In 1985, there were twenty-five empty storefronts… There was a running joke: the last store owner out of downtown Spencer, please turn off the lights.” “In 1979, there wasn’t a vacant storefront in town for Santa to set up shop in. Then Land O’Lakes, one of the town’s biggest employers, closed its plant. Librarian Myron, who discovered Dewey as a kitten in the book drop box one brutally cold morning, gives a lot of background about the town of Spencer, Iowa, a community hit hard by the financial crisis of the 1980s, in which half the farms in the area went into foreclosure. However, the Wikipedia article on Dewey stated that it “told the story of Dewey’s life at the library, interspersed with the difficulties faced by the town and Myron in her personal life,” which made it sound like it would be more interesting than I’d originally thought. I had heard of Dewey-he was pretty famous for a cat, after all-but I guess I assumed that the book would be 300 pages of cute-animal anecdotes. “If you haven’t read the book about Dewey, I heartily recommend it!” “I chose Iowa because the only thing I knew about the state was that they had a lot of corn, and that they had a world-famous library cat named Dewey Readmore Books,” she said in an email. Earlier this year, my mom’s book club read Katarina Bivald’s The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, and in an email, the Swedish author shared some information on how she managed to write about small-town Iowa despite the fact that she’d never even visited the U.S.
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