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Ages 3-5

Celebrate Hanukkah with a storytime, a craft, and gelt to take home and snack on!

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This month, we will be reading Between two kingdoms: a memoir of a life interrupted by Suleika Jaouad. Get the book at the Library!

Register with reference@dobbsferrylibrary.org — please indicate the title and date of the program you are registering for!

In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch–first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward–after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant–she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal–to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked–with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt–on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

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Come learn to play chess with Bradley Wank, Esq. – All Ages welcome!

Register with reference@dobbsferrylibrary.org — please indicate the title and date of the program you are registering for!

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Ages 8-18

Create a character! Fight monsters! Make your own luck! Develop your skills in this fantasy role-playing system with other kids just like you.

Each player will only attend once a week on either Wednesday or Thursday; your slot will be assigned by the library based on your availability, experience, and other factors. The club is spread across two days to accommodate as many members as possible and follows the Dobbs Ferry Schools calendar for vacations and days off. Please only sign up if you think you can attend most of the meetings.

Registration is required via this Google form. You are not registered until a librarian contacts you with confirmation and scheduling details.

PROGRAM FULL. To be placed on the waitlist or ask a question, participants aged 8-12 can email children’s librarian Gina at childrens@dobbsferrylibrary.org, and participants aged 13-18 can email teen librarian Alex at teens@dobbsferrylibrary.org.

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Thursdays, November 6 through December 18 (except November 27)
Grades 6-10

Learn Python with Techno Chix! Join us for a 6-week introductory class where you will learn the programming language Python. Engage in fun mini-projects each week that are designed to help you learn while developing valuable skills. Share your final project at the end of the course and see how far you’ve come!

Limited space available. Email teens@dobbsferrylibrary.org to register or for more info.

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