ORILLIA PUBLIC LIBRARY
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Big Read is back at the Orillia Public Library!
Orillia's Big Read is your library's community reading program.
We encourage everyone in our community to read the same book, and to rediscover reading for the fun of it. This year will be our 13th year.
We are very excited to announce that our 2019 Big Read title is A Girl Named Lovely: One Child's Miraculous Survival and My Journey to the Heart of Haiti by Catherine Porter.
A Girl Named Lovely is about the reverberations of a single decision—in Lovely’s life and in the author's. It recounts a journalist’s voyage into the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, hit by the greatest natural disaster in modern history, and the fraught, messy realities of international aid.
It is about hope, kindness, heartbreak, and the modest but meaningful difference one person can make.
Catherine Porter is the Canada bureau chief for the New York Times, and was working as a Toronto Star journalist in 2010 at the time of the earthquake in Haiti.
Porter has won two National Newspaper Awards and the Landsberg Award for her professional work, and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee for community activism in her east-end Toronto neighbourhood.
We are thrilled to be celebrating this year’s Big Read finale with a visit from Porter on Oct. 26.
Porter will be talking about what it was like to travel to Haiti the day after the earthquake, and how her first story was about a miracle child - a little girl who survived six days beneath the rubble.
She left her own young children more than 20 times over the next few years to return to Haiti and that little girl, Lovely. She learned, increasingly, about the complications of international aid, corruption, the white savior complex, and how difficult, but enriching, it is to help one single person. .
Tickets for “An Evening with Catherine Porter” are available now at the Library and are $20. Your ticket will include not only the opportunity to hear the author speak, but a glass of wine and delicious appetizers catered by Orillia’s own Eclectic Café.
The 2019 Big Read finale will be held at the Orillia Public Library on Saturday, Oct. 26 at 7 p.m.
For more details, please call the library at 705-325-2556 or email us at [email protected]
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