Editor’s Note: It’s a good time to read – we’ve a deep need to feel connected, need something to do when everything’s closed, or perhaps just require distraction from anxiety and fear. So we’re asking Mainers to tell us, in their own words, what they’re reading and why. This week we bring you Becca Starr, Health and Literacy Librarian at the Portland Public Library.

“I feel incredibly lucky to have a stack of library books at home. I just finished Jordy Rosenberg’s “Confessions of the Fox.” In this novel, a floundering professor finds a tattered book in a library liquidation sale. He soon discovers it is a priceless manuscript about Jack Sheppard, a roguish transgender thief in 18th century London. The manuscript, containing the confessions of Jack and his lover Bess, uncovers discoveries and surprises around race and gender in 1790s London; suddenly, many people are interested in the manuscript’s fate. Lovingly researched, “Confessions of the Fox” presents a version of late 18th-century English city life that is not often showcased.

“I started to read the book before the widespread city closures. But I continued to read it because of the escapism it provides: what better to take your mind off the current landscape than being engrossed in a world that looks so different from your own? But about 100 pages in, cue the entrance of the bubonic plague, which is ravaging London in the background while law enforcement make decisions about who to arrest, try, and sequester based purely on race and class. It’s an exercise in what not to do institutionally during a pandemic.”