 10 a.m.

This storytime meets on Monday mornings. Storytime will include books, rhymes, flannel board activities, music and movement. We will also have a craft or other activities available at the end of storytime. This summer session of storytimes runs from June 8 to July 31, 2026. Pre-registration is not required, and it does not mean you are required to attend every week. This just helps plan supplies and materials for the group.

Toddler storytime (ages 18 months to 2 years): Fridays at 10 a.m.

Our Toddler storytime meets on Friday mornings and features a modified version of the weekly theme, with books, songs and rhymes. A simple craft will be offered following storytime for those who would like to participate. Playgroup will not meet in the summer months. Note: The library will be closed on Friday, June 19, in observance of Juneteenth and Friday, July 3, in observance of Independence Day. There will be no toddler storytime during those weeks. This summer session of storytimes runs from June 8 to July 31, 2026. Pre-registration is not required, and it does not mean you must attend every week. This just helps plan supplies and materials for the group.

Our Summer Reading Program is designed to encourage children to read at least 20 minutes per day and minimize the summer reading slide. Research over the last several years indicates that children who do not participate in learning experiences over the summer, year after year, develop an academic achievement gap that widens throughout elementary and middle school.

Stop into the library this summer and find something fun and educational to do. Check out my article next week for more youth programs being held this summer.

We thank the United Way of Mifflin Juniata for funding our youth services.

Book of the week!

If you are going to read one book, give this one a try…

Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu

(New adult fiction: small town, disaster, literary) ~ 304 pages.

In a nutshell: A quietly profound debut that asks what we would really do if we believed we would die within the next few seconds.

Cellphones all over the small Western Massachusetts town of Beckitt light up with the terrifying announcement of an incoming ballistic missile, propelling some of the town’s citizens into radical action and leaving others frozen helplessly in place. After it turns out to have been a false alarm, the fallout of those first brief moments may, in some ways, prove almost as devastating as the disaster itself would have been.

Yu’s debut novel follows many characters through the time before and after that life-changing moment. Some of the characters are closely related. Others come together briefly by chance, but each, in their own way, is indelibly affected by that fateful day. Among them: a mother, struggling with a secret, impetuously texts her daughter something that might cause irreparable damage. A music-school dropout and budding bluegrass musician is starting to feel he has nothing to live for when a chance encounter with a kindly server at the Anchor Grill might turn his fortune around. Across town, a normally responsible husband and father acts out of instinct, convincing his wife she’s seen his true colors and may never be able to forgive him. In the midst of the rippling effects of that choice, the man, who has spent his entire career at the PR firm his father founded, desperately grasps for a narrative that will hold his once-picture-perfect life together.

For some of the characters, it’s a dramatic action that changes everything. For others, it’s the failure to act. The novel twists and turns into the private and public lives of the characters, offering a quirky, often funny and sharply-rendered peek into small-town life and the moments, large and small, that ripple out beyond our horizon of perception. Fans of “The Leftovers” by Tom Perrotta and the HBO adaptation will enjoy this book.

Bottom line: A character-driven story that asks two simple but unsettling questions: If you believed the world was ending, who would you become in those final minutes and how would you live afterward, if you were given the chance?

•••

Vince Giordano has been the librarian and director of the Juniata County Library since April 2015.