Staff Recommendations
Andrea Borchert
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Mis(h)adra
by Ata, Iasmin Omar, author, illustrator.
February 28, 2018
Call Number: 740.9999 A862
Iasmin Omar Ata uses a striking palette and manga art style to tell the story of an Arab-American college student, Isaac, dealing with epilepsy in Mis(h)adra. Because this is a graphic novel, Ata has a chance to develop a new language of symbols and images to convey the physical experience of a chronic illness. Ata can show not just pain, but the frustrating and exhausting battle with illness, with doctors, and with medications in an evocative and visceral way.As Isaac attempts to bargain and placate his relentless illness, strings of beads wind around him, strangling his efforts to... Read Full Review
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Leviathan wakes
by Corey, James S. A.
January 10, 2018
Call Number: SF
Leviathan wakes is a science fiction epic novel that includes a monstrous alien threat, a search for a missing heiress by a down-on-his luck detective, zombies, and a scrappy spaceship crew from all over: Earth, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt. The spaceship crew is cursed with a photogenic and noble commanding officer, who has good intentions. If that doesn’t seem like a curse, you’ve never seen how much harder it is to make a living while stuck in the middle of a galactic controversy with a captain who says the worst possible thing every time a camera is pointed at him, even though he... Read Full Review
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Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore
by Sloan, Robin, 1979-
October 11, 2017
Call Number:
There are people who want you to believe that there is a hot, bright line dividing computers from books. “You have to chose one,” they tell you. You can’t love both the feel and smell of an old hardback and a quick boolean search. You have to chose. It’s media or e-media, and never the twain shall meet. But that’s a false dichotomy. That’s choosing between peanut butter and chocolate, when both are good. Let’s have both and mix them together and see what we come up with.Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore is a novel that embraces and celebrates both paper books and technology. From the... Read Full Review
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Get well soon : history's worst plagues and the heroes who fought them
by Wright, Jennifer Ashley, 1986-
August 30, 2017
Call Number: 614.409 W951
A book of the worst plagues in history could be a nightmare-inducing slog through dark times. Everything, from the suffering of victims to the ‘treatments’ they endured, piles on misery. It would take a deft hand to write about the bubonic plague, or smallpox, or leprosy in a way that neither sinks into despair, nor loses sight of the humanity shared by readers, sufferers, doctors, and the desperate communities trying to outlast the catastrophe.Luckily, Jennifer Wright writes with just such a deft hand! She mixes a gruesome medical history with a humorous, sympathetic perspective to... Read Full Review
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The just city
by Walton, Jo,
April 10, 2017
Call Number:
I love the creation of worlds that is part of various types of science fiction. I love the way reading science fiction makes you pick up clues about extraordinary places and people, and how to use those clues to re-examine your own life. For example, there’s this moment in A Wrinkle in Time when travelers from Earth realize that children on an alien planet are bouncing balls, the way they do on Earth. But in the novel they are bouncing their balls in time with one another, “playing” with obsessive, rigid uniformity. When one child falls out of rhythm his mother reacts with terror.... Read Full Review
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The Fifth Season
by Jemisin, N. K,
February 6, 2017
Call Number:
Science Fiction and Fantasy novels are full of stories of powerful, but oppressed minorities. As magic users or mutants they haunt the genre. And authors have told powerful and wonderful stories featuring these characters. A. E. Van Vogt's novel Slan, is about a super-powered group of humans, called slans, who are feared and hunted by normal humans. There are also the very accomplished protagonists of Anne McCaffrey’s Talent Universe; the voyants... Read Full Review
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Lily and the Octopus
by Rowley, Steven, 1971-
November 6, 2016
Call Number:
One day, while arguing about cute guys with his dog Lily, Ted Flask notices that Lily has an octopus sitting on her head “like a birthday hat." This is not a nice octopus. This is a mean octopus, full of snark and spite. It is, in fact, a malignant octopus. It is hungry and hurting Lilly.What follows this revelation is a pop culture infused examination of love and friendship, not just between a man and his best friend but also the true, pure, and perfect love that exists only between a dog and her special red ball. Ted rushes to save Lily, to defeat the octopus, to comfort and to care for his... Read Full Review
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Shrill : notes from a loud woman
by West, Lindy.
September 19, 2016
Call Number: 071.092 W518
Lindy West is a champion of feminism and body positivity. She is a joke cracking, fearless media critic who walks into the deepest, dankest pits of online culture and shows more courage, compassion, and humanity to the people she interacts with there, than I do to the people who cut me off in traffic. In her book, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, West faces some of the ugliest aspects in our culture, examines them, makes you laugh and shake your fist, and reminds you to live in the world anyway.For example, when the comedian Daniel Tosh caused a controversy by telling a “joke”... Read Full Review
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Stiletto : a novel
by O'Malley, Daniel,
August 22, 2016
Call Number:
Stiletto is the second book in the Rook series by Daniel O’Malley, and you should read both of them because they are awesome. The series tells the story of the Checquy, a secret agency within the British government that deals with strange happenings and unusual people.When there's trouble who do you ask? Is one of the children in the neighborhood school spontaneously teleporting back to the hospital where he was born? Get the Checquy. Have fast growing crystals suddenly enveloped a house, entombing the family inside? Call the Checquy. Has some monstrous, unknown animal washed ashore... Read Full Review
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A burglar's guide to the city
by Manaugh, Geoff,
July 25, 2016
Call Number: 364 M267
I cross the street at the crosswalk. I use the entrance and exit doors as marked, even when they take me a long way around. Sometimes, I wait forlornly on deserted street corners for the sign to indicate that it is finally all right to “WALK”. So, like Geoff Manaugh, author of A burglar's guide to the city, I was thrilled to learn that there were other ways to understand and move through urban spaces. This is not an instruction manual or safety guide. It doesn’t teach you to be a burglar. Instead the book explores the ways that burglars, thieves, and assorted miscreants see and take... Read Full Review
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Grunt : the curious science of humans at war
by Roach, Mary.
June 7, 2016
Call Number: 355.0973 R628
Having read Mary Roach's other books, all I wanted to write about this recent book is a two-sentence review: Mary Roach has a new book! Go read it!!. But several things were pointed out to me: I was abusing the exclamation mark, and not everyone has read Mary Roach.Mary Roach is a science writer. She wrote Gulp (about digestion), ... Read Full Review
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Every heart a doorway
by McGuire, Seanan.
May 16, 2016
Call Number:
When you were a kid did you ever wish that you could find a magic door that would whisk you away to somewhere stranger and better than your ordinary life? The kind of place where, against all odds, you fit in and made a difference? The kind of place where you had a chance at a new and wonderful life? It happens to children in fantasy novels all the time. They get new worlds full of adventure, and magic, and friendship. Then they have to come back here. As a reader, it is a let down. But imagine how it feels for the child, going to all the effort of building a new life and then losing it again... Read Full Review
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