The St. Pius X library participated in its first Big Library Read this November 1-15, a virtual club where readers from across the world read the same eBook or audiobook novel through their library. Facilitated by OverDrive, the selected book was the New York Times bestselling young adult thriller “Five Total Strangers” by Natalie D. Richards, which is available to all St. Pius students through the Sora reading app.

Librarian Mrs. Meggan Wilcauskas, who already moderates the school’s Book Club, enjoyed how the selected eBook was not a standard young adult book.

“I read a lot of young adult, [and] the typical young adult which oftentimes deals with romance or high fantasy,” Mrs. Wilcauskas said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever read a young adult thriller, and so it was interesting because I can’t recall reading any other young adult thriller. And it was a thriller. You know where someone has died, and [you’re wondering] what’s going on?”

Under normal circumstances Mrs. Wilcauskas would read the proposed book farther in advance to check for anything unsuitable for school. However, since she discovered the event just a week before it began, she only had a day and a half to proofread. Thankfully, the eBook, along with being high quality, was very kid-friendly.

“It was super clean. There was like literally nothing in it that was questionable,” Mrs. Wilcauskas said with an emphasis on super. “And if you’ve read Poisonwood Bible there’s lots of things in there that if some parent wanted to have a fit about something they’d be like ‘wait a minute,’ [but] this was so clean it was squeaky clean.”

The Big Library Read happens twice a year, so Mrs. Wilcauskas wants the school to participate again in April. Hopefully the second time around the event will be preceded by a full month of advertising and integration with the already existing Book Club to bolster popularity.

“I’d like to think over time we can build the program because it doesn’t cost the school anything,” Mrs. Wilcauskas said. “These things are typically very expensive, so it’s an opportunity for me to build a program without any cost to the school.”

Even though the Big Library Read is a global program, it offers a surprising amount of flexibility to those who wanted to take part in it.

“You could have checked [“Five Total Strangers”] out both in print and in audiobook, so you could have listened to it on the way to and from school if you wanted to participate but didn’t feel like you had time. Because I know you guys have so much going on you don’t always feel like you have time to read another book, so you could have participated anyway,” Mrs. Wilcauskas said.

No matter how popular the program may have been this first time around, the combination of both no cost and new reading opportunities for students means the Big Library Read is likely to become a St. Pius library staple.